Thanks for the heads-up on TED – we’ll be sharing this information in our next email newsletter.

While we’ve tried our best to build ICT capacity in female activists and NGO workers we are still seeing such poor computer skills in both women and men leaving our tertiary institutions because of poor ICT resources in Universities. But we’re still at it.

On a personal note a few years ago Kubatana.net was shortlisted for the Hafkin Prize. I wrote to Nancy this year saying that at the time of our nomination we had just picked up a stray kitten (gorgeous tortoise shell) and we named her Hafkin for “good luck”. We didn’t win but Hafkin continues to be a delight, and everyone comments on her unusual name.

Jim, you’re raising some very big questions about development theory, some of which I’m badly qualified to address. I am aware that there’s skepticism about Yunus’s work, but I am also greatly impressed with the transformations I’ve witnessed in African societies due to the introduction of mobile telephony. That, in turn, makes me quite optimistic about the upside of the Village Phone project. I also tend to feel like there’s a healthy view of markets that doesn’t accept them as laws of nature, but does accept the reality that market economies are powerful tools for generating wealth and change, and that accepts that any development effort needs to at least acknowledge the market economy that beneficiaries are living within.

As for the question about technology and violence – I think it’s important to point out that most of the reports I’ve read aren’t Internet-connected, but linked to mobile phones. The question here is a cultural one as well – the mobile phone (or the Internet) increase the freedom of the person who uses them – it increases their horizons, the possible number of people they can contact, etc. For some men who are used to women being limited to a very small social universe, this is an extremely threatening development. But I think this is less about technology and more about the proliferation of options that these men find threatening.

As for your Fukayama point – I don’t buy that in the least. The promise – unfulfilled as yet – of the information society is that the producion of knowledge can suddenly be in the hands of anyone who has access to the right tools. This is a revolutionary idea that more closely resembles a creative explosion of knowledge than the end of knowledge…

My heart is somewhat to the north of Accra (well north in fact, closer to Bolgatanga). It was a pleasure listening to you and your colleagues at Nancy’s talk yesterday.

I was particularly struck by your question on culture as I had rather similar musings going through my mind during her presentation. But I was also struck by what for me were the implicit linkages between the neoliberal economic agenda (e.g., the Washington Consensus) and the “knowledge society.” I found it interesting indeed that Nancy mentioned Yunus as I had just come back from the Microcredit Summit conference in Halifax that was basically a Yunus and the Grameen model love-fest. I have always felt ambivalent about microfinance and microcredit wondering whether such programs do in fact alleviate poverty. More to the point, I wonder about the social and cultural implications of microfinance programs that claim to “empower” poorer clients, many of whom are women. For one, while Yunus maitains that credit should be a basic human right, what many of these programs tend to advocate is a rather paradoxical position of “empowerment through debt.” Second, these programs are increasingly linked to international finance capital (side observation: one of the sponsors of the Microcredit Summit was Monsanto Fund). Third, and germane to your questions about culture, these programs necessitate a certain kind of market and entrepreneurial behavior that political economists from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman regard as essential for the operation of a “modern” free market economy. While many (myself included) have been indoctrinated by econ classes that discuss the operation of the market as a given and “natural” force (akin to the revolutions of the planets or evolution), the market is very much a social and ideological construction. Admittedly much may be gained by encouraging the supposed efficiencies and competitiveness of participation in a market economy (no matter how small), there is much that becomes excluded and marginalized and devalued, to wit: cultural, social and other networks that are superfluous to the operations of this kind of market formation. In essence what is being transformed and/or dismissed are competing notions of value and valuation as individuals, resources and productivity become vehicles for capital accumulation. Marx observes this process in Kapital when he talks of primtive accumulation and the inherent violence attending capitalist transformations of societies.

When Nancy talked about the “knowledge society” I had similar thoughts about value, valuation and violence and what forms indigenous forms of knowledge and practices may be transformed and/or excluded through celebration of the kinds of knowledge ICTs can bring or demand from their users/beneficiaries. It was alarming, but perhaps not surprising given the linkages I am suggesting, to hear how Internet access has increased violence against women. Could this be a form of “primitive accumulation” transferred to the knowledge arena? Unvoiced and unexplored are the linkages between the knowledge society and economic programs such as microfinance and microcredit on the one hand, and the overall Fukuyamian vision of the end of history and the triunmph of free market capitalism. Would a triumph of the knowledge society mark in some respects the end of knowledge?

It sounds like the issue in developing countries is not technology, by design, but the way the technology is implemented, such as the way cybercafes cater to high privacy audience, and the rules governing first-come-first-serve computer access in schools. Looks like the next steps will be trying to evoke change in the ways in which technology is presented, and the rules governing fair access, then using these changes to advertise a more positive, gender neutral perception of technology.