The ABC of ICT4D: How best to understand information and communication technologies for development

Through experience we know people who earn as little as R1000 a month and who also have a cell-phone. Living on this amount a month means people are living above the poverty line of R14 (US$2) a day. We need to ask: What do we know about how much people spend on these telephone calls, and why do they make such calls on slight incomes?

While most telecommunications and IT market research is about the top spenders and the top earners, little is known about the millions of very small transactions that make up the mass of most of the worlds population.

However, it is this mass group in the market that makes it feasible and commercially worthwhile for service providers and producers. Cell phones are not mere luxuries or fashion items, they are tools in the employ of people development. If we consider Maslow's hierarchy of needs the idea of communication fits snugly into the basic human need for security. There is no longer a debate about whether communications infrastructure and gaining access to it fulfils a basic human need. The challenges we face in development are improving access, decreasing cost of access and total cost of ownership, access to open content and open source software as well as making use of all of this to improve health and education services in resource-poor countries, and several attendant services that can improve livelihoods, such as agriculture, primary production in order to improve our economies.

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