How best to understand information and communication technologies for development
Heloise Emdon, Senior Programme Specialist ICT4D Africa, IDRC
Through experience we know people who earn as little as R1000 a month and who also have a cell-phone. Living on this amount a month means people are living above the poverty line of R14 (US$2) a day.
We need to ask: What do we know about how much people spend on these telephone calls, and why do they make such calls on slight incomes?
While most telecommunications and IT market research is about the top spenders and the top earners, little is known about the millions of very small transactions that make up the mass of most of the worlds population.
However, it is this mass group in the market that makes it feasible and commercially worthwhile for service providers and producers. Their statistical distribution is known as the ‘long-tail’ which is “the colloquial name for the low-frequency or low-amplitude population which gradually “tails off” from the big spenders, or the high-frequency or high-amplitude population. In many cases the infrequent usage or low-amplitude events — the long tail, represented here by the bright yellow portion of the graph — can cumulatively outnumber or outweigh the initial portion of the graph so that they comprise the majority.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail
A is for Access
Until cell phones and the market structures in most African countries changed the ability of the poorest of the poor to have access to a phone, resource-poor people only had access to public phones. Now households and individuals use cell phones to enhance their livelihoods, or even turn cell phones into livelihoods by selling time. Fewer people in these economic conditions use the internet, though it is much cheaper for instance to make voice over the internet call. The internet just does not reach that many poor communities, either in rural or urban settings. However, there are several public access internet access points, either businesses or development projects. Using the internet also requires a set of skills, least of which is literacy. But illiterate people can make use of highly visual interfaces, although access and availability are the limiting factors here.
B is for behaviour
We do know that resource-poor people use their phones to make various kinds of calls. Some are essential and life-saving, others are to ensure that the family is well, or to check market prices if they are delivering produce and want to get the best prices. Many youths and adults are looking for jobs. (For more on these kinds of behaviours see note at the bottom.) The highest demand for services amongst low income people remains voice calls. However, airtime is sometimes traded for cash, remittances are sent through sending airtime and can be on-sold for cash, or a remittance is sent via someone traveling home and the migrant worker sends a message home to look out for the cash-carrying courier.
A useful approach that gives us understanding of how ICTs are used to improve people’s livelihoods is to consider the way in which people use phones, radio, the internet, television to strengthen their social networks, (social capital). Also how they can improve their skills, training and even education using any of the above (human capital); and gain access to market information, information about natural resources or financial information (market, natural resource and financial capital). These are the five forms of capital that resource-poor people rely on to make a living, and where they experience shortages in times of shock or disaster.
(see http://www.livelihoods.org/info/guidance_sheets_pdfs/section2.pdf).
C is for Cost
Even though the most popular prepaid units are the cheapest, and resource poor people will continue buying these cheapest units which allow them to make just a few minutes of calls at the highest rate per call, and some “call me” messages per day, the real cost of calls is normally borne by those who do call back. They might be the well-off urban dwelling family member, the employer, but not yet the government service call centre, the hospital service, or business call centre. Here are some ideas for e-government services. Poor people cannot afford the expense of holding on while waiting for a response, but they could just leave their numbers and expect a call back.
Telecommunication services are still extremely high in Africa. The most basic reason is that the cellular companies get assymetrical interconnection agreements, it is usually more expensive to call a cell phone then a fixed line, and more importantly the fixed line operators in most African countries still enjoy the monopoly of voice calls. The cost of the Internet is also largely determined by the cost that the telco charges the internet service provider, the latter adding only a small margin. The most expensive access is satellite communications. Almost every square kilometer of Africa is covered by satellite communications, but governments either control the access or charge extremely high fees for services to bypass their telecommunications services, making this the most expensive model.
We have supported projects that seek other ways to aggregate the cost of those internet connections, especially the high cost of satellite connectivity and through sharing the signal with others using a wireless access point. These WiFi signals use the least cost interventions, such as DIY “cantennae” enable several users and especially rural NGOs, households, schools and clinic to gain access to the signal and to share the costs. Some satellite and some leased line services can cost community projects, access points or clinics between R4 344 and R7 240 (US$600 and $1000) a month. See www.fmfi.co.za
D is for digital content and open access
When referring to the cost of owning a computer, connectivity, the software and length of use that the hardware and software make possible, the term Total Cost of Ownership is useful. Consider that all content, not only the dialup cost, is costly. One of the ways to further lower the cost of access is to choose intellectual property rights that allow the author to share, ask for attribution, allow for remixing, sharing any improvements back with the author and others who would be using it, allowing one to generate an income or not from it. This is choosing a particular kind of intellectual property approach that gives the author and user more rights than the normal default restrictive copyright procedures. We have supported the Creative Commons getting established in South Africa and promoting the use amongst other early adopters.
See http://www.commons-sense.org/index.htm# for several of the tools available to create open access content. We also support the use of free and open source software which makes a whole lot of sense for a global community of developers constantly improving and a whole lot of users constantly proving the use.
See www.OpenMRS.org or www.AVOIR.uwc.ac.za.
E is for efficiency
Finally, in this ABC of ICT4D, the most compelling reason for governments and NGOs to be using information and communication technologies is that they can deliver their services more efficiently. Consider the benefit to those patients on lifelong Anti-retroviral therapy whose files are kept electronically. This means every visit to the clinic or complication that needs to be reviewed by a doctor, the patient’s record is up to date, the vitals have been monitored and entered, any drug interactions, reactions or other symptoms are monitored. Those health services that are able to maintain this kind of service are able to ensure better quality of care, improved management information systems, better reporting about the effects of the treatment on patients and the management of the treatment project-wide, province-wide or nation-wide.
The household surveys that are conducted to establish the burden of disease in any region or country, facilities-based information in a health system, or extension of microcredit loans are more efficiently managed on handeld computers. They may be synchronized or dialed up from remote rural settings to the data-base management servers held in capitals. Here the data is managed and analysed, processed and fed-back into the field or to national or international level decision-makers.
Actually the algorithms and protocols that can be coded into most forms-based software can provide the fieldworker with enough feedback to enable that fieldworker to manage patients on lifelong treatment, manage loan portfolios, give advice in remote settings and when smart phones get cheaper, this could all happen in real time.
ICTs are for Development?
Are you convinced? Cell phones are not mere luxuries or fashion items, they are tools in the employ of people development. If we consider Maslow’s hierarchy of needs the idea of communication fits snugly into the basic human need for security. There is no longer a debate about whether communications infrastructure and gaining access to it fulfills a basic human need. The challenges we face in development are improving access, decreasing cost of access and total cost of ownership, access to open content and open source software as well as making use of all of this to improve health and education services in resource-poor countries, and several attendant services that can improve livelihoods, such as agriculture, primary production in order to improve our economies.
Governments fear liberalizing their telecommunications markets because they fear loosing the goose that lays the golden egg. What they don’t realize is that cheaper and improved access to communication spawns many, many golden geese!
The slideshow is available at http://www.slideshare.net/kdiga/idrcpeople-media-i-t-22-jun07-ict4d/
Some resources. See: “Towards An African e-Index: SME e-Access and Usage in 14 African Countries” 2006 http://researchictafrica.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=518 as well as at the “Towards an African e-Index: Household and Individual ICT Access across 10 African countries” 2005. http://researchictafrica.net/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=504.
Both of these research reports were funded by the International Development Research Centre http://www.idrc.ca/Acacia or www.idrc.ca/acacia
