MDGs and ICTs

By Brenda Zulu

One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) is to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, the target being to halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than a dollar a day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.

What is the role of ICTs in combating poverty?
ICT is an issue that cuts through all sectors. It brings increased efficiency and new opportunities to areas from small enterprise development and international trade to education and health care. Promoting opportunities for the poor is essential for reducing poverty. ICTs can help reach this objective by stimulating macro economic growth, making markets more efficient, improving social inclusion and facilitating political involvement.

The key to poverty reduction is sustainable economic growth, and nations can increase labor productivity through the reorganisation of production around ICT goods and services. At the microeconomic level, ICTs provide farmers, workers and entrepreneurs opportunities to reduce transaction costs, increase markets coverage and improve competitiveness, even across borders.

People living in rural areas tend to be poor and socially isolated. They lack information relevant to their particular situations and, thus, have difficulty interacting with other community members or other communities. This isolation serves to reinforce their marginalisation. ICTs such as radio, telephone and e-mail can be of great value in bringing people together, bridging geographic distances and providing relevant information to the poor.

Facilitating Political Empowerment
The poor also lack a means of effectively voicing their needs, learning about available public services and pressuring policy makers to be responsive to their interest and demands. ICTs can improve information flow and communication services to make governments and organisations serving the poor more efficient, transparent and accountable.
ICTs can help the disfranchised voice their concerns, demand their rights and take control of their own lives. Increasing ICTs' use for developing pro-poor policies is a critical component to reduce poverty and sustain development.

ICTs and Gender
In many developing countries, gender inequality persists in education attainment, in access to and control of productive and financial resources, and in political participation, even though such inequality has decreased overtime in low and middle income countries.Lack of schooling coupled with gender biases that dictate domestic roles for women perpetuate gender disparities.

One of the MDGs is to promote gender equality and empower women by eliminating gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005 and no later than 2015. ICTs can empower women and help them surmount gender inequality by raising awareness of their social and political status and creating new economic opportunities.

ICTs enable information distribution channels, which can raise awareness of gender equality issues. It can be an invaluable tool in changing people’s attitudes, including those of women themselves, by disseminating educational programs on gender equality.

It is, therefore, possible for those who actively participate in socio-economic development to increase the self esteem and self confidence of other women and encourage them to push for changes in their social status. Increased pressure from an informed constituency aware of gender inequality could also persuade local policy makers to include gender as an important component of their social and economic policies.

Economic opportunities for women
Women have been limited in participating in many forms of economic life. In many African cultures, women are expected to stay at home and are not permitted to have face-to-face contact with men other than close family or to travel. In such cultures, ICTs may open opportunities for women, since telephone and Internet allow them to interact. ICTs also help female entrepreneurs, who often have limited resources and experience, to reduce transaction costs, increase market coverage and even expand business across borders.

Some women work in the expanding ICT industry, but men dominate this new field in Africa, mainly because, from the onset, women lag behind men in accessing ICT skills.

ICTs for women’s education and for women as educators
In most African societies, women are predominantly responsible for childcare, food preparation and other household tasks. Therefore, providing women with useful information may have multiple benefits in addition to benefiting women themselves.
This has been seen in the Panos radio programme, where women recorded their own agricultural programs that where broadcast in their own languages to teach other people.

It's clear that ICT is a cross-cutting issue when it comes to MDGs and should, therefore, be advocated by the MDG campaign.