Facts & Figures Library - Digital Inclusion

The caller was frustrated. A new pest was eating away at his just-planted coffee crop, and he wanted to know what to do. Tyssa Muhima jotted down notes as the caller spoke, and promised to call back in 10 minutes with an answer.  Each day, Ms. Muhima and two other young women at this small call center on the outskirts of Uganda’s capital city answer about 40 such calls. They are operators for Question Box, a free, nonprofit telephone hot line that is meant to get information to people in remote areas who lack access to computers.  The premise behind Question Box is that many barriers keep most of the developing world from taking advantage of the wealth of knowledge available through Web search engines, said Rose Shuman, the service’s creator. That could be a drag on economic development. “So I was thinking, why not bring the information to them in a way that’s most convenient and useful to them?” said Ms. Shuman, who is based in Santa Monica, Calif.

Getting bright ideas while performing everyday tasks in life is not really unusual; after all many have gotten their brightest ideas while doing the most mundane things in life. But getting the idea of bridging the digital divide from wheeling and dealing in Wall Street? That's what happened to Iqbal Quadir way back in 1993, when this Wharton-educated Bangaldeshi national working as investment banker in Wall Street, realized that just like people find gold mines in "unglamorous companies" by buying them cheap and selling high, he too has an "unglamorous" country Bangladesh, whose huge population of very poor people could be an "asset" if only they could communicate.

BANGALORE, India — Manohar Lakshmipathi does not own a computer. In fact, in India workmen like Mr. Manohar, a house painter, are usually forbidden to touch clients’ computers.

So you can imagine Mr. Manohar’s wonder as he sat in a swiveling chair in front of a computer, dictating his date of birth, phone number and work history to a secretary. Afterward, a man took his photo. Then, with a click of a mouse, Mr. Manohar’s page popped onto the World Wide Web, the newest profile on an Indian Web site called Babajob.com.  Babajob seeks to bring the social-networking revolution popularized by Facebook and MySpace to people who do not even have computers — the world’s poor. And the start-up is just one example of an unanticipated byproduct of the outsourcing boom: many of the hundreds of multinationals and hundreds of thousands of technology workers who are working here are turning their talents to fighting the grinding poverty that surrounds them.

On September 26, 2007, ICF Co-Founder John Jung addressed the Expert Policy Forum of Showcase Ontario on tackling Ontario's digital challenge.  He discussed the importance of digital inclusion, the double-sided role of new technologies in closing the gap and also magnifying economic and social differences, and how Intelligent Communities rise to the challenge.

From www.govtech.com
By Indrajit Basu

What do you do when you want to provide digital communication services like voice mail, digital documents and e-mail to those living in villages so isolated quite apart from no phones, there's no electricity -- where even availability of drinking water is a problem?

Take the Internet to them of course!

But how, when there's not even a proper road to the village? Why, on motorcycles! And if that doesn't work either, try bicycles.

That's exactly what a Massachusetts-based provider of "simple, low- cost, and easy to deploy" telecommunication equipment, United Villages, Inc. is doing these days to take information and communications services to over two hundred thousand rural residents around the world.

From Digital Communities (www.govtech.com), Jun 1, 2007, By Indrajit Basu

The fact that Djurslands.net is considered one of the biggest -- if not the biggest -- non-commercial rural wireless Internet network in the world is not its most notable feature. Neither is the fact that it runs at about a third of the cost it takes to run a similar project in the urban areas. Nor is the fact that it is run solely by volunteers in the several hundred villages across Djursland. No, by far the most interesting feature of this rural wireless project in Djursland (a region in the middle of Denmark) is its volunteers' fierce passion to share their experience and knowledge. They sincerely want to us "good old Wi-Fi" to form more self-help groups so that all the rural districts around the world can build their own wireless network and bridge the growing digital divide.

By Michel Marriot
The New York Times, March 31, 2006

African-Americans are steadily gaining access to and ease with the Internet, signaling a remarkable closing of the "digital divide" that many experts had worried would be a crippling disadvantage in achieving success.  Civil rights leaders, educators and national policy makers warned for years that the Internet was bypassing blacks and some Hispanics as whites and Asian-Americans were rapidly increasing their use of it.

By Sascha Meinrath, November 20, 2006

When do we recognize a shift in the fundamental social fabric of civilization? Where do we look to find better exemplars of participatory democracy? When do we realize that notions of justice have to expand to include a new ways of thinking about human rights? How do we change our institutions to support a more just and equitable world? These are the questions that thought leaders in the community and municipal wireless movement have been asking themselves more and more over the past few years.   Time and again, those interviewed for this series pointed out that "nobody benefits" from digital exclusion -- yet, in our society, broadband services are inequitably distributed.