Seven Digital Divide Fallacies
Those involved in the ten-year effort to close the Digital Divide were all well-intentioned. But we were like blind men describing the elephant as a tusk or a hoof rather and missing the point about the whole elephant. Similarly, closing the Divide turned out to be not a matter of gaining access to computers or cell phones but finding room for both. It is not a matter of promoting personal use of gadgets vs. shared use of gadgets but both. It is not a job for business or government but both. Not about choosing open source software over Windows but both. Similarly, it is not about GSM wireless vs. CDMA but both. Not about bottom-up vs. top-down efforts but both.
In other words, closing the Digital Divide involves building “ecosystems” in which a diverse mix of stakeholders forge alliances that close the Divide. Here are the “blind man” fallacies, each of which are partial truths:
FALLACY NUMBER ONE: Closing the Digital Divide is about giving poor people access to computers.
Giving a poor person access to a computer, or any other ICT product or service, may not necessarily help that person -- and it is not essentially what the movement to close the digital-divide is all about. Most activists who are engaged in the effort to close the Divide look beyond the issue of access to the larger issue of how ICT-enabled "solutions" can help the poor: such as by using new technology to provide clean drinking water available to poor people, or to improve health care services for the poor. Thus, closing the Digital Divide is about catalyzing the digital economy so that it serves poor people whether those people have their own direct access to computers or not.
FALLACY NUMBER TWO: Getting the private sector to profitably serve the poor at the "bottom of the pyramid" is the key to closing the Digital Divide.
C.K. Prahalad is among the brilliant management gurus who have pointed to the need to formulate tech solutions for the four billion citizens "at the bottom of the pyramid." He has argued that multinational corporations should take the lead in this effort, not governments. Prahalad's thesis has been very valuable, but it fails to address the heart of the matter of closing the digital divide. It is true that closing the Digital Divide requires that big multinationals devote their R&D facilities and market-development activities to question of how to build demand for technology among the poor and then to figure out how to lead the poor through a process of "learning and earning." Furthermore, small entrepreneurs can play an important role by serving low-income customers that the big companies ignore. But it is unrealistic for the private sector to switch from serving the affluent and middle class to serving those at the very bottom of the pyramid. It is more important for them to figure out how to leverage their success at serving their current customers to reach the second billion customers. Doing so would create a staging ground for reaching the third billion customers, and eventually the forth billion. In other words, the private-sector should move down the pyramid rather than turn it upside down in a heroic effort to serve the very poorest consumers. In emphasizing consumer marketing activity by multinational corporations, the Bottom of the Pyramid (BOP) thesis also fails to emphasize the crucial matter of "egovernment" as a factor in closing the Digital Divide. For most high-tech multinationals government is their most important customer in emerging markets. By accelerating the process of digitalization of government, the private sector can bring about reforms in government that can greatly help the poor, as well as improve the health-care, educational and environmental services of the poor.
FALLACY NUMBER THREE: Creating "shared use" of ICT products in the countryside, such as information kiosks that deliver government services, is the key to closing the Digital Divide.
It is true that shared use facilities such as community centers or simply internet kiosks or rental of cell phones and other devices hold great promise for the poor.
But shared use is a complement to a strategy that involves giving each person their own wireless device. Eventually, the price of such devices will be low enough so that everyone can have their own device. Both individual-use and shared-use create powerful complementary tools to use to close the Divide.
FALLACY NUMBER FOUR: Closing the Digital Divide requires setting up a "superfund" that supports ICT projects for the poor.
Way back in 1996, the noted UC-Berkeley sociologist, Manuel Castells, argued that there should be a Marshall Fund-like effort to transfer ICT expertise and funding from the wealthy to the poor countries. Hoping to be the host for such a superfund is one reason why the United Nations luminaries - Secretary General Kofi Annan and World Bank President James Wolfensen -- became so vocal about closing the Digital Divide a decade ago. The closest any government came to creating such a fund was Japan when it offered to provide $15 billion to close the Digital Divide. Once the Japanese Foreign Ministry realized that no other government was going to join in, it quietly rescinded the offer. In the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) much of the politicking was based on setting up a big fund for the poor countries, an idea that was eventually formally presented by Senegal. But by the time the Summit reconvened in Tunis two years later, the idea seemed to have disappeared.
In fact, there are many reasons not to create such a fund. One of them is that no one institution or individual has the status to serve as an honest broker for serving as an intermediary for deploying such a fund certainly not the United Nations, which is one of the least successfully digitalized major institutions in the world. Another reason is that no one has ever defined how much money would be needed to close the Digital Divide, or what projects would be funded. Lacking a comprehensive framework for how to finance the closure of digital divide, the notion of a fund simply never caught on.
FALLACY NUMBER FIVE: The key to closing the Digital Divide is investment in literacy and education.
One of the most commonsensical ideas for closing the digital divide is to invest in literacy and training. After all, the biggest barrier to use of digital technology is lack of skills. But not all skill-development requires the user to be literate. The next generation of the world wide web, referred to as Internet 2.0, emphasizes the need to go beyond text to give users a sensory experience of the web. Some governments are exploring the use of cell phones, and applications like voice recognition technology or use of visual icons on various devices. Indeed, there are many new ways that poor can be helped by new technologies even with without their becoming literate.
FALLACY NUMBER SIX: Social entrepreneurs with IT skills must become the prime movers for closing the Divide since they are able to introduce "disruptive technologies" to serve the poor.
Entrepreneurship is indeed an important factor in closing the Digital Divide. All over the world entrepreneurs with IT skills are able to recognize customer needs that are ignored by large corporations. In China and India they have been able to circumvent entrenched interests by bringing power and affluence into areas that have been unserved by the established business elites.
But, though we all want to cheer on heroic entrepreneurial companies, the reality is that no one entrepreneur can go it alone successfully. Entrepreneurs can only be sustainable if they fit into strategic alliances and supply chains in which an "ecosystem" of big and small companies co-exist. A truly proactive entrepreneur, such as Grameen Phone's Iqbal Quadir, can pull together these strategic alliances but they cannot go it alone.
FALLACY NUMBER SEVEN: If governments will only open up their telecom sectors to foreign competition, and make themselves "e-ready", market forces all by themselves will cause the Divide to close.
Public policy innovations by government are indeed an important factor in closing Digital Divide. Some governments, like Costa Rica, Estonia and Thailand have figured out how to use wireless policymaking to "leapfrog" other nations. But public policy change is only part of the story. But it is a mistake to think that governments must first liberalize their policy and eliminate corruption in their telecommunications policies before the private sector can be drawn to a country. In fact, the private sector can be the prime mover in ways that forces reform in the public sector as we have seen in India. The best circumstance occurs in countries in which the private sector induces government reform and government reform induces corporate reform. The key to closing the Digital Divide is the dynamic between and government not unilateral action by one sector.
