Category: Deeshaa (Rural Development)

[via ZooStation] Global Social Venture Competition just announced the winners. First prize went to World of Good: “World of Good’s new line of globally sourced fair trade gifts and accessories brings ethically sources handcrafts into the mainstream retail market and aims to generate sustainable livelihoods for thoughts of artisans around the world. During 2004, its first year in operations, World of Good established sourcing partnerships with 70 fair trade artisan copperative in 20 different coutnries around the globe and increased sales for all of them. Products are sourced under fair trade guidelines that generate employment for women and disadvantaged communities, promise a living wage and promote social and economic development. Just months after World of Good installed its first in-store kiosk, our products are flying off the shelves in over 55 reatil locations, including bookstores, yoga studios and 14 Whole Foods Bay Area stores. World of Good’s 2004 run rate was over $400,000 in sales and its products have turned significantly faster than retail industry averages while generating markups of 100% for both retailers and World of Good. World of Good projects its 2007 revenues to be over $20 million.”

Atanu Dey writes:

The use of high technology (x) is highly correlated with high degree of economic growth and development (y). Correlation, as economists never tire of reminding one, is not causation. Furthermore, even if there is causation, the direction of causation is not always obvious. Two variables x and y may be causally linked; but does x cause y, or does y cause x, or are they two connected through some other hidden variable z?

I am sitting in the University of California at Berkeley. (Hi from Berkeley!) The campus is full of high technology tools. Compared to what UC Berkeley has in terms of computers and bandwidth, the campus of a typical Indian university (Nagpur University, for instance) has very little. So it is tempting to believe that if Nagpur Univ were to be equipped with all the electronic gizmos and Internet bandwidth, then it too will attain the level of a UC. But that is patently absurd. What makes UCB is not the hardware (electronic or otherwise) but human and institutional capital. Human and institutional capital is what matters, not hardware. Just to drive home that point, Nagpur University in 2005 has more electronic hardware and internet bandwidth than UC Berkeley had in 1980. Yet, the capability of UCB(1980) far exceeded that of Nagpur University(2005).

It is not how much hardware or software or information one has that matters; what matters is what you do with it. And what you do with it depends on you and not on the thing. An inept author will not suddenly start writing masterpieces even if equipped with the fanciest word processing software. People will not suddenly become knowledgeable just because they have all the information of the world wide web at their finger-tips.

Atanu Dey writes:

Leapfrogging is possible but mostly it is restricted to technologies.

Unlike technology, you cannot leapfrog the various stages of development. A century ago, to be educated, one had to be literate and numerate. Same holds for today even though we have digital gizmos and computers. Indeed, to be able to effectively use the products of high-technology, literacy is an absolute necessity. Functional skills required for using high-tech all involve the ability to read and reason. I grant that illiterate idiots can use a cell phone, but that is not what I would call the effective use of high technology.

The so-called digital divide cannot be bridged by simply installing lots of PCs in areas where they dont exist and connecting them up to the internet. If the people are unable to use them, they serve no purpose other than to enrich the peddlers of hardware and software. Furthermore, there is the opportunity cost of spending limited resources on useless high-tech gizmos.

You cannot leapfrog development. It cannot be done at an individual level. And it cannot be done at a societal level. Although development paths may differ, the sequencing within a path cannot be radically altered because there are strict dependencies. Basic functional literacy is a pre-requisite to pretty much anything that one does. The use of high-tech depends on literacy and therefore if the population is illiterate, even gifting them with free hardware will not make a difference. The pre-condition for bridging the digital divide is therefore the bridging of the literacy divide.

Ethan Zuckerman writes about Mike Best and his work:

After giving us hope that there might be a demostrable connection between connectivity and democratization on the macro level, Mike takes us to the micro level – the SARI (Sustainable Access in Rural India) project that he’s been working on for several years. SARI provides internet connections to 50 villages in the Madurai district of Tamil Nadu state in India. The kiosks are set up in villages of 300-1000 households where average per capita income is about $0.60 per day.

The kiosks provide a wide range of internet services, everything from email, online training programs, entertainment (horoscopes, movies and games are especially popular), televeterinary services, telemedical services (notably cataract diagnosis) and e-government services. Mike is most interested in the e-government side of things. The systems allow citizens to apply for birth certificates, old age pensions, community certifications (evidence that someone is part of an “untouchable” caste, which has government benefits associated with it), income certificates (evidence that someone is below the poverty line), as well as voicing grievances about government services.

The numbers of people using the kiosks for e-government services look small, at first glance – a few users per month. Mike points out that most of these certificates are someone one applies for once – there’s not a lot of repeat usage. And, when Mike compares the number of certificates applied for from wired villages to unwired ones of similar size, in the same region, the results are dramatic: citizens in wired villages apply for birth certificates five times more often and for old age pensions three times as often.

The reason for the increased usage is pretty simple. It costs lots less for citizens to apply for these essential documents online than it does to get them in person. To get papers in person, villagers need to spend one or more days in transit, which entails expenses, and often need to pay bribes to get the essential forms. The total expense for getting a birth certificate, including travel and bribes, is often more than a person’s daily income. That becomes a powerful incentive to learn how to use the Internet kiosks.

Mike’s research comes at an interesting time in the debate over ICT for development. There’s a real backlash against the idea that ICT projects in rural areas have a meaningful, positive effect – the Economist dedicated a substantial portion of their last issue to an argument that cellphone penetration was far more important than rural Internet access, and that rural Internet projects had mixed impact, at best.

While I largely agree with the Economist – cellphones are critically important, and most rural ICT projects have been badly thought out and their impact poorly measured – Mike’s offering a great argument that rural ICT can have a meaningful impact IF people are smart enough to build applications that have direct benefit to users in the developing world.

Atanu Dey writes:

The undeniable fact is that literacy is the basis for all development. Literacy (and numeracy) is absolutely positively acutely necessary. You have to have a literate population for there to be any hope of any advancementsocial, economic, physical, whatever. Given a literate population, even in the absence of new-fangled high tech equipment, you can have wonderful outcomes; absent a literate population, no amount of high-tech gizmos will amount to a hill of beans.

Every notable invention, every innovation, every advancement made by humans have been made by humans who have been literate and they did it without PCs and internet. That statement is obviously true until about 30 years ago. PCs and the internet have arguably enhanced the power of humans to innovate more rapidly but the preconditions are that of literacy and resources to afford those tools. The lesson for the development of India is straightforward. If you want the rural populations to benefit from the use of high technology, then you have to make them literate first. If you dont make them literate, then you can forget about bridging the so-called digital divide.

Here is my prescription: First, make the people literate. How? See my modest proposal to make India literate within a few years.) Second, figure out which of the problems admit a least cost solution which involves PCs and internet. Finally invest in PCs and internet.

The Economist reviews Jeffrey Sachs’ new book “The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities for Our Time.” The Economist writes: “Aid can work, the book argues fervently, but you have to think big. Even when conditions are such that aid is likely to succeed (when standards of governance are adequate, when supporting policies are in place, and so forth) rich-country governments have been mean, fickle and short-sighted about aid. Find those cases where aid can work, says Mr Sachs, spend generously, and sustain it. This central point is persuasively hammered home.”

Dina Mehta writes about some of the work already underway:

Indext-C, a Gujarat Government endeavour has been created to provide information and guidance in organising the Cottage & Rural Industries sector as a catalyst for a better quality of life for artisans and small entrepreneurs.

The COTTAGE INDUSTRY-GLOBAL MARKET (CIGM) project works with women’s craft cooperatives in the Kangra District of Himachal Pradesh, India to support capacity building and local development. K2Crafts is the online marketplace for the CIGM project, established to market the cooperatives; hand-made, world-quality shawls. There’s a whole lot of interesting master’s theses covering research by CCT students on different aspects of the project: strategies for sustainable development, generating social capital, women’s empowerment, and Internet branding for local industries.

PEOPLink, a non-profit organization has been guiding women communities in countries like India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Haiti and Kenya, involved with handicrafts to place their products online, and building a global network of Trading Partners (TPs). The TPs have digital cameras that allow easy uploading of images, which are in turn used as promos to retail and wholesale buyers in the industrialized countries.

The Asian Center for Entrepreneurial Initiatives (AsCent) has made an attempt to introduce CAD / CAM technologies to artisans in the Belgaum district of Karnataka, alongside online advertising and sales.

Atanu Dey writes on what’s needed in education:

The present educational system evolved in simpler times when technologies were comparatively rudimentary. All you had were books, blackboards, and hard-copy libraries as teaching and learning tools, and live teachers giving real-time instructions. Now we have (the possibility of) broadband access to the world wide web, electronic libraries, distance education, radio, TV, CDs, DVDs. Things that were not written about or heard about just a generation ago. The tools and technological capabilities have evolved astonishingly. Therefore the educational process cannot but be subject to radical change as well.

One such change that I foresee is that of the separation of instruction and testing…The point is that the basic charter of a school (I will use the generic ‘school’ to refer to any educational institution) is to instruct or deliver education. That the school also tests the students it instructs and then declares whether or not any specific student has met the standards that the school sets is an unfortunate fact that is taken for granted. It is my contention that in the information age, the time has come when schools should de-link instruction from testing, and should concentrate only on instruction and leave the testing to institutions that are specialized in testing.

Atanu Dey writes:

At the turn of the 20th century, the US population was largely rural. Agriculture and related occupations employed the vast majority of Americans. The government saw the need to make higher education available to the rural populations. That was the birth of the so-called land-grant universities. (The University of California, which I attended for several wonderful years, is one such.)

Providing higher education to the children of the rural families was the need. So did they start very little colleges in the tens of thousands of little rural communities? No. They started large universities for the children of farmers to go to. The idea was that these trained people would then go back to the farms and increase the farm productivity. But what was the actual outcome? The children of the farmers got urbanized and did not want to go back to the rural areas. As luck would have it, technologies developed in urban areas were successful in raising farm productivity which meant that so many were not needed in the farms anyway. And who developed the technologies and labored in all those urban areas? Those children of rural farmers who went to the colleges were the people who supplied all the necessary bits that the rural farmers required.

The point I am trying to make is that it was not rural development that made the difference in the rural areas. It was what happened in the urban areas that changed the rural areas.

The problem with rural development, in my considered opinion, is that the focus has been the village. Nothing wrong with focusing on a village, of course. But you do have a problem if you have to focus on 600,000 villages. The moment you try to focus on 600,000 thousand of anything — villages, songs, books, cars, you name it — you become unfocused and unhinged. That is what happened with rural development.

Suhit Anantula points to an NYTimes editorial:

There is certainly much to debate about the details of Mr. Sachss report, which calls for rich countries like the United States to drastically increase foreign aid to poor countries in an effort to halve poverty in its many forms – hunger, illiteracy, disease – by 2015. But this is not a time for armchair quarterbacking. The United Nations report is a bold initiative that refuses to accept hunger as the inevitable fate of so many Africans, Latin Americans and Asians. There will be and should be a debate about it as world leaders prepare to meet in September on the antipoverty goals, but it is vital that it not turn into another excuse for inaction.Mr. Sachss report lays out, in real terms, the myriad ways to help poor people.

The beauty of his ideas is in their simplicity: Provide mosquito nets for children who live in malaria-infested regions. Eliminate school and uniform fees to ensure that poor children dont stay home because they cant afford to go to school. Provide farmers in sub-Saharan Africa with soil nutrients to ensure healthier crops. Reform and enforce legislation guaranteeing women and girls property and inheritance rights.