SPREAD OF TECHNOLOGY
More than 70 per cent of the rural households in India own transistor radios, bicycles, and wrist watches; more than 60 per cent own or consume plastic shoes, tooth powder, and cooking oils; over 50 per cent consume electric fans, sewing machines, motorbikes, kerosene stoves, ghee, leather shoes, and tea; over 40 percent own quartz watches, black and white television sets, and cassette players; over 30 per cent have invested in pressure cookers, electric stoves, tooth paste, bulbs, and aerated beverages; and over 20 per cent have color television sets, refrigerators, and gas stoves.
Tariq Banuri, “ICT, PRSPs, and MDGs”
My recent contribution to the World Summit on the Information Society via the Development Gateway (“Information and Communications Technology
Applied to the Millennium Development Goals”) depends fundamentally on my notion of how technology spreads across the developing world.
Tariq Banuri’s comment above illustrates the nature of the diffusion that interests me. More than 70 percent of Indian rural households have radios; more than 40 percent have black and white televisions; more than 20 percent have color television sets. How did this come about? Were there projects illustrating the use of transistor radios and black and white televisions? Were the successful ones replicated and scaled up? I doubt it.
I think that Everett Rogers' “Diffusion of Innovations” approach is a more likely explanation. He focuses on the individual decisions of people, and the processes by which most people learn from the experiences of the early acceptors of technological innovations in their local, following the examples of those who are successful.
Why is it then that so many people in donor agencies focus so heavily on pilot projects, and replication and scale up? One reason is that replication and scale up are often within the power of the donor agencies and their client governments, and they focus on what they can do.
Another reason is that it is so difficult to understand the complex processes out of which emerge the larger dissemination of technologies, and even more difficult to understand how to modify and improve those processes. How does one spread better information to improve decision making over huge numbers of people? How does one identify, much less modify the incentives (and disincentives) faced by those people in their ICT decision making? Especially how does one target the decision makers making key decisions for the alleviation of poverty with information and incentives enabling them to do the right thing.
Further, as I have often pointed out, we are dealing with technology systems. The Internet changes the value of computers and telephones. Content availability affects those values. And indeed, ICT changes the values of the electrical infrastructure. What then is the proper sequence in which to build capacity, infrastructure, applications, content, and all the rest.
As Voltaire said, “The ideal is enemy of the good.” We man not have all the answers, but it seems likely that we can target people making important ICT decisions that ultimately affect the poor, and we can provide many of them with useful information through affordable processes, and we can make some changes in the incentives they face that will encourage more pro-poor decisions. And we can do so now.
By the way, let me recommend Kerry McNamara’s “Information and Communication Technologies, Poverty and Development: Learning from Experience.” I think it presents a useful view based on a wide-ranging assessment of experience to date.
