I’m whipping a dead horse here. I thought I’d do a follow up on my friend Erik’s post on ICT4D, a polarizing discussion around the acronym ‘ICT4D’ (Information and Communications Technology for Development) that seemingly casts a condescending shadow on tech in Africa and other developing regions.
One thing is for certain in 2011 — Tech is exploding. Bleeding edge technology is at the point that it has become “Cut your finger and die” bleeding edge. In the world of 2011, if you’re not innovating and iterating at light speed, you’re not innovating. ICT4D and indeed then term ICT in general in this breakneck environment has come to symbolize access to technology at the lowest rung - basically a booster seat at the table with the adults.
I don’t mean to disparage all the valiant efforts so many have made by taking technology to the farthest reaches of the earth, but technology visualized through the lens of ‘development’ has inadvertently created a mind block in the mindset of a developing country’s tech innovator. An article on memburn - ‘With millions of smartphones in South Africa, where are all the apps’ illustrates my point. There is simply no excuse for the lack of smart phone applications in Africa. True, many cool smart phone applications today are built for vanity, but in between are thousands of truly useful apps — and they all have one thing in common, they make money, and they make money because its what people want. My point is not just about ‘apps’, but technology in general.
Seth Godin makes a good point:
The future feels a lot more like marketing—it’s impromptu, it’s based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people—and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.
Then, is there a very remote chance that the role of technology in development has been slightly overemphasized?
