The 'Digital Divide'

According to a survey we conducted, one admittedly unscientific, the phrase "digital divide" first emerged in 1995, when it was used to describe the zealots and sceptics of the Internet. It showed up just once that year. By the next, it had popped up 28 times, by then developing mostly into a description of the gulf between those with access to the Internet and those without. Even then, four recorded instances connected digital divide with poverty. By 2000, however, there were over 3000 news stories in which the phrase was linked to poverty - and that's only in English-language reports, and not even all of them. Call us cynical, but when a term gains such wide currency, it may be time to question its validity.

The current and most pervasive understanding of digital divide is that the poor - especially, the hard-core rural poor - without access to computers and the Internet are deprived of opportunities to improve their lot. One putative benefit is that the Internet will allow farmers to see weather patterns so that they can better know when to plant and harvest. Other claims are that the Internet allows farmers to check prices for their commodities and to better understand demand for their crops. Yet another reason - class this one under "e-commerce dreamings" - is that poor producers of whatever goods or commodities can bypass middlemen and sell directly to end buyers. Distance learning is also another opportunity touted.

The people telling us this talk through their hats. You have to wonder if they have ever walked through a bottom-of-the-pile Third World village. Or if their only contacts with the developing world have been through their foreign born domestic help. Though we grant that some of these people do have the interests of the poor at heart, they still err in thinking that what the poor need is to be more like them: Hook 'em up to the Internet and prepare to be amazed. In truth, the needs of the poor are radically different. That's not to say that they should be denied the opportunity to live like those in the developed world, only that there are social and market conditions that must be satisfied before those choices become relevant. Yes, more developed economies like Malaysia can fret about the digital divide; others like Bangladesh must first worry about the "hunger divide".

Start with farmers and the Internet. Weather patterns? Prices and trends? Take India, which holds a quarter of the world's poor. It is also a country where half of all adults are illiterate, with the proportion even higher for the poor. The fact is, if more of the poor could read, they'd find all the information they need already available in cheap newspapers that can be passed on to many others when done. Ditto with distance learning. You have to know how to read before you can be taught off a computer screen. And as for selling off the Internet, how many even in the developed world can operate an e-commerce site? And if you say that someone else can run it for our impoverished producer, what happens to the argument against middlemen? Honestly, the naivety is astounding.

Certainly, a digital divide exists. But it doesn't contribute to the persistence of hard-core poverty. And neither can its eradication be expected to alleviate penury. As an executive formerly based in Manila puts it, "When you live in a shantytown, what good is an ATM on the corner?"

The poor more compellingly need opportunities to raise their literacy rate. From that, much benefit will come. Beyond this, what the agricultural poor need is not 21st century technology, but 1940's and 1950's machinery. Anyone who has ever seen a Thai farmer toiling behind a bullock-plough will realise how much productivity could be raised - and life bettered - by using one of those small, smoke-belching, mechanised ploughs. Or a petrol-driven pump for deep wells so women needn't spend half the day fetching water. Rural populations in Asia also would gain if traditions related to inheritance were to evolve so that land doesn't keep getting divided by successive generations of heirs into uneconomic sizes. Add to that better (and more) roads so more produce gets to the markets and more rural electrification to make life less elemental.

In short, what the poor need is a combination of basic education, basic mechanisation and infrastructure - so they can let the full effect of market forces raise them to the next level. Closing the digital divide would be good, but right now most of Asia's poor are still looking forward to home electricity.

Editorial from the Far Eastern Economic Review dated April 12, 2000.