The international community should remain realistic in its expectations on the potential of using information and communication technologies to address global development challenges, argues a member of a U.S.-based think tank focused on market-oriented ideas.
“We should be wary of being distracted by technologies that can solve some direct problems but will never be able to solve underlying development problems,” Tate Watkins of the George Mason University’s Mercatus Center writes in a guest entry for the “Aid Watch” blog. “If an app gives a mother access to maternal health information, but she doesn’t have access to basic healthcare, how much good will it do her?”
He adds: “Direct solutions to problems (say, aid programs that use ICTs to locate disaster survivors) may be worthwhile as benefiting a lot of people. But a long list of many such solutions is not development. Development is the gradual emergence of a problem-solving system.”
Read more development aid news.
