Disruptive Social Processes from Technology

The often quoted successes in IT4Dev are often accompanied by an undocumented and silent disruptive process that leaves behind a large portion of the community members and generates new divisions in social and economic structures within these communities.

New Divides

Those farmers with a young kid who attends school and is able to use a computer will have an edge on those who don’t. Those kids who have a computer at home or are able to spend time at the tele-center will have better opportunities than those who don’t.

Alienation

More often than not a new world is presented to the people and they make the unconscious decision of jumping in a boat to arrive to this new world and abandon theirs. The young are not only overwhelmed with all sorts of social behavior and cultural content traditionally alien to them but are blinded by the promise of a better future as computer language programmers, network technicians or IT slaves to the global corporate world.

Indirect Diaspora Promotion

In bringing Information and Communication Technologies to remote communities, their inhabitants, particularly young ones, have access to the world and discover new opportunities and choices of life and for their future.

But in order for them to fulfill and reach those choices and options they now discover, they have to leave their communities and go to work to areas that demand those new skills.
So, by bringing ICT into remote communities, we often initiate or strengthen the process towards their destruction.

Imposing Human Capacity and Skill Choices

ICT Development Strategies often focus in deploying Human Capacity programs to increase ICT skills and the number of local ICT professionals. A lot of talk is done on developing new competencies so that the local people can be inserted in the global information and knowledge society, find work in the global economy and to make local institutions more efficient and the local economy more competitive.

But we must be aware that developing regions and underserved communities often fail to provide diverse options and opportunities to its inhabitants. So when we provide capacity building and professional growth options to an underserved communities, we must be very careful of not doing so for a limited range of “technological” skills or we will be imposing biases in the choices, life and futures of the people we try to serve.
We may end up turning potential great business people, social and cultural leaders, artists, educators into simple programmers or designers in this army of ICT soldiers we dream of putting together to fight poverty and promote development.

Quite often, we think we can observe, diagnose and prescribe strategies to achieve the goals of a pre-conceived development. But proper leadership and guidance implies paying close attention to those we hope to lead. It’s not about showing them the way, but about listening where they want to go and with them build a custom road for their own path.