EMPOWERMENT TECHNOLOGIES / QUARTER 2 – MODULE 6 : ICT PLATFORM FOR CHANGE
LESSON 6 ( ICT PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION )
WHAT I CAN DO ( ACTIVITY 1 – CREATE A ICT PROJECT .USING wix.com SITE ,CREATE AND DEVELOP AN ICT PROJECT FOR SOCIAL CHANGE.)
FACILITATE POOR FILIPINO PEOPLE’ S ACCESS TO PUBLIC SERVICES WITH THE USE OF ICT
INTRODUCTION
Growth in the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) sphere is not confined
to the corporations, governments, and individuals of the industrialized countries who
already participate in something approximating to the vision of an information and
knowledge society. There is also a substantial movement to spread the benefits of ICT to
poor and marginalized communities, both in the industrialized countries of the North, and
in the less developed countries of the South. This might on the face of it seem an
unrealistic enterprise. How can (comparatively) expensive and complex technology
benefit those whose access to resources and, more particularly, public services, is already
so slight as to be almost nonexistent? How can technology benefit those whose education
and skills contain little that seems appropriate to the use of even the most basic of
devices? It was answers to such questions that were the subject matter of a small group of
linked projects managed by OneWorld South Asia (OWSA),
Department for International Development (DFID) 2004-5 in their Knowledge and
Research (KaR) Programme, entitled ‘Improving Transparency, Quality and
Effectiveness of Pro-Poor Public Services using ICTs’. (OneWorld South Asia, 2006)
This article outlines the group of projects (carried out in India by OWSA and by the
national chapters of Transparency International in Croatia, Nigeria and Philippines),
concentrating in more detail on the Indian project.
The projects can be categorized as falling into the ICT in development movement or
forming part of the widespread introduction of e-governance into countries certainly not
confined to those of the industrialized North. (Garai and Shadrach, 2006) Although the
literature is particularly rich in relation to Philippines, the movement can also be identified in
Philippines (Luzon Visayas Mindanao , 2005) and Latin America (Galperin and Bar,
2006). In Philippines the movement currently focuses on the ambitious Mission 2007 project,
which sets the shortest possible timetable to ensure ICT access for all of Philippines tens of thousands of villages.
SOCIAL CONTEXT
The problems of the poorest communities in developing countries, and in pockets of
deprivation in industrialized countries, are many. The observations and experience of the
researchers involved in the projects reported here match and complement those set out in
a major recent report by UN-HABITAT (2003) or in books
or from Philippines specifically by to the cite
only a selection. Typically only a few residents in poor communities will have a secure
source of income. The income that can be obtained from labouring, domestic service,
piecework, petty trading, scavenging, begging, prostitution and other means are generally
not adequate to cover what would be considered the minimum expense of keeping family
members properly housed, fed, and healthy. Mortality rates, including child mortality,
are consequently high, and life expectancy is low. Opportunities for education are limited
and people’s prospects for improving the standard of their lives can seem almost totally
absent. Members of a slum community may rent decaying properties, or occupy land that
they do not own and do not have permission to occupy. Housing in the very poorest
communities is initially improvised from such pieces of wood, plastic, cloth and metal
that can be obtained, but over time residents often succeed in constructing much more
solid dwellings using conventional building materials. Landlords claim ownership of
parts, or all, of slum areas, often with doubtful title themselves. The rent they charge,
although small by other standards, is a substantial burden on the inadequate incomes of
tenants. Such slum landlords are notoriously unaccountable and exploitive.
Overcrowding, dirt, hunger, and disease are everyday experience of the members of poor
communities. Standards of family care and community spirit can rapidly deteriorate
under such circumstances.
National and local government does usually recognize, at least in formal terms, that there
is a responsibility to provide facilities and services for the people of such areas. However,
services – water supply, sewage disposal, electrical connection and roads – are likely to
be absent or completely inadequate. Policing is usually minimal and oppressive rather
than protective of local residents. Facilities such as clinics and schools, if they are
provided, are likely to be insufficient for the needs of the community in terms of both
their number and quality. Where facilities and services do exist, residents in poor
communities are likely to be disadvantaged because they lack the necessary documents to
register for benefits and services. Migrants from other countries and rural people seeking work from the cities,refugees and other fugitives are disproportionately represented among the population of these areas. In those countries with some form of democratic
system there is a certain scope for residents to mobilize and use their electoral
opportunities to demand improvements, but this generally results in promises rather than
substantial gains.
Inefficiency of services, unaccountability of officials, apathy, lack of information, and
corruption, dominate the service provision landscape. The poor get the worst services,
whilst at the same time carrying an extra, unpredictable burden of expenditure in the form
of bribes to obtain what the law actually entitles them. The obvious response to this
complex of negative factors might seem to be efficiency drives and campaigns to enforce
anti-corruption laws. Such responses still, however, leave the residents of poor
communities as the passive object of struggles between those who are content to oppress
them and those who profess to seek to remove the burden of oppression. Alternative
solutions, which might empower people to lift the burden themselves, depend first of all
on introducing transparency into the system.
With information about their entitlements, and then where, how and when services are
supposed to be available to them, people are placed in a position to take action on their
own behalf. However, for transparency to be more than just a source of even greater
frustration people need allies to join their struggle. Informal community leaders,
campaigning journalists, and populist politicians are potentially such allies. There are
also relief and aid agencies, religious organizations, charities and civil society
organizations of many kinds that might become involved. The interventions of such
organizations range from providing food relief and assistance with the necessities of daily
life, to health care and education projects. They also might initiate, join or promote
schemes designed to help people themselves make sustainable changes to the
community’s quality of life. One of the possibilities that can emerge from this form of
intervention by NGOs is the possibility of using ICT tools to improve the access of poor people to public services.
THE PROJECT
The premise of the research was that the effectiveness of the delivery of public services
to the poor could be strengthened by the use of ICT. At first glance the idea of
introducing some form of ICT into poor communities to empower them through
transparency may seem absurd. How can communities with no regular electricity supply,
low levels of literacy (let alone computer skills), few if any buildings with communal
access and insufficient funds even to feed their members adequately, hope to take
advantage of sophisticated technology. The answer is that without some initial outside
help they are, indeed, most unlikely to benefit from technology. Yet the question remains,
what if some external ally did provide technology theoretically capable of helping them,
could such an intervention work in practice? To take the opposite position, what makes
ICT attractive is the agility of the technology. Data can be swiftly and conveniently
updated; this data can be available at multiple access points; and it is possible to use
graphics and video to make data presentation attractive and accessible even to those with limited skills.
THE HOPE HOSPITAL PROJECT
The chosen site for the philipphines project was the maternity and child
Hospital, , a location that presented particularly striking, and even
emblematic, difficulties. The hospital was built to serve the families of Ballesteros family
Noel Nagar, a slum community of self-built housing on land actually owned by the City
Council, but effectively claimed by slum landlords who derive rents from the residents,
and also threatened by large scale government infrastructure plans that would use the site.
In addition to all or most of the conditions sketched out in an earlier section of this
article.The members of project team were able to forge an essential
relationship with the Project Head of IPPVII, as the way into a working. They also enlisted the cooperation of LGU’s a local NGO
focusing on reproductive health issues, which was able to offer assistance with
community contacts and outreach.This served the
purpose of providing community views on the relationship with the hope hospital
whilst simultaneously building up a network of contacts and building community
awareness of project personnel and their intentions. The assessments indicated that local
people did not seek to access the hospital’s services because: they had limited awareness
of its service; there were no communication channels to the services (except for a
network of community workers, supposedly free medical
services involved hidden costs; relations with the hospital staff were not friendly; and
people already had their own health care seeking behaviour patterns. Alternative sources
of care that were used included traditional medical practitioners (referred to as quacks),
dais (community midwives) who were responsible for nearly 70% of deliveries to local
mothers), private doctors and clinics, and, in emergencies, the larger government
hospitals such as Philipphines General Hospital and the All Philipphines institute . The
conclusion drawn on the basis of this was that there was a need for a neutral tool that allow to exchange information.
CONCLUSION
All of the projects in the programme pointed to some solid lessons for the introduction of
ICT into the process of providing public services to communities living in poverty. The
lessons were not, however, mainly concerned with the technology itself, but more with
the ways in which technology can be introduced and embedded in the community to best
effect. The first of these was present in the failed Philipphines project, which showed the
central importance of bringing service providers into some degree of partnership with
those who wish to introduce more transparency into the system. Whilst it is possible to
envisage a kind of ‘whistleblower’ service based on data not provided by the system
itself, and operating purely as an external challenge and stimulus, this would tend to be of
comparatively limited use. The projects in croatic Pakistan and Philipphines all built on some
form of explicit partnership arrangement with the service providers, however grudgingly
they might have entered into this partnership. The partnership did not merely guarantee
the necessary flow of data, but it also provided the beginnings of the leverage that could
bring about change in the service providing institution.
All of the projects confirmed that tools making use of some form of ICT were capable of
performing a useful function in the context of public service provision and that people
would use them, find them helpful and begin to take more control of their interaction with
officialdom. The question that was introduced in the Introduction to this article as to how
far technology was of use to the poorest and least privileged whose knowledge and skills
do not obviously fit them to make confident use of ICT was addressed most usefully by
the philliphine project. The approach was, however, not aimed at a complete answer to the
question. By concentrating on voice technology, the telephone link between
Nagar’s noel and the hope hospital set out to confirm that a form of ICT which
is more than one hundred years old, but not necessarily used easily for official purposes
by urban slum dwellers, could be put to good effect. The question is not entirely selfcontained, however. Voice technologies are now being developed as a major aspect of
computer and Internet use and communication, so casting light on telephone use in an
urban slum actually reveals things of relevance to more than just the matter in hand. The
suggestion is that even telephone use in relation to public services requires some learning
and adjustment on the part of its users. This said, the research suggests this learning and adjustment can quite swiftly be accomplished by useful numbers of members of poor communities.
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