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Reawakening the digital development dream
16 April 2007
Seeing the Possibilities
Seven years ago at the height of the ‘dot-com’ boom there was constant chatter about the need to help poor communities and countries close the ‘digital divide’. Fast forward half a decade of exponential technological progress and UN conferences, and the digital divide between the world’s rich and poor is accelerating as much as other gaps in the unprecedented opportunities of globalization. What can be done that is scalable and sustainable?
We were right in grasping that access to IT could be transformational in development. Yet we failed miserably to grasp that diffusion of IT needed a sustainable model of affordable access for this to be a reality beyond much-hyped digital village and e.lab pilot projects.
In Africa, a model is now quietly being developed which could offer a sustainable and affordable solution for poor communities based on a global and local partnership. A breakthrough in IT access for education, health and enterprise is possible by linking the mass decommissioning of high quality IT in the rich business world, through responsible and locally managed refurbishment and deployment, plus essential training and capacity building.
The model needs to beat off skeptics, IT utopians and the forces of high pressure, short-term technology marketing to poor world governments who together simply don’t want to see practical partnership solutions as sexy. How can the poor have affordable access to technology to underpin their community development needs – and what role for business in building inclusive access to technology in their global markets?
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