ICTs, Africa and the paradox of sustainable development

Are ICTs really contributing to sustainable development and supporting poverty alleviation or are they just another technocratic hype which is being imposed on development countries? Working in Ghana in several ICT projects, I experienced the complexity of the above question.
At a first sight, I was fully convinced of the need to connect Africa to the global information society, to provide access to valuable information, to enhance online collaboration. It was easy to find arguments for an information revolution for Africa, and for bridging the digital divide.
All the global development agencies support ICTs in their development agendas. World Bank, UN, DFID, Nuffic, SIDA, IDRC, UNDP, WTO, NGOs, African governments and pan-African organisations as the African Union, NEPAD and Association of African Universities and many others embraced ICTs as part of their development policies.
Despite the apparent consensus on this subject, there is also criticism.
In November 2008 I attended the International Conference on Rethinking Development Studies at Cape Coast in Ghana. I presented a paper on ICTs and development myself, and discussed with conference participants, development researchers from universities in Africa and the US, who were very sceptical on development policies. One important issue came up.
It seems that the focus on ICTs within development started in the mid 90s, as a new approach to development, in a period of public “compassion fatigue” and falling levels of foreign assistance. The introduction of ICTs in development fitted well in the neoliberal discourse of trade-not-aid, promoting the Information Revolution as the new ‘development paradigm’. The idea was adopted by the Clinton Administration and rapidly disseminated worldwide to global governance institutions. In this newly created actuality, the main obstacles to the information were identified as technological and thus solvable. The “advantage of technological backwardness” of Africa not having a fixed telecommunication infrastructure, was mentioned as an asset for the introduction of wireless internet technology and mobile telephony. The opening of the markets, by cutting tariffs on imported computer equipments, the transition of state-run to privatised, deregulated telecom markets, and the creation of an open competitive trade environment, were all strong arguments which fitted very well in the existing neoliberal discourse of the day. These ideas were enthusiastically integrated into the donor’s structural reform strategies and the IMF and World Bank’s structural adjustment programs for developing countries. In this way, the information revolution was discursively marketed by linking “poverty” to “lack of information”.
As a result to the proposed reforms, the telecom state companies of several African countries, was privatised and successfully acquired by international companies. Vodafone is currently the number one telecom company in Africa. It acquired Ghana Telecom lately.
Basically, the information revolution might be necessary for African development, it is an excellent opportunity for global markets.
Africa does not participate in global ICT productivity. Nor does it participate in the production of hardware, nor in software, not in services. The global supply chains for the delivery of computer hardware are in Asia, Europe and North America. Service delivery and software design shifted from the US to India and China. Not to Africa until date.
In the meantime, Africa is paying a high price for its participation in the global information age. We can see the information revolution taking place in Africa. Mobile telephony has infiltrated African society, even used by the rural societies and the very poor.
Private telecom companies, aimed at short term profits, benefit from the deregulated market by charging high prices, and deliberately holding back available internet bandwidth capacity, in order not to spoil their market shares.
ICTs and the internet, however indispensable for collaboration, knowledge and education, are not very sustainable. ICT equipments have very short lives. According to Moore’s law, processor capacity and data storage capacity double every 18 months. Software is adapted to this pace of technological and commercial developments. We are still in the middle of a technological evolutionary phase, in which concepts change very fast, and in which much is being invested. You could say the the concept of ICT is not fully mature. Developing countries are confronted with gigantic costs to catch up and keep up to this global technological playground, which makes it fundamentally not sustainable.
There are now about 4 billion mobile telephones in the World in 2008, and approximately 1 billion computers (Source ITU and the Gartner). In 2008 180 million computers have been replaced by new machines, and 35 million computers were dumped, despite the toxic substances they contain. Of the world’s energy consumption, about
1 % is estimated to be consumed by data centres, and 0,25 % is consumed by the data flows of the Internet. The internet flows in the Netherlands have doubled again over the passed 15 months. Since the number of users has stabilised, this increase is especially attributed to the data traffic of music, images and motion pictures (I-tunes!).
When returning to the scale and level of our projects in higher education in Africa, we can see the demand of internet connectivity by our partners in e.g. Ghanaian universities and polytechnics. Despite our own reluctance to impose ICT policies and to create a so called situation of ‘eiland automatisering’, we have unsustainably contributed to the increase of the number of VSAT dishes in Africa, and introduced our own ICT isle e.g. at the university of Cape Coast, bringing our own backup energy supply, equipment, subscription to the internet, connectivity via the Netherlands, software and maintenance activity, going against all existing or non-existing university ICT policies. The subscriptions to the internet are paid from the budget and will expire one year from the end of the project.
How can we justify these activities?
First of all, it was the urgent need from our project partners, the time frame and the result focus of the project, and the lack of human capacity at ICT management and technical level of the university, compelled us to take these actions.
This is probably the way ICTs are implemented anywhere in Africa, by lack of existing management structures or due to the volatile nature of ICTs themselves.
There is no conclusion in this continuing story of ICTs for development. But, when talking about ICTs and sustainable development, there is, first of all a "critical need to be critical... and to look beyond that which is given to you" [Büscher 2009].