Bridging the Digital Divide?

Interesting post today in the World Bank's "Africa Can End Poverty" blog (linked to the right also) about bridging the "digital divide" in Africa as a way to fight corruption and poor governance. I think the jury's stil out on the link between internet connectivity and development. There has been a lot of easy talk in World Bank and UNDP about using information technology to increase transparency, facilitate democratic participation, empower people with legal knowledge, and the like. And its fairly obvious that there is a lot of potential here: it ought to work, and no one can be against spreading knowledge and information. Of course, that last sentence is not entirely true: governments are often against spreading such knowledge, and many do resist internet connectivity for their citizens, or at least, fully free connectivity.

The Jordan case linked above shows that capacity is important, and I think that's been a theme in all the projects I've looked at; the Bank, governments, UNDP, etc., just don't have the expertise to implement all these projects effectively, and pretty often seem to underestimate how complex they will be. These organizations usually seem to rely on very young, inexperienced staff to implement these complex projects, often embedded in local bureaucracies that are either disinterested or actually resistant to change. In education, there has been disappointment with the idea of bringing computers to all students, both domestically and internationally. In the judicial reform projects I cited in an earlier post, the effect of using computers to bring legal knowledge to "the people" as well as jurists was mixed at best, and largely ineffective.

Still, in Kenya they are reporting a lot of success, from the ability of people to instantly report being shaken down for bribes, to the use of cellphones to check food security and market prices, and the gathering of more data on development projects. In the human rights field, the "right to information" is a key human right in and of itself, regardless of how it empowers people; but empower it does and importantly. I think, though, that its a mistake for development agencies to spend TOO much money and time on technology until more fundamental things -- like literacy, and anti-corruption efforts -- are in place, or they will be doomed to fail, or at least to cost more money than they're worth. But I'm interested to see more evidence of successful projects where information technology has really empowered citizens beyond what they could do through more "traditional" means.