ICT for the poor
Sunday, 16 December 2007
The development paradigm evolved during the last four decades in Bangladesh as well as around the world. Poverty eradication was the ultimate goal of all development efforts. At the initial phase, the focus was primarily on improvement of the income poverty situation. Gradually the focus spread on the non-income issues, which was crystallised through the development of Human Development Index (HDI). Combination of income and non-income issues was considered as holistic approach towards neoclassical strategy of poverty eradication. The non-income poverty eradication approach covered a wide range of factors which influenced the improvement of living standards, including, inter alia, access to quality education, access to health care, access to productive employment opportunities etc. However, access to information and knowledge, as a dimension of access to resources, which determines haves and haves not, remained unexplored in the poverty discourse.
This writew-up is an attempt to share the experience of an experiment on whether access to information and knowledge has any role to play in addressing poverty through improving access to information and knowledge by poor and marginalised. A system of information and knowledge exchange for the poor and marginalised was designed for this experiment, where information and communication technologies (ICTs) are one of the components of the system. The experiment, spread over a period of more than four years starting from 2003, tested the system termed as "Pallitathya Model", consisting five basic components: content, multiple channels of information and knowledge exchange, Infomediary (human interface between information and knowledge-base), ownership and mobilisation (marketing). The system is based on two pre-requisites: it focuses on the need of a poor and marginalised community, and it emphasises on income generation for financial sustainability, where possible.
Under the Pallitathya experiment, all system components were built from zero. It was essential to understand the existing information and knowledge system practised by poor and marginalsed community people. A need assessment research was conducted by a joint rural-urban research team. Based on the gap identified in the prevailing information and knowledge exchange system, a number of livelihood questions were identified which cannot be resolved by existing system. The outcome of the needs assessment research was findings on absence of information and knowledge in those livelihood areas. As there was no digital livelihood content in Bangla and in semantics, which is easily comprehensible by ultimate beneficiary within a community, for the making the experiment possible, ICT-based content development efforts were undertaken. After four and half years, the outcome vindicates that information and knowledge gap was very rightly identified. Considering the pervasive illiteracy among the community beneficiaries both in mother tongue and illiteracy in ICTs - the 'Infomediary' as a system component was introduced. Such a system component allowed Pallitathya research team to include illiterate people to benefit from Pallitathya system not waiting for time when such literacy would be achieved. The research team was aware about slow 'technology diffusion' and 'behavioural change'. The team was also aware of attribution problem of any 'impact'. Thus, for capturing any 'positive' or 'negative' change in a community, the research team followed a 'transaction' based approach and used 'Outcome Mapping' as a methodology for capturing 'change', if any.
A new concept of 'benefit of investment' (BOI) was introduced for assessing benefit accrued by a community in monetary terms, where applicable, against investment made in a community-based unit of Pallitathya information and knowledge system. Such an indicator was needed, as there is confusion, whether investment in building information and knowledge system for the poor and marginalised is justified, because there is competing needs for investment. The combined BOI for the whole Pallitathya experiment is 1:4.64, which means for each Taka investment for 15 months of operation of the system the community benefited for Taka 4.64. The BOI for information and knowledge services was estimated 1:4.42, whereas BOI for income generating services was only 1:0.25. It is to be mentioned that the BOI mentioned above is estimated considering all costs including cost of operation for conducting research at head office level. If only local unit level cost is considered, the BOI was 1: 18.33. In this case, the BOI for information and knowledge service was 1:17.43 and for income generating service 1:1. The research findings strongly argue for 'public assets' and 'public goods' opposed to only financial sustainability argument, while income generating aspects should not ignored for nurturing entrepreneurial mindset. The research findings also show that the information and knowledge system as 'kiosk' is less preferable, rather the system unit should be embedded in a broader community ecosystem.
Since 2003 more than 120 researchers have been involved in the Pallitathya experiment. They passed many sleep-less nights to make the experiment reaching a meaningful end and to produce a good publication for sharing the findings of the experiment with broader constituency. The research team particularly is grateful to all community leaders and barefoot researchers, who are the real heroes and heroines for proving that access to information and knowledge is an essential dimension of poverty paradigm.
The research team believes that the findings and methodologies developed in the process of experiment would be useful to researchers, practitioners, policy makers, media, academia and other stakeholders. We know that many of the elements of Pallitathya model can be improved further and replaced with some better elements. We believe that researchers and practitioners will take away the model further with many twists and new directions. D.Net believes that research in this arena just started and a long way to go along way for making the efforts of truly benefiting poor and marginalised.
........................
Source: D. Net
This writew-up is an attempt to share the experience of an experiment on whether access to information and knowledge has any role to play in addressing poverty through improving access to information and knowledge by poor and marginalised. A system of information and knowledge exchange for the poor and marginalised was designed for this experiment, where information and communication technologies (ICTs) are one of the components of the system. The experiment, spread over a period of more than four years starting from 2003, tested the system termed as "Pallitathya Model", consisting five basic components: content, multiple channels of information and knowledge exchange, Infomediary (human interface between information and knowledge-base), ownership and mobilisation (marketing). The system is based on two pre-requisites: it focuses on the need of a poor and marginalised community, and it emphasises on income generation for financial sustainability, where possible.
Under the Pallitathya experiment, all system components were built from zero. It was essential to understand the existing information and knowledge system practised by poor and marginalsed community people. A need assessment research was conducted by a joint rural-urban research team. Based on the gap identified in the prevailing information and knowledge exchange system, a number of livelihood questions were identified which cannot be resolved by existing system. The outcome of the needs assessment research was findings on absence of information and knowledge in those livelihood areas. As there was no digital livelihood content in Bangla and in semantics, which is easily comprehensible by ultimate beneficiary within a community, for the making the experiment possible, ICT-based content development efforts were undertaken. After four and half years, the outcome vindicates that information and knowledge gap was very rightly identified. Considering the pervasive illiteracy among the community beneficiaries both in mother tongue and illiteracy in ICTs - the 'Infomediary' as a system component was introduced. Such a system component allowed Pallitathya research team to include illiterate people to benefit from Pallitathya system not waiting for time when such literacy would be achieved. The research team was aware about slow 'technology diffusion' and 'behavioural change'. The team was also aware of attribution problem of any 'impact'. Thus, for capturing any 'positive' or 'negative' change in a community, the research team followed a 'transaction' based approach and used 'Outcome Mapping' as a methodology for capturing 'change', if any.
A new concept of 'benefit of investment' (BOI) was introduced for assessing benefit accrued by a community in monetary terms, where applicable, against investment made in a community-based unit of Pallitathya information and knowledge system. Such an indicator was needed, as there is confusion, whether investment in building information and knowledge system for the poor and marginalised is justified, because there is competing needs for investment. The combined BOI for the whole Pallitathya experiment is 1:4.64, which means for each Taka investment for 15 months of operation of the system the community benefited for Taka 4.64. The BOI for information and knowledge services was estimated 1:4.42, whereas BOI for income generating services was only 1:0.25. It is to be mentioned that the BOI mentioned above is estimated considering all costs including cost of operation for conducting research at head office level. If only local unit level cost is considered, the BOI was 1: 18.33. In this case, the BOI for information and knowledge service was 1:17.43 and for income generating service 1:1. The research findings strongly argue for 'public assets' and 'public goods' opposed to only financial sustainability argument, while income generating aspects should not ignored for nurturing entrepreneurial mindset. The research findings also show that the information and knowledge system as 'kiosk' is less preferable, rather the system unit should be embedded in a broader community ecosystem.
Since 2003 more than 120 researchers have been involved in the Pallitathya experiment. They passed many sleep-less nights to make the experiment reaching a meaningful end and to produce a good publication for sharing the findings of the experiment with broader constituency. The research team particularly is grateful to all community leaders and barefoot researchers, who are the real heroes and heroines for proving that access to information and knowledge is an essential dimension of poverty paradigm.
The research team believes that the findings and methodologies developed in the process of experiment would be useful to researchers, practitioners, policy makers, media, academia and other stakeholders. We know that many of the elements of Pallitathya model can be improved further and replaced with some better elements. We believe that researchers and practitioners will take away the model further with many twists and new directions. D.Net believes that research in this arena just started and a long way to go along way for making the efforts of truly benefiting poor and marginalised.
........................
Source: D. Net