Activity File
Enhancing the Livelihoods of the Rural Poor
The Role of Information and Communication Technologies
Summary
There is some degree of understandable skepticism about whether information and communication technologies are appropriate tools for addressing the needs and challenges of the poor, particularly the rural poor. Yet even the poorest people and families in rural areas have information and communication needs. More generally, technologies that reduce their expenditure of their few valuable resources (their time, labor, energy, and physical resources) and increase the yield from those expenditures could have a profound positive effect on their livelihoods and incomes. Innovations and tools that leverage their own creativity, and their own knowledge of their context, could benefit both their own situation and those of their neighbors and of other poor people elsewhere.
Background
Given their poverty and the difficulty of the environments in which they live, it is extremely important to be judicious and practical about the types of technology appropriate to their circumstances and needs. Yet it is equally important to exploit every possible, and practical, use of these technologies for the benefit of the rural poor, both through their direct application to their livelihoods needs and challenges and through their role as an enabler of institutional change, capacity building, governmental effectiveness and accountability, and economic growth more broadly.
infoDev has commissioned a multi-part study that will build upon and update existing research, add evidence and experience from the field, map the current state of our knowledge of these issues, and recommend a way forward both in the international community's framing of these issues and in urgent priorities for further research and experimentation. This will occur in the context of addressing the priority knowledge needs of policy makers, donors and other key stakeholders. This study will build on similar work completed a few years ago by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) in cooperation with DFID, FAO and the World Bank.
The project will have three closely-linked components:
- a "knowledge needs assessment" that identifies the priority knowledge needs of international donor staff and their country counterparts working on these issues.
- a "knowledge map" detailing the state of available knowledge on the subject of "ICTs and Livelihoods of the Rural Poor", the key issues about which our knowledge and information are still unsufficient, and what seem to be the most urgent priorities in filling some of the gaps.
- a "framework paper" offering a way of thinking about the issues of ICT and Livelihoods of the Rural Poor that builds on lessons from previous work, frames the issues in the context of our broader understanding of poverty and of the role of ICTs as change agents and tools of innovation, and recommends concrete next steps for infoDev and its donors to develop a broader work program on these issues.
This project is proudly supported and funded by the European Commission.