Waiting for Pilots to Land in Tunis

In fact, it is uncertain when -- or whether -- some of these pilots willever touch the ground. For they are the creations of development donorsor well-meaning civil society groups, many completely detached from thereal world.

Are Pilot Projects Helping Development?

Thousands of 'pilot projects' have been seeded all over the developingworld during the past few years to find out if information andcommunications technologies (ICTs) can foster development. Among theseare attempts to put computers in underprivileged schools, provideinternet access to the poor, or bring 'community radio' to villages.

The development community, ever anxious to coin more jargon andacronyms, now has a collective name for these efforts: ICT4D (ICT fordevelopment).

Of course, there is nothing wrong in trying out new ways of improvinglives and livelihoods. Every possible tool must be employed in theglobal battle against poverty. If technologies can offer part of thesolution, we should indeed welcome it.

But the enormous development challenges we face, captured in recentyears by the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), are not going tobenefit from what I call 'forever-pilots': projects that remainexternally supported for years or decades, and never seem to stand ontheir own.

It is also strange how the generic ideas behind these pilots are notimitated, in a world that is quick to emulate-even pirate or plagiarize-good ideas.

Here in Tunis, where a massive ICT4D exhibition ran parallel to theofficial, inter-governmental meeting, project proponents from UNagencies, civil society and the private sector have spent much time,effort and money in promoting their pet pilots.

Phrases like 'up-scaling' and 'ensuring sustainability' have been tossedabout over endless cups of coffee. But these are precisely what theforever-pilots fail to accomplish.

One much hyped project comes from my own country, Sri Lanka: the KotmaleInternet radio project. Established in 1999, it used a "community radio"service, a rural broadcast from the fully state-owned radio network, tobring the World Wide Web slightly closer to its listeners.

Surfing the web was not a practical option in the Kotmale valley, some250 km (155.3 mi.) away from the capital. So a daily two-hourinteractive radio program enabled listeners to request (by livetelephone or by post) information on any topic. Radio presenters sourcedit from various websites and summarized on air in the local language,Sinhala.

This helped to overcome the twin problems of Internet access and Englishproficiency. For a while, the station also provided free Internet accessat two public libraries and at the station itself. The capital andrunning costs were covered by donors.

The project appealed to communications researchers and journalists allin search of a "good story". Never mind the project wasgovernment-driven, and rarely provided information of economic or socialvalue. In reality, the community had no say in either management orcontent development. Nestled in the scenic Kotmale valley, the pilotproject had all the 'sexy' trappings for the development community.

But when the donors finally wearied of funding, everything came to astandstill. Amazingly, however, the project lives on in developmenttextbooks and websites, and is still cited widely as a South Asian'success'.

If it was such a success, why didn't it spawn similar efforts in SriLanka or elsewhere? The rural and urban information needs are vast andremain unmet.

Joining Kotmale are a large number of other 'small-is-beautiful' ICT4Dinitiatives across Africa, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Thetele-centre fever that is currently sweeping the developing world isonly the latest wave. Tax payers in the North keep these numerousprojects on life support, believing the hype that it really helps thepoor.

Fighting Illusions

If some people want to believe in myths, that's a personal choice. Butprojects like Kotmale do great harm by distracting funding agencies,distorting investment priorities and creating an illusion ofaccomplishment. Murali Shanmugavelan, a researcher with Panos London,calls these initiatives 'donor mistresses'.

I see them as 'picture postcard opportunities' for roving developmentworkers. There is a seductive allure in images of school childrenplaying with a computer, a Buddhist monk using a mobile phone, or tribalpeople trying out a palm-top. They lull us into believing that we arefixing the world's ills with geeky gadgets.

Ten years after the Internet went public and a dozen years into mobiletelephony, some continued to advocate more pilots in Tunis. We were toldthat pilots would first test the ground, assess the limits of thepossible, or 'demonstrate' a concept before rolling it out.

With only 10 years left to meet the globally agreed development targetsof MDGs, how much longer can we keep studying problems or piloting atthe fringes?

Investing disproportionately and endlessly in scattered 'pilots' willnot bridge the digital divide or reduce global poverty. These pilots,and their jet setting proponents, look at problems from 30,000 feetabove the ground, and create small islands of prosperity amidst muchdeprivation. They should be irrigating the whole vast desert, not keepwatering the few donor-pampered oases.

Development donors looking for a bigger bang for their increasinglylimited buck should put more money in regulatory and structural reformsthat have tangible downstream returns. For example, telecom reform inSri Lanka during the 1990s brought mobile phones within reach of mostpeople. When they were first introduced 15 years ago, mobiles wereover-priced and over-rated. Today, they make up over half of thecountry's 2.5 million phone connections, and have revolutionized howpeople work and conduct business.

Two years ago, as part of a nine-country Asia Pacific study on how ICTsare influencing human development, I was desperately looking forexamples of any communications technology that has directly benefitedthe poor. The market-driven mobile phone phenomenon stood out amidstmany donor-driven 'pilot' projects that had either collapsed or neverdelivered the promise.

Investing To Make a Difference

These misdirected pilots only give ICTs a bad name. Yet many of thesetechnologies hold untapped potential to make good development better.When applied correctly, ICTs-from phones, radio and television tocomputers and internet-can also liberate millions of people fromignorance, ill-health and unemployment. I didn't hear that message loudand clear in Tunis. Or maybe it was lost in the self-congratulatorycacophony.

Every big UN summit generates its share of hype, and WSIS has been noexception. Tunis brought back memories from three years ago, when Iattended the World Summit on Sustainable Development. Held at the otherend of the African continent, in Johannesburg, South Africa, it had asimilar deluge of pilots. The richest square mile of Africa, where thatSummit was held, probably held the world's highest concentration ofdevelopment hype and rhetoric for a few days. It will be interesting togo back and see how many of those pilot projects, all trying to save theplanet, have been able to save themselves.

The Tunis Kram Centre, venue of WSIS, must have had the highestconcentration of laptops and mobile phones in Africa for the week. Itwas also drowning in everything e- (electronic) from e-readiness studiesto e-development plans, and from e-commerce strategies to e-wastemanagement plans, there was a downpour of it everywhere.

'Forever pilots' were lurking among all this, looking for landing pads.They would happily settle for a few sympathetic listeners, or some morefunding to keep them going for as long as they can.

If governments, UN agencies and donors don't move on from this basiclevel and begin investing in what really makes a difference, it's notthe pilots who will soon crash land.

It will be all of us.