Bridging the digital divide

Before the Internet came to Veerampattinam, a coastal village in southern India, the local fisher folk went to get their daily catch without knowing sea conditions or the location of fish shoals. Lives were sometimes lost because of particularly high waves and rough seas. But in late 1998, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF), an Indian research centre, installed a computer in a "village information shop" with financial assistance from the International Development Research Centre, Canada. Through a wireless local-area network based on radio frequencies, the computer makes available daily data on wave height and wind forecasts from a U.S. Navy website. This information is broadcast to the villagers in the early morning via loudspeakers on the roof of the information shop. Armed with this knowledge as well as with details about fish location, the fishermen now ply the seas in greater safety and with more efficiency. Not only has the Internet-enabled computer made the main work of the village easier, but it has also made information about prices, health and transportation facilities and entitlement schemes accessible. Indeed, before the computer arrived, villagers were unaware of housing loans that they were entitled to. Most fishermen in the village have now benefited from these low-cost loans. Veerampattinam is one of many recent examples of the way the Internet has reached and benefited the poor in developing countries. Although small in scale, these examples have posed a challenge to the view that the Internet belongs to the technologically advanced and that it would be out of place in poor rural areas. Without doubt the Internet and other information and communication technologies (ICTs), such as faxes, video, digital radio, mobile phones and satellite technologies, have helped people gain access to, process, respond to and distribute information in a faster and more far-reaching way than ever before. This ongoing shift toward a more information-intensive society gives both added weight and new meaning to the old maxim, "information is power." ICTs at a minimum can enhance the livelihoods of the poor and improve market efficiency. As development tools in their own right, ICTs can also help lead to higher literacy rates through distance learning; gender equality through the empowerment of women who gain greater access to economic opportunities and civil society; sustainable development through easier dissemination of appropriate information; more balanced social relations through the greater accountability imposed on the powerful by the marginalised; and other global goods.