Paradise lost? Reinstating the human development agenda in ICT policies and strategies
✍ Scribed by James George Chacko
- Publisher
- Taylor and Francis Group
- Year
- 2005
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 52 KB
- Volume
- 11
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0268-1102
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Almost a year ago, the world's attention was unquestionably focused on the high-level delegations marching into the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva. In the wake of its furor were a multitude of delegations debating, deliberating, and fervently hoping to shape the future of the information society of tomorrow. Within these demands and statements, critical questions of how Information and Communications Technology (ICT) is actually able to address global, regional, and national human development issues have begun to come to the forefront of debates taking place around the world. WSIS in Tunis later this year will surely see much of these issues coming back to the forefront, yet again.
The debate essentially lies in two primary conjectures. On one side, the critics expound on how ICT is not essential in the context of development and is thus dispensable in the fight against world poverty. It is also put forth that a positive relationship between ICT and human development is either weak or absent. The proponents of ICT, however, strongly believe that ICT has the capability to provide developing nations with an unprecedented opportunity to meet vital development goals and thus empower them to "leapfrog" several stages of their development far more effectively than before. It is argued that those nations that succeed in harnessing the potential of ICT can look forward to greatly expanded economic growth, dramatically improved human welfare, and stronger forms of democratic governance, thus playing a specific role in furthering and enhancing sustainable development. Even the protagonists of ICT for development, however, argue that growth of ICT should not become a "techno-quick-fix" for solving development problems, as these may be unacceptable tradeoffs in less developed countries.
It is within this contested notion of the role of ICT and development that UNDP-APDIP 1 together with the UNDP-APRI 2 set out to examine the highly pertinent questions on the relation of human development and ICT while attempting to reinstate human development at the heart of ICT deployment and initiatives. This initiative has led to the development of a Human Development Report entitled Realizing the Millennium Development Goals: Promoting ICT for Human Development in Asia. 3 In order to systematically assess the role and impact of ICTs on human development, the clear targets of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were used as benchmark for human development. The MDGs include: