Dr. Roger Harris
Independent Consultant; Roger Harris Associates, Hong Kong;
Founder; Asian Encounters; ICTs for Community Based Tourism (e-CBT).
Summary
Roger Harris Associates (RHA) is a consulting and social entrepreneurial firm based around the work of Dr. Roger W. Harris. Its mission is to alleviate poverty by facilitating access to Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) for underserved sections of society in Asia, and to ensure they are able to make good use of the technology according to their own development aspirations. Dr. Harris has been working in this field since 1997 and the firm has been providing consulting and knowledge sharing services for six years in the area of ICTs for poverty reduction and rural development in Asia. Services include; policy advice and development, programme design and evaluation services, project implementation assistance and research - to governments, international development agencies and civil society bodies. The company also engages directly in project activities in the same field of work, partnering where appropriate with communities, civil society bodies, development and government agencies. Direct involvement in grass-roots activities contributes to the firm’s ability to offer advice that is strongly evidential and this has lead to the formulation of practical and widely-adopted approaches that are anchored in a thorough understanding of the challenges of the use of ICTs for rural poverty reduction. One such initiative, called Asian Encounters promotes the use of ICTs in support of pro-poor community-based tourism. RHA partners with its associates according to the requirements of its assignments. It works with a network of associates in several countries, including Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Nepal and India. Past assignments have involved work in: Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Vietnam, Philippines, China, Sri Lanka, India, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Peru.
1. Can you tell us briefly about the Roger Harris Associates?
Roger Harris Associates (RHA) is a consulting and social entrepreneurial firm based around the work of Dr. Roger Harris. In 2001, Dr. Harris began advising governments and international development agencies on the use of ICTs for rural development; working in a number of Asian countries. In partnerships with a variety of like-minded collaborators from many walks of life, RHA only provides advice that is based on personal experiences and first-hand research. We draw our credibility directly from the work that we undertake in partnership with poor rural communities and the projects that we operate and support directly in the field. This has enabled us to generate our own knowledge base that we can use to influence governments and aid agencies in the promotion of development and poverty reduction that is based on the effective use of ICTs. Our consulting work for ICTs for poverty reduction and rural development ranges from the design and implementation of both individual community-based development projects and wider programmes involving multiple locations, as well as assisting in the formulation of government policy mechanisms for national schemes for e-Inclusion. At the same time, we operate and support local initiatives with rural ICTs that allow us to develop and test our own theories with regard to how ICTs can be used to bring meaningful development to poor rural Asians.
2. Do you think ICT has a role wider than just the means to improve the delivery of government services? How can ICT be leveraged to reach the rural masses in the remote corners of developing countries?
ICTs have opened up new opportunities to alleviate rural poverty and they have changed the way in which poverty reduction efforts take place. Agricultural and market price information shared through the radio and the Internet gives small producers more negotiating power and increases the efficiency of production. ICTs provide increased opportunities to access health and education services and they are reducing the vulnerabilities to sickness and unemployment of people living in poverty. ICTs are bringing valuable environmental information to rural populations, including weather forecasts for agriculture and fisheries or early warnings on natural disasters. Although ICTs offer vast development opportunities, those most in need of them (low income groups, rural communities, women, and people with no formal education) often have the least access to ICTs.
ICTs have the potential to specifically contribute to poverty reduction, by:
i. Complementing pro-poor activities, such as rural health extension programmes and micro-credit activities or basic education.
ii. Directly enhancing livelihoods of the poor, e.g., through agriculture improvement.
iii. Helping address barriers to poverty reduction, such as corruption or natural vulnerabilities.
3. What role do you see of tele-centers for delivering e-enabled services to the citizens?
A telecentres is a community centre that offers shared access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for the purpose of community level development and poverty reduction. Telecentres are being promoted as an answer to the problems of the digital divide, whereby large sections of society do not enjoy access to ICTs and are therefore at risk of being excluded from the socio-economic benefits that such access brings. Typically, telecentres contain computers connected to the internet, along with a variety of other technologies, and they are located in communities where domestic ownership of such equipment is not affordable. They are staffed by people who help the community use the equipment for a range of purposes, but especially for improving its well-being, in terms of better education, health care, agriculture, and enterprise opportunities. Telecentres are known by different terms; community e-centres, multipurpose community telecentres, multimedia community centres, village information shops, info-kiosks, community knowledge centres, and so on. Telecentres are distinguished from cyber cafés, which exist only for profit, without concern as to how the technology is used, by their development focus.
4. What limitations have you faced while implementing ICT4D projects at the grass root level in the developing countries? Can you tell us about Nepal experience on UNDP’s ICT4D tele-center program?
I have encountered the following limitations;
i. Technology-driven approaches; based on the incorrect assumption that the technology is the main ingredient of the solution to poverty.
ii. Policies for poverty reduction that do not incorporate ICTs and policies for ICTs that do not incorporate poverty reduction; governments need to adopt more joined-up approaches to policy and programme development so that ICTs are rendered fully capable of contributing to solutions.
iii. Inadequate infrastructure; the number of internet subscribers in Asia still only amounts to around 4.1% of Asia’s population. Access to ICTs by rural populations is conditioned by inadequate telecommunications infrastructures.
iv. Inadequate funding; donors and development agencies seem to be loosing interest in ICTs as a mechanism for inducing development.
v. Capacities; mostly in government circles where the role of ICTs in development is not well understood. If you demonstrate to poor people how ICTs can help them, they will learn how to do it very quickly.
vi. Scepticism, and confusion, especially regarding sustainability. There’s tension between approaches that insist on market-driven mechanisms and those that see the need for government support.
UNDP’s ICT4D programme was a pioneer telecentre project in Nepal, and the forerunner of all those that came later. It provided a useful learning opportunity.
5. Can you tell us about e-Bario project?
I first conceived the idea for e-Bario in 1997 when I went to live in Sarawak, Malaysia in order to conduct research into the use of ICTs for rural development. I was able to obtain funds, initially from the IDRC and later from the Malaysian government, which enabled the implementation of a telecentre with internet connection in Bario, as well as computer laboratories at the two schools there. Previously, communications between the isolated community, which has no road access, and the outside world were rudimentary at best. Although the residents had little understanding of the technology at first, they were closely involved in the project from the start and this helped them to build an informed view on what it could do for them. Since then, e-Bario has won numerous awards, and it has demonstrated that remote and isolated communities can make effective use of contemporary ICTs. This has resulted in the project acting as an important catalyst for the wider diffusion of telecentres throughout Malaysia. However, e-Bario is by no means a finished product; I call it a success-in-progress. Building on the community capacities that the project has engendered, I recently organised a conference and workshop there, in partnership with the Bario community and UNDP, to explore the use of ICTs in the support of development for Asia’s indigenous peoples. Arising from this, we are developing future plans for building a wider community network incorporating a range of technologies and information services that will serve the surrounding indigenous peoples in the central highlands of Borneo; reaching the neighbouring state of Sabah and across the border into Indonesian Kalimantan.
6. Do you think that there is a scope of replication of the ICTD activities of one country to other developing countries of the world?
Absolutely. Asia’s most pressing problem is poverty, which is primarily a rural problem. In terms of using ICTs for poverty alleviation, Asia’s experiences with rural telecentres are readily transferable from country to country, suitably contextualised where necessary. I have formulated the concept of Telecentre 2.0 in order to depict the notion of what a mature development telecentre and the eco-system within which it operates looks like.
Telecentre 2.0 means that it is no longer necessary to pilot telecentres, even in countries where they hardly exist. Telecentre 2.0 gives a clear picture of what the lagging countries should be targeting to achieve e-inclusion. Telecentre 2.0 also signals the sceptics that telecentres are here to stay. Despite the problems that are sometimes experienced with telecentres, Telecentre 2.0 indicates that these are not fatal; that solutions are available and that they are worth pursuing in order to realise the benefits that telecentres bring.
Telecentre programmes can now be initiated with confidence, knowing where they are headed. This can accelerate their development by doing away with the slow experimental phases, so long as countries are willing to learn from the experiences of others. As the more advanced countries make progress with their telecentre scaling operations, so more learning becomes available for those who are behind. Moreover, there are now sufficient and adequate international forums for the new starters to learn from those with more experience, for example, the Asia Telecentre Forum. There are also highly experienced international agencies such as UNDP, IDRC, UNESCO, Telecentre.org and the Global Telecentre Alliance that can provide assistance. So Telecentre 2.0 removes uncertainty for those lagging countries by outlining a target for their telecentre programmes. It therefore has the potential for accelerating global progress towards e-inclusion and achieving the international development goals.
7. at do you think are the strategies required to overcome the problem of 'digital divide' in the developing countries?
The first move should be to re-structure the problem of the 'digital divide' into something more meaningful because it is primarily concerned with access to technologies. However, experience has shown us that empowerment is not an automatic result of access. Governments, and their advisers, should shed the emphasis on access and adopt an approach that is more concerned with the consequences of access. In my work with the Malaysian government we adopted the concept that focussed on the ‘value’ of access which was based on the European initiatives for achieving e-inclusion, which goes beyond mere access to technology and addresses the underlying socio-economic disparities of the poor and under-served. E-Inclusion means employing ICTs to address the problems of social exclusion and promoting opportunities for the economic and social empowerment of all citizens. It also encapsulates the contribution that ICTs can make towards achieving the international development goals. Targeting e-inclusion implies the adoption of key socio-economic development objectives by ICT programmes in areas such as health, education, agriculture and rural enterprise development. There is a risk that without such a focus in policy-making, efforts to close the digital divide will benefit the better off, by making more ICTs available to them, without having a significant improvement in e-inclusion.
Having adopted an approach based on e-inclusion, developing countries need to follow a range of policy objectives to ensure ICTs are able to make their fullest contribution to the reduction of poverty. Elsewhere, I have organised these into a Stage Model that identifies around five key stages that developing economies need to proceed through in order to achieve this. The stages relate to the progressive development of the following factors, organised under three groups;
Input Indicators
i. Policy-making for ICTs for rural development and poverty reduction
ii. Telecommunications reform and deregulation
iii. Human capacity development
iv. Donor assistance
Output Indicators
v. Telecommunications infrastructure; teledensity
vi. ICT Infrastructure; PCs
vii. Organised access to ICTs, Telecentres.
viii. Development of e-government
Outcome Indicators
ix. Progress towards MDGs; Poverty
x. Human Poverty Index (UNDP)
xi. Human Development Index (ADB)
xii. Indices for ICTs and the MDGs (UNDP)
Strategies that address these indicators will lead to reduced poverty and elevated levels of e-inclusion.
8. What are the main barriers for building the 'knowledge society'? What do you think should be done to overcome them?
In Asia, the main barrier to a knowledge society is poverty. The main barrier to overcoming poverty is complacency. The West is miserly with its development aid, and most Asian governments have yet to take poverty as a really serious problem. Some observers suggest that an increase in ICTs leads to increased GDP per capita, but whilst these factors may correlate, it is not safe to conclude that the casual effect is in that direction. I believe that it is more of a recursive relationship; people will buy a mobile phone when they have sufficient disposable income to do so, then they can use it to generate more income, and so on. Telecentres kick-start this process, by delivering ICTs at low per-capita cost to large numbers of people and by using information to overcome their poverty-related problems. As incomes rise, ICTs become more affordable domestically, so telecentres will have done their job.
9. Do you think that public-private partnership may play a major role in promoting the knowledge society through effective policy implementation?
Effective policies for poverty reduction through wider diffusion and effective use of ICTs invariable imply multi-stakeholder public-private partnerships, which include civil society institutions. No single organisation or institution possesses the necessary capacities to complete the job alone. Reliance on a single sector leads to sub-optimal outcomes. Whilst market forces fail the poorest, under-performing government services frustrate innovation. Combined efforts that are outcome-oriented exploit the strengths of multiple partners, overcoming their respective weaknesses and delivering value for all stakeholders. But it’s not easy to achieve.
10. What role the NGOs and grassroots organizations should play in knowledge creation and diffusion?
Most of the information needs (80%) of Asia’s rural poor are derived from local sources; within 20 kilometres or so of their homes. Accordingly, the knowledge that is required to mobilise these resources, to understand how they can be used effectively and therefore made more widely available, is generated at the local level. This is where knowledge creation takes place, and ultimately, where it is put to good use. Unfortunately, the type of knowledge that is required for ICTs to play their full role in poverty reduction does not yield itself wholly to intermittent formalised studies that reduce the lives of poor people to tables of data. If you rarely get mud on your shoes, you’re not really involved in this process. NGOs and grassroots organizations are well placed to capture and apply this knowledge, but they don’t always get the opportunity to do so. Sometimes they’re outsourced to collect data, and maybe to assist with project implementation, but the formalised knowledge processing and diffusion takes place elsewhere; in the capitals and conferences that poor people never visit. There’s a disconnect here.
Finally, are you working on any new ICT for Development projects in developing countries? If so can you tell us about it?
My most exciting project right now is called “e-Borneo.” It emerged from the e-Bario Knowledge Fair, in December 2007, a workshop and conference concerned with the use of ICTs to address the problems of Asia’s indigenous peoples, where we developed the e-Bario Vision for Indigenous Peoples and ICTs. Asia contains the majority of the world's 300 million or so indigenous people, about 70%. For the most part, they remain marginalised in terms of social and economic development, compared with their national compatriots. Whilst representing around 5% of the world’s population, they make up 15% of the world’s poor. There are many underlying characteristics of ICTs that render them suitable for alleviating many of the problems of indigenous peoples; such as those relating to the death of distance and to freedom of expression. I am working to make this possible for the indigenous residents of Borneo and also for those in other countries in Asia.