Information And Communication Technology And Poverty In Developing Countries

Today, we are so accustomed and dependent on technology to communicate and inform our world (Bentley, 2014). According to Australian Bureau of Statistics (2017) Australia has a population of 24.7 million people, only 14.2 million of those people have access to the internet. That means that over ten million people in Australia, a young but well-developed country don’t have access to the internet. Nicholas Negroponte created a non for profit initiative called one laptop per child, in hope to continue to minimise the digital divide, this initiative has now rolled out in Ethiopia, Mongolia, Peru, Mexico, Rwanda and more. Technology is such a big part of our education system so what happens when some of our students don’t have access to basic

* Economic status The acquisition of technology is often not a high priority for people in low socioeconomic groups. The priority for people in these groups may be housing, food and health care. The provision of public internet access through libraries and internet cafes has assisted people access the internet.

Technology has a huge impact on eliminating poverty but it cannot make poverty gone for good. In the article Can Technology End Poverty, Kentaro Toyama describes why technology cannot solve poverty. Toyama states, “Technology has positive effects only to the extent that people are willing and able to use it positively” (15). What Toyama is saying is that we can give these people in poverty technology to succeed, but if they have no intentions of using it to better their education then technology is pointless. Toyama mentions that technology is expensive and we are focusing more on spending “one hundred dollars for a computer” instead we could be paying “$0.50 per year, per child for de-worming pills” (15). What Toyama is saying is right. First

I have come face to face with the challenging statistics pertaining to the health of people especially women and girls in resource-poor countries due to non-integrated healthcare service delivery which is significantly attributed to poor health information system

Our world has undergone two stages of technical revolution which made our community develop rapidly. Entering the third millennium, we’re living in a modern society which is significant development in ICT. Technology has become an essential factor that has created a great revolution on all aspects of our lives such as education, medical, economy, politics, etc.…and connects us together. Technology has made our lives easier which results in the changing of other sides in our society. The technology plays an important role which is clearly shown in the achievements of many countries in the world. However, technology also consist drawbacks and has negatively effects on all fields in our society which people do not realize.

Through Information Communication Technology (ICT) provides patient with hands on health care services. This will allow the patient

Information Technology has revolutionized the world as never before and Indian women are no exception to it. Workforce trends show that a large

technology as a life enhancing tool is on the rise in development projects, and as people become more dependent on technology, exploring how culture and technology intersect is increasingly important for the wellbeing of target communities. Colombia is a significant point of departure in this exploration as this country has experienced an influx of development programs implementing information and communication technologies (ICTs)—laptops, mobile tablets and mobile phones—as tools to enhance the livelihoods of people living in rural communities. Of the 5 million people who identify as Afro-Colombian (10% of the population of Colombia), 1.2 million live in rural areas. The highest concentrations of Afro-Colombians live on or near the Pacific and Caribbean Coasts, and two thirds of people living in rural communities live below the poverty line. Several development projects being planned and implemented (Plan Vive Digital: Ministry of Technology; Land and Rural Development Project-Colombia: USAID; Afro-Colombian and Indigenous Program: USAID; etc.) to enhance measures of wellbeing that many rural Afro-Colombian communities lack, such as economic sustainability, education, health, and security. The main challenges to development projects in rural

How can technology be directly and intentionally applied to serve the urban poor? Well first of all we know that the quality of education we find in the urban and poor centers of the city is not very good. Many kids who grow up in poor neighborhoods do not and can't get a quality education because of a lack of funding, qualified teachers and schools that do not have access to technology. Education is a direct path to the middle class and out of poverty. Many of these schools report that they are forced to use outdated text books, outdated computers that are not working or without networking or Internet connections and a lack of other technology. This is why we see many young people who are not prepared and therefore do not graduate High school

The healthcare system in the developing countries is facing significant challenges. Despite the high expenditure on health, it has been noted that weak systems and facilities that do not have resources are contributing to poor health outcomes. With the challenges that are affecting the healthcare system in the developing nations, the information technology presents a good solution (Cline & Luiz, 2013). The information technology has the potential to improve the healthcare system by reducing the costs and ensuring that there are efficiencies in the healthcare system. The major trends in the developed health systems are automation and proper business management. The potential to reduce complexities in the healthcare system lies in the ability to reduce the excessive use of paperwork as well as the provision of information to support the healthcare systems (Cline & Luiz, 2013).

In order to uphold to these strategies, Ghana launched many health information projects. Plans such as the Mobile Technology for Community Health in Ghana (MOTECH) and Mobile Teledermatology (Afarikumah, 2014) in Ghana concentrates on the topic of telemedicine. MOTECH focuses on prenatal care with an objective towards increasing quality of care for mothers living in rural areas and Mobile Dermatology looks at dermatology situations in outpatient settings without the use of the Internet (Afarikumah, 2014). With Ghana being a developing country, individuals would have very limited access to health care services because of travel barriers or health costs. Telemedicine projects create the effort and space for those individuals to be able to

In some countries, they can’t afford to establish communication infrastructure. Moreover, when people don’t have enough to buy food, they definitely unable to pay for technology.

Also, there is now wide ICT deployment in both the public and the private sectors though a lot of growth is expected in the forseeable future. The deployment of ICT has contributed largely to the rapid development of other sectors of the country’s economy and had been a backbone specifically in the growth witness in the financial service and telecommunication sectors whereby the have become more innovative in the products and services. Whereby, the ICT sector has seen the fastest sectoral growth of the Nigerian economy with average CAGR growth of 35% in the past decade (NBS). ICT sector contributed 5.46% to the country’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2011 while private investment in the sector increased from US$50 million in 1999, to US$18.0 billion, in 2009, and $25 billion in 2010 respectively (Ministry Of Communication Technology, 2012) .

The Ministry of Information and Communication Technology have declared to use a Policy Framework, it is stated in Strategy number 6, where one of the focus is for "ICT to enhance social equality" to lower the disparities in society and also to promote equality when it comes to accessing resources in these strategic actions, 6.4 states that electronic access should be accessible to everyone, and that it should coincide with the needs of daily lives of the people. This is further enforced with laws relating to ICT, such as Web Accessibility Standards to make everyone can access websites equally.

For sustaining this transition from agrarian to industrial economy, Bangladesh must create and exploit knowledge through the widespread use and application of ICT ensuring the women participation. ICTs have the potential to support the development strategy of “leapfrogging” i.e., bypassing heavy infrastructure building it is possible for a developing economy to transform itself directly into a knowledge economy & women empowerment should be enhanced by using this dynamic means. For example, during the last half of the twentieth century, substantial achievements in few countries which succeeded in narrowing the economic divide separating them from the industrialized world often involved the export-oriented production of ICTs (Kim, 1997, Hobday, 1995, Amsden, 1989).