Summary

Background / Terms of Reference

As part of its services to its donors, infoDev organizes and delivers customized training workshops on the effective and appropriate use of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to help meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).

These workshops are not meant solely for '"ICT4D specialists," but rather for a much broader audience of development advisors and practitioners interested in the role of ICTs.

infoDev ICT4D workshops and seminars begin with a discussion of our current understanding of the nature of poverty and the challenges of development, an analysis of how ICTs might address those challenges, and some tentative lessons drawn from our experience thus far.

A guiding theme throught the workshops is that the proper approach to harnessing ICTs for development and poverty reduction is to mainstream them as tools of, and subordinate them to, broader strategies and programs for building opportunity and empowering the poor.

While these workshops include information, analysis and perspective on a number of ICT4D initiatives, the goal is not simply to provide not a detailed checklist of what works, and what doesn't. Rather, the workshops present and explore a roadmap for understanding what might work and why in specific circumstances, informed by the successes, and failures, of a variety of projects in recent years.

As with all of infoDev's work, the focus here is on ICTs as means, not ends, as tools that enable desired changes — in the performance of institutions and markets, in the livelihoods of poor people and the vulnerabilities they face, in the capacity of individuals and governments.  It is these changes, not ICTs, that lead to poverty reduction and sustainable development.

These outcomes — fewer people in poverty, more vibrant developing-country economies, more responsive government institutions, reduced disease and illiteracy, greater gender equality — are the ultimate measure of the value and impact of ICTs in development.