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The global digital divide in the Internet: developed countries constructs and Third World realities

Tilburg University, The Netherlands, m.j.james{at}uvt.nl

Defined as the differential degree to which rich and poor countries benefit from new information and communications technologies such as the Internet, the global digital divide is widely measured by international institutions in terms of the number of persons with individual access to those technologies. Yet, while this measure makes sense in the rich countries, where individual ownership is widespread among the population, it makes very little sense in poor countries. For, in the latter, what we find is that although individual access is indeed very limited, a remarkable number of local innovations ensure that the benefits of the Internet are made available to at least 10 million people throughout the Third World. Many such persons are illiterate, unskilled and resident in the rural areas of developing countries. These findings directly contradict the commonly held notion that there are few, if any, local innovations in the applications of the Internet outside the rich countries and those parts of poorer countries with close connections to the former (most typically through multinational corporations). From a policy point of view, we suggest that foreign aid donors and national governments pay less attention to providing individual access facilities such as so-called telecentres and focus instead on ways to foster indigenous rural innovation systems devoted to finding relevant and cost-effective applications of the Internet.

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