leondumoulin.nl: The Global Course of the Information Revolution: Technological Trends, Proceedings of an International Conference: Robert H. Anderson.
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Furthermore, while it is common to focus on average levels of income and income growth, the distribution of those gains can also have an effect on well-being. This is true not only because absolute levels directly affect the quality of life of particular groups, but also because broad perceptions of unfairness can have a negative psychological impact, and inequality can contribute to sociopolitical tensions.
Since the mids, the United States has experienced significant growth in inequality in both income and wealth. This is the subject of a large amount of literature and has been documented in great detail by Acemoglu, Autor, Katz, Piketty, Saez, and many others. Over the past several decades, IT and automation have been a significant driver of this increase in inequality, although there are also other forces at work.
Much popular attention has been focused on the rising share of income of the top 1 percent of each of these distributions. While this increase has been substantial, with the share of income accruing to the top 1 percent of households increasing from about 10 percent to over 20 percent between and , there have also been increases in earnings inequality within the other 99 percent, accounted for largely by the increasing skills premium associated with a 4-year college degree.
For example, the absolute median earnings gap between those with a high school and a college degree approximately doubled from to , as the real wages of college graduates rose and those of less educated workers fell through about A related phenomenon is the falling share of GDP paid to labor relative to owners of capital illustrated in Figure 3.
Kearney, , Trends in US wage inequality: Revising the revisionists, Review of Economics and Statistics Saez, , Top incomes and the Great Recession: Neiman, , The global decline of the labor share, Quarterly Journal of Economics 1: It suggests that trends in income are increasingly favoring those who have already accrued wealth. This decline in the labor share of GDP, if sustained, will affect the distribution of wealth as well as that of income, expanding the share of total income flowing to wealth holders. Many factors are likely at work in this landscape of inequality; technological change, social biases, increased globalization and trade, the decline in labor union density and power, 51 declines in the real minimum wage, changing norms regarding executive compensation, growing economic deregulation, changes in tax rates, and growing oligopoly—or in some cases, simple monopoly 52 —are among the hypothesized causes of increased inequality of income and wealth over the past 40 years.
As with employment, the case that technological advances have contributed to wage inequality is strong. For most of the 20th century, real median incomes—incomes of people at the 50th percentile—grew at least as fast as overall real GDP per person, suggesting that the benefits of improved technological progress were widely shared. But since the late s, productivity and GDP per person have continued to grow, while median incomes have stagnated illustrated in Figure 3. There is a debate in the research literature, and indeed, among committee members, about how much of the increase in inequality should be attributed to technology.
There are three prominent narratives implicating technological change as a force toward greater inequality over the last several decades. First, many new technologies have replaced labor-intensive, routine, and physical tasks and expanded demand for labor in jobs that require social skills, numeracy, abstract thinking, and flexibility.
Second, as labor-intensive tasks are automated, the share of income going to capital relative to labor can increase, which may also help to explain the falling share of labor in overall GDP as illustrated in Figure 3. This in part reflects their improved ability to sell to not only customers in local markets, but also with greater ease to those in regional, national, and even global markets as improved communications technologies reduce the costs of reaching a broader audience. Changes in IT also seem to be playing a role in the changing demand for skills and the earnings inequality for the other 99 percent.
Technology can be a complement for highly skilled workers, as well as a substitute for low- or medium-skill workers. This is often called the skill-biased technological change hypothesis. Unless supply changes sufficiently, this will shift wages in favor of the more skilled group. It has been suggested that this divergence is exacerbated by an increasing reliance on technology in the workplace, as the skills required to work with these technologies are more readily.
DiNardo, , Skill-biased change and rising wage inequality: Some problems and puzzles, Journal of Labor Economics Kearney, , Trends in U. Revising the revisionists, Review of Economics and Statistics 90 2: The Evolution of U. In fact, many new technologies of the 19th century automated previously skilled occupations and expanded unskilled assembly work which paid lower wages than the prior forms of work.
For instance, the Luddites may have been misguided in their tactics of smashing mechanical spinning and weaving machines, but they were right that the way these machines were used was bad news for them: In general, if there is a mismatch between the skills of the workforce and the skill requirements of new technologies, changes in the structure of pay will tend to follow. In the s and s, these changes in technology—along with complementary factors such as globalization, deregulation, and deunionization—have likely contributed to the reduction in demand for middle-level skills, and this has been reflected in both the quantity of jobs and in wages for middle-skill workers see Figure 3.
In particular, workers doing routine tasks such as production tasks in manufacturing or clerical tasks have seen their demand decline due to multiple factors, including changing technology. This is reflected in a decline in manufacturing employment even as output has grown to an all-time high. Globalization has further eroded the demand for such skills in advanced economies like the United States. In contrast, there have been expanding job opportunities in both high-skill, high-wage occupations like professional, technical, and managerial occupations and low-skill,. But changes in skill demand are far from the only factors at work.
In addition, technology may be helping to drive a decline in the labor force participation rate and a broader shift in the labor-capital relationship, as advanced technology is embodied in capital equipment that replaces many workers. Acemoglu, , Changes in unemployment and wage inequality: An alternative theory and some evidence, American Economic Review 89 5: Acemoglu, , Good jobs versus bad jobs, Journal of Labor Economics 19 1: Karabarbounis, , The global decline of the labor share, Quarterly Journal of Economics 1: Another factor that is important in this context is that advances in IT often involve significant supply-side economies of scale: Thus companies whose software has more users will tend to have lower average costs per user.
Similar logic holds for many business-to-business platforms and, to some extent, even productivity software like word processors, spreadsheets, and presentation software, because they are compatible between users and enable file sharing and collaboration. Even if the gains are shared across all the workers within the winning firms, this still leads to concentration of the gains to a relatively small share of workers.
That said, gains have not been evenly distributed, with the top employees in firms seeing the biggest gains on average. Cobb, , Risky business: Saloner, , Competition, compatibility and standards: The economics of horses, penguins, and lemmings, in Product Standardization and Competitive Strategy L. Van Alstyne, and S. Choudar, , Platform Revolution: Instead, the rapid proliferation of digital technology may enable a third class—people who can create and distribute new products, services, and business models—to prosper immensely.
This can amplify their power, importance, and relative pay. While the gender wage gap has narrowed since the s, it is important to note that significant wage gaps by both race and gender persist in the United States. Much but not all of these gaps have been explained by varying education and experience, or the fact that different groups participate at different rates in different industries and occupational fields.
Even when controlling for education, white men out-earned all groups except for Asian men; white and Asian women out-earned Hispanic and black men and women. How these disparities will shift in the future as a result of technological change is an open question; gender and occupational fields are discussed further in Chapter 4. An important variable for understanding and shaping future developments is the way education and vocational training institutions might ameliorate the mismatch between new technologies and existing skills. The early 20th century was also a period of rapid technological change in the U.
However, existing evidence suggests that wage inequality declined during this era, in part because the U. That does not mean that simply investing more in the same sorts of education is the best way to reduce inequality, however. More out-of-the-box thinking may be necessary for prescribing what the educational system needs to deliver. The existing evidence so far suggests that greater numeracy skills and ability to think abstractly might help.
A cocktail of other skills are also likely to be affected, including cognitive, physical, interpersonal, networking, and problem-solving skills. But an emphasis on any fixed set of skills might be too backward-looking. As technology continues to evolve, the future workforce will also likely need to evolve. This suggests that flexibility will likely continue to be a valued skill—one that may be particularly underprovided by the current schooling system—in particular, to enable lifelong learning and adaptability to a changing labor market.
This discussion suggests that for society to make the best use of new technologies without increasing income inequality, adjustments are necessary. Although the heaviest burden of adjustment is likely to fall on the skills, competencies, and flexibility of workers, the perspective that technology is not a force of nature and can be shaped and adapted by societal decisions suggests that technology can have positive societal impacts if it is designed with certain values in mind.
Can society continue to harvest the benefits of new technologies while at the same time modifying their implementation so that they create more work for those at the margins of society, make better use of existing workers, and yield deeper satisfaction for workers? The history of numerically controlled, or programmed, machine tools is instructive on this point.
In the early days of numerical control, the task of writing programs for machine tools was allocated to programmers, not machinists. The programs were encoded on paper tapes or punch cards and fed to the machine tools. Machinists simply monitored the tools. This led some to argue that machinists would be deskilled because management desired to separate cognition from execution. But with the rapid improvements in the microchip, computers became small enough to embed in the machine tools, and machinists now had access to the computers and the programs.
They began to learn to alter and eventually revise the code that controlled their tools. Noble, , Forces of Production , Transaction Publishers. Indeed, increasing inequality in the United States has a political dimension, a phenomenon that is, of course, not new. Politically powerful individuals and groups have long deployed their power in order to increase their economic rents.
This is seen today in the form of some business groups campaigning for special treatment of their line of business or for the continuation of tax loopholes. Nevertheless, there is a technological element to such rent-seeking, and to inequality as well. Some of the most spectacular salaries on Wall Street are paid by hedge funds that deploy more and more sophisticated computers and algorithms to execute trades or arbitrage information, before their competitors, in a matter of milliseconds.
This is just one facet of the potential use of technology in ways that do not necessarily advance social welfare, but create large benefits for those who deploy and control it. In sum, new technologies can participate in eliminating occupations, creating new occupations, shifting the distribution of tasks among occupations, and altering the geographical division of labor.
Most importantly, these forces interact with technology, and vice versa, to shape ultimate outcomes. Consequently, the ways that any particular technology, or a range of new and rapidly changing technologies, will affect employment and income are not predetermined, but rather a function of choices. The committee ends by again cautioning the reader against believing that all the effects of a technology on employment and inequality are inherent in the nature of the technology itself. How technologies affect work and employment hinge not only on the constraints and affordances.
For instance, Autor, Dorn, and Hanson found that rising Chinese imports caused higher unemployment, lower labor force participation and reduced wages in the local markets that had manufacturing plants with competing products D. Hanson, , The China syndrome: Nevertheless, on the basis of previous research, the committee believes several generalizations are possible. Recent years have yielded significant advances in computing and communication technologies, with profound impacts on society. Technology is transforming the way we work, play, and interact with others.
From these technological capabilities, new industries, organizational forms, and business models are emerging.
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Technological advances can create enormous economic and other benefits, but can also lead to significant changes for workers. IT and automation can change the way work is conducted, by augmenting or replacing workers in specific tasks. This can shift the demand for some types of human labor, eliminating some jobs and creating new ones. Information Technology and the U.
Workforce explores the interactions between technological, economic, and societal trends and identifies possible near-term developments for work. This report emphasizes the need to understand and track these trends and develop strategies to inform, prepare for, and respond to changes in the labor market.
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Looking for other ways to read this? The National Academies Press. Page 55 Share Cite. Page 56 Share Cite. Page 57 Share Cite. Page 58 Share Cite. Page 59 Share Cite. Page 60 Share Cite. Courtesy of Pascual Restrepo. Page 61 Share Cite. Future Prospects for Technology and Employment Predictions that new technologies will make workers largely or almost entirely redundant are as old as technological change itself.
Page 62 Share Cite. Page 63 Share Cite. Page 64 Share Cite. Page 65 Share Cite. Page 66 Share Cite. Page 67 Share Cite. Page 68 Share Cite. Page 69 Share Cite. Page 70 Share Cite. Data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St.
Page 71 Share Cite. Page 72 Share Cite. Reprinted with permission from AAAS. Page 73 Share Cite. Dorn, , The growth of low-skill service jobs and polarization of the US labor market, American Economic Review 5: Page 74 Share Cite. Page 75 Share Cite. Page 76 Share Cite. Future Prospects for Income Distribution An important variable for understanding and shaping future developments is the way education and vocational training institutions might ameliorate the mismatch between new technologies and existing skills.
Page 77 Share Cite. Page 78 Share Cite. SUMMARY The committee ends by again cautioning the reader against believing that all the effects of a technology on employment and inequality are inherent in the nature of the technology itself. Page 79 Share Cite. Productivity is the key driver of increased living standards. In turn, innovation, diffusion, or adoption of technology is the key driver of improvements in productivity. The most important technology of this era is IT. However, the existence of technology alone is not enough to enhance productivity.
Effective use of technology typically requires a shift toward complementary skills profiles in the workforce and adaptation of business processes, organization of work, and institutional processes. These changes can be costly and take decades to play out. While productivity is still growing, it does not appear to be growing as rapidly as it did in the late s and early s. This may reflect a combination of factors, including mismeasurement of some of the benefits, reduced dynamism, the inherent lags often associated with the implementation of new technologies, or secular stagnation.
Technology has transformed employment by automating some tasks and creating the need for new ones, a trend that is likely to continue. As a result, some entire occupations may become obsolete, and new occupations will come into being. Employment will shift from one occupation to another, while some occupations will simply experience changes in their required skill sets. While the share of people working has declined over the past 20 years, shifts within and across occupations will likely be much more economically significant than changes in the overall level of employment. New computerized technologies do appear to have contributed to increased income inequality and are likely to continue to do so as long as they replace skills and tasks historically associated with low-wage or middle-wage occupations.
The jobs that remain tend to require more abstract, cognitive skills, or they provide personal services that are not currently economically valued. Left alone, societal forces will prevail, and women will get left behind. Without the efforts of the women whose writings are included in this book and those of the activists working diligently to put these tools into the hands of women across the region, the pessimistic scenario may become reality.
However, women and women's organizations are becoming more aware of the importance of ICTs for empowering women. In early , the Gates Foundation approved a grant for WomenConnect! The aim of WomenConnect! Through the activism of individuals, groups, and institutions such as the Gates Foundation, women in Africa can and will exploit these technologies to meet their needs and improve the quality of their lives.
African Information Society Initiative. Findings—global networking for change: Appropriate technology for African women. The impacts of modern life and technology on women's economic role: Information as a transformative tool: Mansell, R; Wehn, U. Knowledge societies — information-technology for sustainable development. Using information-technology to strengthen African women's oganisations. Abantu for Development, London, UK. Creating an African women's cyberspace.
Technology, gender, and power in Africa. International gender, science and technology information map. During the past decade, global communications have changed dramatically, as a result of the increased use of information and communication technologies ICTs. It has been widely acknowledged that the new ICTs have the potential to democratize national and international systems to an extent that no political movement has achieved.
For the first time, a clear opportunity is afforded for individuals and populations outside the centre to have a significant influence and to ensure that their ideas and perspectives are taken into account by decision-makers in their own countries and indeed that their views become part of world thinking. For the first time, Africans living in remote areas can bring their perspectives, viewpoints, and experience to the global marketplace of ideas and knowledge.
The most prominent and revolutionary feature of ICTs is their ability to eliminate the barriers of time and space, which have effectively silenced millions of people. However, if Africans are to become fully integrated into the global communication revolution, they require a basic level of technical knowledge and, even more dauntingly, an initial financial investment in the new technologies. At the national level, there is the need to create and maintain an adequate telecommunications infrastructure, and at the community or personal level, there is the need to invest in the purchase and maintenance of personal computers.
ICTs depend on good telephone connections, and this continues to be an elusive goal in many African countries. The status of the telecommunications sector in Africa is examined in this chapter, which then focuses on the need to ensure that social issues in general and gender issues in particular are taken into.
The views expressed in this chapter are my own and not necessarily those of the International Development Research Centre. It is argued that ICTs have the potential to improve or make an impact on the lives of African women but that it is not enough for women simply to be passive participants in the development and wide dissemination of these technologies in Africa. Women in Africa must also be decision-makers and actors in the process of using the new ICTs to accelerate development.
This chapter suggests that men's and women's attitudes, needs, and perspectives on ICTs are likely to differ and that it is important to take account of the specific needs of women. A reconceptualization of the use of ICTs as tools for African development may therefore be necessary, along with a reorganization of existing knowledge and information, and this implies a potential new role for African universities and research institutions.
Finally, this chapter discusses a number of relevant activities already under way in various parts of subSanaran Africa SSA. Even while the economies of many countries have grown Africa has become increasingly marginalized in the s. For the most part, the continent has lagged behind in the process of economic globalization that has swept up other regions of the world, including the so-called emerging regions, such as Latin America and parts of Asia.
To a significant extent, this has been due to Africa's poor infrastructure, including its telecommunications infrastructure, and its lower availability of skilled labour. The continent's comparative advantage in labour costs, which might have been a substantial attraction to international investors in earlier decades, has become less significant with the emergence of the new ICTs. This is true for at least three reasons. First, the effective use of ICTs depends on the availability of skilled labour. Second, ICTs have eliminated the need for some types of labour-intensive work.
Third, ICTs have directly contributed to job fragmentation, whereby large portions of work can be completed in different parts of the world. The newly industrialized countries of Asia were quick to recognize and take advantage of globalization, and they offered attractive opportunities to foreign investors, not the least of which were their excellent infrastructure and educated labour force. Also, production processes have become fragmented because information can be quickly transferred from one location to another.
For example, many American firms now contract out routine data-processing work to countries like India or Barbados, which have advanced telecommunications infrastructures and highly skilled labour but much lower operating costs. Some have denounced these processes of globalization as another stage of imperialism. However, if globalization is interpreted as another stage of imperialism, it is even more pernicious than its predecessors, as it co-opts large numbers of people living in developing countries and makes distinctions among individuals based on education, skills, and access to ICTs, rather than on the simple centre-periphery or other geographical paradigms of an earlier age.
Globalization has created new outsiders in the metropole, just as it has created new insiders in the periphery. Nonetheless, access to ICTs offers new economic and social opportunities. At the end of the 20th century, Africa faces the challenge of using these opportunities constructively, rather than remaining passive and allowing ICTs to become another instrument of foreign domination. In a speech at Arlington, Virginia, in September , he noted that "the information economy is not an economy of dependency.
It is a democratizing economy in which each one of us is free to contribute his or her talents and be compensated for it in an open global bazaar" Chasia Africa has tried to respond to the new opportunities. But not surprisingly, the level and type of response have been uneven. In —97, twelve African countries established separate telecommunications regulatory bodies. African countries with more liberal telecommunications policies have become continental leaders in the ICT sector.
In South Africa alone, the number of Internet users is estimated at more than , and the country has a teledensity of 10 lines per people, about 20 times higher than that of the rest of SSA. However, major disparities remain along racial and urban-rural lines. Such large-scale investment is beyond the capacity of most African governments, so a growing number of countries are opening up the telecommunications sector to private investors.
By mid, 17 African incumbent operators had full or partial private ownership, some of it foreign. Indeed, according to ITU, between and , telecommunications privatization injected nearly 2 billion USD into African economies. Nonetheless, ITU research suggests that even after a country reaches a teledensity of 1 line per people, it can take 20—50 years to reach a density of 50 lines per people, which reflects high telecommunications development. Moreover, it is quite likely that a disproportionate number of African users are foreigners based in Africa or Africans working in donor agencies, embassies, or international nongovernmental organizations NGOs.
Table 1 illustrates the major disparities in Internet use in Africa. Despite these disparities, Internet use is without doubt growing rapidly. Current estimates of the number of users in Africa vary from to more than 1 million Jensen By mid, it was estimated that in Kenya about 25 people had Internet access, and the cost of computers had fallen to about USD, owing both to reductions in import duty and to increased competition among suppliers.
However, poor telephone connections have continued to be a significant deterrent to new Internet subscribers, as has the high cost of local calls in some countries Jensen Moreover, African business has in general been slow to recognize the potential of the Internet. Electronic commerce is only beginning on the continent, despite the obvious potential in industries such as tourism.
Finally, although no gender-disaggregated statistics on Internet users in Africa are available, it seems likely that more men than women are users, simply because in Africa men generally have greater access to technology. A long-term perspective is needed, focused on achieving clear economic and development goals. Currently, entirely uncoordinated donor efforts are responsible for much of the information-technology introduced in African countries James With the notable exception of South Africa, most African countries have given little attention to formulating ICT policies to provide overall structure to the development and growth of the telecommunications sector.
Such policies are desirable to establish a well-coordinated development pattern with specific goals, take advantage of opportunities, and optimize investments from governments, donors, and the private-sector. However, if women are to participate fully in all aspects of ICT development, then ICT policies must include a gender dimension.
Previous African experience in a wide range of sectors from agriculture, to microenterprise, to education, etc. Most commonly, when policymakers have considered gender issues, it has been only after initial policies have proven ineffective. This new area of policy research therefore provides an opportunity for policymakers to integrate gender concerns into policy-making from the very beginning and "get it right. Few African countries have articulated policies on the overall development of the ICT sector, although many have elaborated policies specifically to reform the telecommunications sector.
Although the countries of Africa are liberalizing their economies, most of the continent's telecommunications networks are still under the control of national governments, with the result that the cost of telephone calls, especially international calls, is kept high and access to telephones is severely restricted. Increased competition, which is starting to occur in countries such as Senegal and Uganda, is leading to a reduction in prices, greater availability of lines, and, in consequence, increased connectivity, not only in urban centres but also in rural districts. However, in mid, the Ugandan government awarded a second network-operator licence to a consortium of private investors, headed by South African-based Mobile Telecommunication Network MTN , for a bid of 5.
The MTN-Uganda consortium is expected to install 60 land lines, in addition to cellular lines, thus providing some relief from the current inaccessibility of telephone services outside Kampala. The immediate effect of the entry of the second network operator was a steep reduction in the cost of cellular telephones. Similarly, Tanzania is currently drafting a new policy to guide the development of the sector into the next century.
The policy is expected to reaffirm Tanzania's commitment to competition and private-sector participation and mandate the privatization of the state-owned national operator. The cellular subsector has already been open to competition for some time. In many African countries, the low-income subscriber base and difficult terrain often make land-line networks an unattractive option, and for this reason cellular services are seen as more feasible, often attracting private-sector investment.
However, although most of the cellular networks can be used to access the Internet, this often involves a very high cost, which still makes it an unattractive option Jensen Although the telecommunications policies adopted by many African governments are typically intended to promote the spread of ICTs to less advantaged parts of a country, they make no distinctions between the attitudes and needs of male and female users.
In fact, it is assumed that such policies will provide equal benefits to all. However, experience has shown that the so-called gender-neutral policies tend to favour men, as men are more likely to have the income needed to purchase telephones or telephone services, and they are more likely to have slightly higher levels of education, which predisposes them to trying new technologies.
For this reason, highly targeted efforts are needed to involve women and thereby ensure that their needs are integrated into ICT policies. Women themselves must become involved in ICT policy formulation. The starting point for encouraging women to participate in ICT policy-making is to create awareness in them of the importance of the information revolution and to help them to see the opportunities it holds for women. Women must understand their own information needs and develop sufficient technical knowledge to be credible advocates of their views in policy debates Hafkin The new ICTs can marginalize both men and women in Africa.
However, women are likely to be slower in adopting the new technologies, unless strategies are developed to deliberately involve women. As will be argued below, these strategies should focus on how to integrate women into ongoing processes while exploring and analyzing the extent to which these processes meet the needs of African women and take account of their perspectives. Traditionally, the tendency has been to view new technologies introduced into the global marketplace as gender neutral, having equal potential to be used by either men or women.
Engineers in technology development gave no consideration to the symbolic value of technology or, perhaps more important, the symbolic value of the use of technology.
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As is already well documented, fewer women than men in Africa, as elsewhere, specialize in the sciences or engineering Rathgeber Moreover, if women seem to be "fearful" of technology or reluctant to experiment with new technologies, then this is usually interpreted as a "female problem," rather than as a reflection of the inappropriate design of the technologies or the aura of male dominance surrounding their use, or both. Thus, if women have not been active participants in the development and use of new technologies, then it is assumed this has been a result of 1 their own choice or 2 the fact that they have been slow to recognize the importance of a particular new technology.
Seldom does anyone consider that women may take less interest in new technologies out of a sense of pragmatism, that is, out of their need to deal with a multitude of tasks, meet a variety of demands, and play diverse roles with limited time. In other words, whether or not some women have a "fear" of technology, they have a pressing need to attend to many diverse duties and have little time to experiment with new technologies simply out of a sense of interest.
To a large extent, this traditional pattern of male and female attitudes toward technologies is replicating itself in the development of the new ICTs. Few if any statistics are available on the involvement of women in this sector, but preliminary observations indicate that women are greatly underrepresented.
For Europe and North America, some anecdotal evidence indicates that women who do involve themselves in information technologies tend to bring with them interests and expectations different from those of their male colleagues. For example, early research has shown that women and girls in information-technology and engineering tend to be more interested in the social applications of technologies Keller Similarly, research in the United States suggested that girls are less likely to be interested in violent computer games, which are often very popular with boys.
However, developing software for children has become a substantial industry in North America, with the result that a wide range of computer games are now available, including some designed specifically for girls. Consequently, even preschoolers are achieving a certain degree of computer literacy. In Africa, too, interest is growing in the potential that ICTs offer women. The group's mandate was to gather field information on the conference themes, which led to numerous lively and lengthy discussions of the potential of ICTs to advance African women's interests.
More than half of the group came from South Africa, Kenya, and Uganda. Only one-fifth came from francophone Africa, and half of the francophone group came from Senegal AWG b. Perhaps not surprisingly, more of the members were Africans living outside Africa, especially in the United States. The working group focused on the problem of persuading more African women to establish Internet connections.
It also noted that the Internet serves as an effective means for Africans living outside the continent to be immediately in touch with those still in Africa. As such, it points the way to the formation of similar working groups to connect African women living in different parts of the continent to discuss issues of common concern, ranging from microenterprise to peace and conflict resolution. However, most of the women with access to e-mail and the World Wide Web still tend to be members of the urban elite.
Although ICTs evidently can play an important role in African development, it must be emphasized that they are simply tools, means to an end. Provision of telephone services to rural areas is a starting point in making use of these tools and one that has been widely recognized as being of central importance. The benefits of wider telephone service include employment generation and improvements in social services and farming practices. Most importantly, ICTs such as telephones can help to break down the isolation of individuals living in remote rural areas. Although it will take some time for all of these benefits to accrue, it is clear that the provision of telephone access in the rural areas will help to break down some of the rural-urban inequities persisting in much of Africa.
It is noteworthy, too, that this list of benefits is very practical in orientation, focusing on improved income opportunities and provision of necessary health and educational information. The services identified by USAID can in most cases be provided by telecentres situated in widely accessible central areas.
Telecentres are already established in many African countries. Setting up a telecentre basically involves installing one or more telephone lines in a single location and providing basic assistance for placing calls. Eventually such telecentres may expand their services to include access to fax machines, photocopying, e-mail, the web, and other relevant ICTs. Telecentres can provide services to rural populations, but if private individuals or groups establish them, they can also become sources of income.
In the final analysis, however, ICTs will not have a major impact in rural areas unless they meet people's information needs. This will involve developing appropriate software to provide gender-sensitive, relevant information, sometimes in forms the nonliterate can access. Information for audiences with limited or no educational backgrounds has to be packaged in a meaningful format.
But even for literate consumers, especially women, time constraints are important factors. Thus, producers of information would have to ensure that their knowledge packages meet the needs of their consumers, with clear and direct content. The task of producing such packages would provide significant opportunities for both the public and the private-sectors.
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Finally, it should be pointed out that there is far from universal agreement that ICTs have an immediate role to play in African development. For example, one African communication expert Obijiofor argued that more advanced ICTs are inappropriate in Africa at this stage, that they can have little impact in rural communities, and that the telephone itself is the most useful instrument for African communications because it builds on the oral traditions of all indigenous societies. Similarly, many African politicians, senior civil servants, and intellectuals have argued that the continent's primary concern should be to resolve the lingering traditional problems of development, including poverty, illiteracy, and inadequate health services, before diverting scarce resources to the ICT sector.
Although such views have merit, they are based on a linear approach of human development, in which advancement is seen as a progressive, step-by-step process. From another perspective, it seems timely to build on the emerging opportunities offered by the new ICTs because once the infrastructure is in place, they would provide the considerable advantage of enabling people to move information and knowledge quickly and cheaply to very remote parts of the continent.
To some extent this is already being done. For example, Kenyan newspapers regularly feature articles about girls' participation in science. However, they are more common in the biological and biophysical sciences, such as medicine and food technology, than in engineering, electronics, or information science.
This situation is not unique to Africa. However, with the recognition of the growing importance of information-technology during the s, secondary and even primary schools in the industrialized countries have increasingly exposed students to computers, and information-technology has become part of the curriculum. In Africa, students' access to computers is confined to only a few elite private schools, usually in or near urban centres. Girls and boys tend to be equally disadvantaged, although awareness of the importance of information-technology and computer skills is growing in many schools and these schools are making efforts to provide some basic equipment for their students.
The World Bank has been an active partner in such efforts in Uganda, establishing linkages between a number of Ugandan and US schools through its World Links for Development project. These initiatives allow less well-endowed schools to benefit from some of the knowledge resources of the more prosperous schools in the same country. African educational systems will have to change at all levels to ensure the needed skills base for a broader use of computers and information technologies in all aspects of life. Both men and women will need to acquire various new skills in participatory networking, information-sharing, and facilitating the design, implementation, and maintenance of new communication networks to successfully integrate ICTs into African societies.
African users of ICTs will require people with technical skills in computer installation, user training and maintenance, and management of sophisticated communication networks and information services and applications Crede and Mansell Acquisition of any of these skills rests on an openness to new ideas and new ways of working. Lifelong learning will be a demand of the ICT age. Beyond simple questions of curriculum reform, another more complex set of issues should also be addressed. These issues relate to the conceptualization of knowledge.
Feminist philosophers of science have observed that female cognitive structures differ from those of men. This has implications for women's attitudes and approaches to the use of ICTs. For example, Sherry Turkle observed that "the present social construction of programming styles and computer culture encourages one particular style of thinking which is not only repressive for many women, but restricts the potential of computers" Turkle, quoted in Kirkup , p.
As well, Kirkup , p. This suggests that women may deliberately avoid the use of ICTs because the accepted structure of interaction with the technologies goes against their preferred way of dealing with problems and people. If that is the case, then there may be an argument for reconceptualizing the ways we use ICTs or, at the very least, for ensuring that knowledge transferred through ICTs is packaged to conform to female users' preferred learning styles. In Africa, this may mean combining information transferred through ICTs with more traditional ways of imparting knowledge.
For example, an IDRC-supported project undertaken with the International Center for Agroforestry Research, in Nairobi, is developing a system to electronically send information on soil conservation and good farming practices to a community centre equipped with a computer and e-mail facilities in Kabale, Uganda. When the project is fully functional, this technical information will be downloaded and shared with local women's groups, which have already started to "humanize" such scientific information by creating stories and performing dramas to convey not only this information but also commentary on social issues of importance to the community, such as male drunkenness, violence against women, and the importance of keeping children in school.
In this way, ICTs are used to disseminate scientific knowledge, but, on arrival at the site, that knowledge is made more interesting and relevant to rural women and men. An in-depth discussion of the nature of knowledge and knowledge production is beyond the scope of this chapter, but at least two important factors are relevant to ICTs.
The first is that traditional modes of library-based research are fast becoming obsolete and that African institutions must change their approaches to research and knowledge production or risk being completely bypassed in the global marketplace of knowledge and ideas. The second is that the explosion of knowledge generation and the new capacity to immediately move information and ideas around the world have brought on a new world information order.
Emerging scientific knowledge and ideas no longer have to go through the traditional channels: The hegemony of knowledge — tight control by specialists — is being severely challenged. This has both positive and negative connotations. On the one hand, it may lead to a democratization of knowledge and make it possible for ideas and contributions from outsiders to be heard and taken seriously.
On the other hand, it has already led to an explosion and surfeit of information, with the resulting "information fatigue. Perhaps the most difficult task facing knowledge users today is to meaningfully sort out and systematize knowledge and information. ICTs can help individuals and groups gain information on how to improve some aspects of their lives. However, that information should satisfy the following criteria: These may appear to be self-evident criteria, but in fact they probably pose the most important obstacles to the wider adoption of ICTs in Africa.
The opportunity costs of the investment in a computer for an individual or even a group are often too high to make it a worthwhile endeavour if it offers no obvious and immediate payoff in terms of beneficial information. The organization and the systematization of useful development-related information for rural Africa are tasks for African universities and research institutions familiar with local conditions and languages.
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However, African universities have not readily accepted this challenge. They still tend to operate on the models of research established in the late colonial and early postcolonial eras, when most of the universities were founded. Most African universities are not fully computerized. Efforts have been made to introduce computers into university classrooms and libraries, but the high capital and maintenance costs have made it difficult for struggling institutions to systematically computerize.
Many have depended on donors to provide computers and connectivity. Unfortunately, most African universities and research institutions still tend to use computers as sophisticated typewriters and have failed to establish linkages with colleagues internationally or access wider information bases. The reason for this may be, in many cases, that users do not have extensive contacts outside their country or institution to motivate them to use the Internet or e-mail.
Nonetheless, a few institutions were quick to recognize the potential of ICTs. For example, the medical library at the University of Zimbabwe has been computerized since the s. Consequently, its students have had access to global bibliographic resources. Despite the slow move toward computerization and connectivity in African universities, ICTs probably offer them their best opportunity to minimize and even overcome the disadvantages they have suffered over the past 20 years as a result of declining budgets and the consequent inability to develop library collections.
Also, information technologies can enable African universities to develop outreach services in rural areas, through distance-learning programs. This is done in Europe and North America. For example, the Open University in the United Kingdom now offers 14 online courses, and East Tennessee State University is pioneering an innovative program with the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the United States whereby students have remote access to electron microscopes.
Students post samples to the laboratory and then operate the microscopes directly from a keyboard Guardian Weekly Because the cost of computers is still far beyond the means of the average African citizen, various modes of social organization will have to be developed to provide people in rural areas with access to such innovative modes of instruction. Potentially, this might involve a more extensive development of community-based learning centres or telecentres, or both, in rural areas, which is already occurring at a rapid rate in countries like Senegal.
Many international organizations actively promote the use of computers and ICTs in Africa. To a considerable extent, their initiatives have tended to focus on the needs of urban users and to view rural women and men as secondary users. This is likely to change in the near future, because of the current expansion of telecommunications infrastructure occurring over most of Africa. As a result of this expansion, women and men in even remote areas will have access to ICTs, and as the market expands more private operators are likely to become active.
Notwithstanding the urban bias, a number of important activities are under way the following provides a selected overview, rather than an exhaustive listing. The basic objective of AISI is to end Africa's information and technology gap by bringing the continent into the information age. The main areas for implementing AISI are policy awareness, national ICT infrastructure planning, connectivity, training and capacity-building, democratized access to the information society, sector applications, and development-information infrastructure.
Of these, the greatest progress has been made in policy awareness: Ten countries have started to develop national policies. Momentum is also great in the area of democratizing access to the information society, and to respond to this issue the telecentre movement has taken on great momentum. ECA's efforts in democratization of access to ICTs have concentrated on encouraging the full participation of women in the use of these technologies.
IDRC has been promoting information systems in Africa since the early s. Until the mids, its support was aimed primarily at the establishment of computerized information bases and resources intended primarily for research at African higher-education institutions or government ministries. Since the mids IDRC's efforts have intensified. In its first phase, Acacia has targeted four African countries: Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda.
Acacia has made efforts to introduce a comprehensive strategy in each country to develop policy, infrastructure, human-resources, and content. The initiative takes a special interest in working with women and marginalized members of communities. Acacia is implemented in Uganda through the National Council of Science and Technology, which has established an overall coordinating secretariat and a number of working groups that focus on the various components of the strategy. This meeting brought together representatives from different strata of society and regions of the country.
The strategy was later introduced and discussed in communities in five regions of Uganda. In each case, community members indicated their information needs and priorities. Not surprisingly, these varied somewhat, in accordance with the main income-generating activities of the region. By the end of , two telecentres had been established. Interestingly enough, early evidence, not only in Uganda, but also in other Acacia focus countries, shows that the communities often believe that the telecentres should have female managers.
Many other donors have been active in development-information projects. The United States has undertaken a number of important activities, including the 15 million USD, USAID-funded Leland Initiative, which is designed to strengthen Internet connectivity in 20 African countries, in return for agreements to liberalize the market to third-party Internet service providers Jensen The Leland Initiative also aims to enable USAID projects to communicate electronically with one another and share development-related information.
USAID is also supporting AfricaLink, which provides connectivity for the agriculture, research, and naturalresources management community in Africa. POWERNET will enable them to share information and lessons learned in their efforts to increase the participation of women in political processes and economic development. However, to date, USAID has done little to enhance the use of the Internet in rural communities or among the poor in Africa, and these remain areas for further development.
Women'sNet provides training and capacity-building and has also developed a website Women'sNet , with content that is useful and relevant to South African women. Its first topics of concentration were the prevention of violence against women in South Africa and the region of the Southern African Development Community and women in small, medium-sized, and microenterprises.
In Uganda, the Forum for Women in Democracy is helping female parliamentarians gain access to the Internet to gather information relevant to performing their roles in the legislative process, with a special focus on legislation affecting women at the community level. Similarly, in Benin and Cameroon, three pilot centres have been set up to provide legal and extension information and education services aimed at improving women's legal and social equality ECA Despite all these activities, much remains to be done to put African women on the information superhighway.
Despite all the energy going into establishing connectivity and promoting ICTs in Africa, these findings indicate that in reality much remains to be done to sensitize and train women, provide hardware, and develop appropriate content. Nonetheless, as has been shown, ICTs offer new opportunities for African women to improve their daily lives through greater access to useful, practical information on income-generating activities, agricultural-production methods, health, the organization of women's groups, etc. ICTs also give women a chance to share their ideas, insights, and experiences among themselves and with others.
As such, if the ICT sector is developed appropriately in Africa, the benefits of the information revolution will help to ease the burden on African women. Report on outreach efforts by an African NGO. Developing an African information infrastructure: International Telecommunication Union, Geneva, Switzerland. Summary notes and guide questions for working group discussions: African women and the information age: Making information and communications policies relevant to women.
Report on working group 3. An overview of Internet connectivity in Africa. The social construction of computers: Drumbeat of change pulses across African telecom lines. Business Times, Johannesburg, South Africa. Future of communication in Africa's development. Futures, 30 2—3 , — Education and career opportunities for women in science, technology and engineering. Providing telecommunications services to rural and underserved areas. African policymakers face many economic, social, and political challenges as they seek to improve material living standards and quality of life in Africa and undertake their task of transforming the continent in a complex, rapidly changing, and uncertain environment.
Unfortunately, decision-makers have few directly comparable examples to assist them in developing ICT policies supportive of sustainable development.
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The challenge of harnessing ICTs for development is difficult and encompasses many issues. ICTs do not offer a panacea for social and economic development. There are risks of unemployment and social and economic dislocation, and these may lead policy makers to give lower priority to the need to create effective national ICT strategies. However, on the basis of the evidence, it is apparent that the risks of failing to participate in the ICT revolution are enormous.
Failure to give priority to ICT strategies that enable developing countries and countries in transition both to develop their national infrastructures and to join the GII [global information infrastructure] will exacerbate the gap between rich and poor. There is a growing need to evaluate the social and economic impacts of ICTs and to create opportunities for capacity-building that will ensure their beneficial use and absorption within national economies and civil society.
In this influential report, UNCSTD also acknowledged that least-developed countries in Africa and other regions will require special treatment if they are to gain access to the financial resources, physical infrastructure, and knowledge base required to successfully harness ICTs for development. This chapter is concerned with strategies to secure the potential economic benefits of ICTs for all groups in society.
As I will show, without a gender perspective the potential benefits of ICTs may bypass girls and women. The economic benefits for girls and women in terms of enhanced income-generation opportunities, employment, and improved quality of life are tremendous, but because technologies are not gender neutral, I will also be concerned with advocating ICT strategies to reduce and manage the potential for ICTs to create economic and social exclusion and reinforce existing social disparities.
In other parts of the world this dual character of ICTs — their ability to simultaneously produce economic benefits and social dislocation — is coming under increasing scrutiny from academics and other critical thinkers, and their insights are beginning to influence the policy debate. Ventura presented a very clear argument that wealthy countries must act, in partnership with the developing world, to prevent the global information society from causing social dislocations. Mitter presented the findings from that research program.
HLEG's analyses have influenced policy-making at the European, national, and regional levels. The central purpose of this chapter is to outline strategies to introduce a gender dimension into national ICT policies. This has been a missing element of ICT policy formulation and implementation to date. The analysis will show that, on efficiency and equity grounds, such gender considerations are vitally important.
ICT policy-making is no different from other important areas of social and economic development, such as economic justice, human rights, and access to education. It also needs to be considered in its gender dimensions. As many of the other chapters in this volume confirm, the vast majority of African women live in rural settings, endure dire levels of poverty, and face cultural and legal barriers to exercising and enjoying their human rights.
Annex 1 of this chapter is from World Bank It provides a concise statement of the strategic objectives for gender and development in Africa. Although a small proportion of African women enjoy fairly high levels of income and have access to education, training, and other societal resources, the desired positive impact of ICTs will not be realized for women if access to the transformative role of these technologies is restricted to this small, privileged group.
All of Africa's women and men should have the opportunity to benefit from ICTs. Ensuring equitable treatment for men and women will require concerted effort and will exert considerable demands on the institutional capacity of Africa's policymakers. The analysis and recommendations presented here are intended to assist policymakers who are willing and committed to reorienting ICT policy to take account of the needs, aspirations, and constraints of both men and women in African societies.
The ICT sector is a heterogeneous collection of industry and service activities, including information-technology equipment and services, telecommunications equipment and services, media and broadcast, Internet service providers ISPs , libraries, commercial information providers, network-based information services, and related specialized professional services. Figure 1 shows the segments making up the composite ICT sector.
As a direct consequence of the sprawling nature of ICTs or perhaps as a result of the difficulty one encounters in defining the ICT sector with any precision, policy-making in this sector is very diffuse. The main policy-making actors include government ministries — which are usually responsible for setting overall policy objectives and direction for other agencies — and independent regulatory bodies, which implement policy directives and are responsible for operational management of the regulatory system.
In wealthy countries, an array of technical and research organizations assist and advise these decision-making and implementation agencies. In addition to organizations operating at the national level, many regional and international organizations are involved in ICT policy-making. International organizations, such as the International Telecommunication Union ITU , the World Trade Organization WTO , and other agencies within the United Nations system formulate policy recommendations and set standards for international best practice.
Policymakers are also influenced by private industry, nongovernmental organizations NGOs , trade associations, professional bodies, and the intellectual community. The regularity, format, and nature of the consultation between policymakers and these groups of stakeholders vary considerably across countries.
Segments of the ICT industry and technology system. Mansell and Wehn This chapter recommends an active interventionist vision for ICT policymaking in Africa. Achieving this objective will not be without problems, but without such a vision there is no hope of realizing the benefits of ICTs.
Action is required at various levels of society to ensure that the potential benefits of these technologies are available to African women as well as men and that girls and women do not suffer dislocations as a result of this fundamental shift in organizational and production technologies. The analysis contained in this chapter and in its supporting annexes provides justification and possible direction for policy intervention.
The next section maps out the current state of national ICT policy-making in Africa and provides a brief historical review of the landmarks in this policymaking. It more closely examines the process of ICT policy-making in four countries — Mozambique, Senegal, South Africa, and Uganda — providing details of the policy-making apparatus, assessing the challenges facing policymakers, and reviewing their successes in each of these countries. This is particularly important for making an up-to-date assessment of African policymakers' success in accounting for social variables and, in particular, gender considerations in their ICT policies and programs.
The third section discusses in detail how gender considerations can be taken into account in national ICT policies and sets out clear arguments in support of taking these actions. Finally, the concluding section summarizes the recommendations and actions required for various sets of actors involved in formulating and implementing ICT policies.
This section sets out a simple framework for understanding ICT policy, reviews the status of national policy formulation and implementation in the ICT sector in an international context, and, finally, presents some empirical findings on how African nations are formulating policy for the ICT sector. At the outset, it is important to note that only fairly recently have efforts been made to define the boundaries of the ICT sector, measure its contribution to national economic output, understand precisely the interaction between this sector and other social and economic activities, and design its policy instruments.
Policy intervention in the ICT sector is very much a work in progress. Conceptual frameworks, systems of data collection, policy tools, indicator construction, and evaluation methodologies are all very rudimentary. As a result, in developed and developing countries alike, real change in the structure and functioning of the ICT sector outpaces policy intervention, and therefore the environment for long-term and day-to-day policy decisions is uncertain, rapidly changing, and ever more complex. Some of the basic concepts and terms used in the rest of the analysis are defined in the following subsection.
A national ICT policy is an integrated set of decisions, guidelines, laws, regulations, and other mechanisms geared to directing and shaping the production, acquisition, and use of ICTs. Because the ICT sector is heterogeneous, extending beyond traditional classifications of industrial or services sectors and because production and diffusion of ICTs are of equal importance, national policies in the ICT sector intersect with a number of other areas of policy-making — technology, media, industrial, and telecommunications policy.
Figure 2 shows these areas of intersection among the various policy spheres. Individual countries design their ICT policies according to prevailing objectives, values, and cultural practice. Figure 3 presents a schematic of the various actors involved in ICT policy-making. The key elements of policy-making in the ICT sector are the context, or the environmental factors, and policy objectives, tools, and outcomes. As discussed in the introductory section, the lead actors in this system are policy-makers, whose actions directly and indirectly influence other agents in the system — producers and users of ICTs.
These elements, working together, constitute the system of policy intervention. This subsection reviews the context for ICT policy formulation in the wealthiest countries and describes the policy tools they use. The material in this section provides important background for the more detailed discussion of African ICT policy initiatives, not only because this provides a contrast but also because international approaches influence the definition and implementation of policies in Africa.
The environment for policy decisions is changing dramatically. For example, in the last two decades, the economic structure of the world's wealthiest countries has been significantly restructured. In the member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development OECD , the services sectors have overtaken the industrial and agricultural sectors as the main source of national income.
Major changes have also occurred at the firm level: In addition to the changes within individual countries and companies, a restructuring has occurred in the international economic system.