INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY PROJECTS

There are huge numbers of small ICT projects in operation, and indeed lots of stories, case studies, and other information on these projects. I am ignoring them here. Instead, I’m writing now about larger projects such as might be funded by development banks or large bilateral donors. In this Blog entry I’m also skipping mass media projects, such as those dealing with radio or television broadcasting in developing nations (not because they are unimportant, but because I want to keep this short).

Since good policies and good institutions almost always underlie successful development, let me start with them. Policy dialog is, I suspect, always involved in discussions of large ICT projects, and such projects often include funding of activities designed to improve policy or build institutions. However, technical assistance for policy or institution building would not usually in itself require the amount of funding found in large ICT projects. (The exception might be in large projects with a regional or global mission, providing policy or institution building assistance to many countries.)

Telecommunications infrastructure tends to be organized as a public utility, while computer infrastructure has tended to be privatized within organizations. Therefore investment in “communications technology” or telecommunications infrastructure tends to focus on organizations which run the telecommunications utility to be used by others; investment in “information technology” or computer infrastructure tends to be focused in support to organizations that utilize the technology in carrying out their missions. Projects focusing on building utilities tend to be quite different than those focusing on developing ICT applications in organizations!

First telecommunications infrastructure projects. Telecommunication privatization has swept the developing world; donor agencies have essentially stopped making loans to public telecommunications agencies, and seek instead to use investment instruments that facilitate access to capital for private telecommunications companies. Thus telecommunications infrastructure projects have moved from government loan windows, such as the IBRD, to windows promoting private investment, like the IFC. There are lots of people who know more than I about funding these telecommunications projects, so I will leave the subject of telecom projects to them.

Investment in telecenters and public access for the poor is perhaps worthy of a specific comment. Poor people by and large need to share access to telecommunications, and are not able to enjoy (multiple) private lines – access enjoyed by most people in rich nations. In my youth (many years ago), there were a lot of public phones in the U.S. With the proliferation of mobile phones, there is now discussion of reducing public phone service. On the other hand, in poor countries the public phone is now sometimes supplemented by other communications services such as fax, email, and even Internet browsing; the public phone becomes a telecenter. It seems that no two people mean the same thing by the word “telecenter”, and people refer to the same kinds of facilities by other terms such as “cybercafes” or “business service centers”. Telecenters range from things that are approximately phone boths, to facilities offering complex services capable of serving a number of clients simultaneously. Clearly there are private-sector based approaches to encourage rollout of public phones and telecenters, such as regulatory requirements for universal service placed upon private phone service provision, or the Grameen Bank’s program to loan to women micro-entrepreneurs to enable them to offer mobile phone based service to their neighbors. However, there are also possibilities of fairly large projects that would allow public or non-profit organizations to roll out telecenters by the hundreds or thousands.

Now we come to projects promoting the application of ICTs in government, health, education, small and medium enterprises (SMEs), civil society, etc. Perhaps the hottest applications areas are e-government and e-commerce, but telemedicine, e-learning, and distance education are all areas with long histories of projects and development. I would differentiate projects:
· dealing with one or more large government bureaucracies, such as e-government, e-learning in public schools, and applications of ICT in public health service delivery,
· from projects that focus on promoting ICTs in large numbers of small organizations, such as those emphasizing SMEs and non-governmental organizations (NGOs).
The latter projects would most often be in the context of developing business service organizations or NGO service organizations. In my experience projects aimed at promoting the application of ICTs in specific economic sectors normally benefit from leadership from the experts in the sectors involved. In some cases one can justify a large project promoting ICT utilization within a sector, but such activities are perhaps more often developed as components of more general sector development projects.

I don’t recall seeing a large-scale, ICT-for-Development project that encompasses both development of the telecommunications infrastructure and also development of ICT applications within several sectors. I suspect such a project would be hard to develop, and hard to manage were it developed. Thus “ICT for Development”, in my opinion, is more often a term used to describe a variety of projects and project components with a common element, than a theme for the building of large development projects that build both the ICT public utilities and intra-organizational infrastructures and applications.