Under-estimating the Role of Electricity in Bridging the Digital Divide

Those who have lived all their lives (and those who live) in developed countries tend to take a lot of things for granted. Few of them are good roads, access to education, access to health care, potable water, and electricity. In today's Information and communications technologies (ICT) driven world, access to the Internet is fast becoming an integral part of the list of things many take for granted. The past decade has seen many an effort directed towards making sure that those living in parts of the world (or parts of countries) where access to the computers and the Internet is not easily available can also have access in order to benefit from the many useful tools and resources that are available on the Internet. This effort is what is generally referred to as bridging the digital divide. The important question here is "what is the digital divide".

The term digital divide refers to the gap (or divide) between those people with access to digital technologies (computers, the Internet, and related technologies) and those without access to them. It includes the imbalances in physical access to these technologies as well as the unequal access to resources and lack of skills needed to effectively participate as citizens of the world in an increasingly globally connected world driven by these technologies. In other words, it’s the unequal access and acquisition of related skills by some members of society to computers, the Internet, and related technologies . Groups often discussed in the context of the digital divide include socio-economic - rich and poor, racial - majority and minority, or geographical - urban and rural). The term global digital divide refers to differences in technology access between regions - North America, Europe, Latin America and the Carribeans, Asia, Africa - and even between countries in the same region or across regions.

The premise of this article is that no effort at bridging the digital divide in developing countries will be effective unless availability of basic infrastructure like good roads and electricity are also seriously tackled. Evidence of the foregoing assertion is not far-fetched; in most developing countries, computer usage and Internet access (both public and private) are close to 100 percent concentrated in the capital cities. This trend is definitely changing but the pace is frustratingly slow. The reason being that you need good roads to send the technology to the rural communities and you need power (electricity) to run the equipment even if yo mange to get them to these communities. We are talking about countries where even large portions of the capital towns are still not properly connected to the national road and electricity networks. Even those served communities (in terms of roads and electricity) are plagued with frequent power outages.

This catch 22 situation leaves a number of questions among which are the following:

1. Should we continue to send computers and other ICT equipment to people who don't have electricity to run them?
   
2. Should we stop any effort at bridging the digital divide and concentrate on building good roads and providing electricity first?
3. Should we divide the effort into providing these services in parallel?

To be continued ... (with some videos)