contributed articles

Doi: 10.1145/1435417.1435433

Information systems enable rural development by increasing the accountability of nongovernmental organizations.

By taPan s. PaRiKh
Engineering
Rural
Development

ecoNoMIStS aNd ecoLogIStS

agree that the foremost
challenge facing the world today is how to raise
international standards of living while reducing
humanity’s environmental footprint. Also generally
recognized is that the response must be global,
including all human societies, cultures, and vocations.
Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in
the Millennium Development Goals ( www.un.org/
millenniumgoals/), a mission statement for the world
endorsed in 2000 by the 192 member states of the
United Nations.

Access to information and communications technologies (ICTs) plays an increasingly important role in creating efficient markets and sustainable economic relationships. This is true not only for businesses but for initiatives in conservation, poverty reduction, and global health as well. To succeed, these efforts must be able to manage, understand, and react to globally distributed sources of information. since the 1950s, advances in computing and other ICTs

have revolutionized the way we create and share information, spurring an empirical revolution in fields as diverse and important as medicine, astronomy, biochemistry, economics, and ecology.

Understanding and responding to the global challenge of development must draw upon the same empirical and scientific methods. Failure to do so dooms us to repeat the same mistakes over and over. Computing technologies are essential for understanding the problems we face, as well as for planning, executing, and evaluating potential solutions. However, this process cannot be limited to the technical, social, and economic elite. To address historical disparities, it is essential that the poorest and least developed communities also contribute to, and benefit from, the global pool of knowledge.

Many rural ICT projects in developing countries have focused on individuals as the direct beneficiaries of technology. This includes efforts to improve rural education (such as the One Laptop Per Child project, laptop. org) and broader efforts to enable rural service delivery (such as the global movement to establish PC-based tele-centers, or kiosks, www.telecentre. org). The early days of computing in the developed world emphasized business automation. Similarly, in rural areas of the developing world, one major initial benefit of ICTs will be the improvement, performance, and transparency of local institutions.

Nongovernmental organizations and community-based organizations, or NGOs and CBOs, can serve as an institutional basis for ICT adoption and use in the rural developing world. Due to their local knowledge and relationships, they are a key source of innovation, envisioning, implementing, and validating new models for rural

one farm inspector teaches another how to use Digital ics in a village outside of Barillas, Guatemala, during an early field visit, spring 2006. (Photo by Ronak Parikh, now a student at columbia university, then an intern at the university of Washington.)