A few weeks ago, I attended a talk by Eric Brewer about the delivery of eyecare through telemedicine in southern India, and I’ve been thinking about his presentation ever since. He began his talk with two examples of projects; one was on the global adoption and use of mobile phones and the other was Grameens bank’s groundbreaking work with microfinance for women. His two main points from these examples as I understood them to be were (1) technology can be readily and rapidly adopted worldwide; there is a market for it (2) it’s essential to consider development. His last point reminded me of George Leigh Mallory’s (a famous mountain climber) response when questioned about why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest: ”Because it’s there…”. Eric’s point was that it’s not enough to do something for the sake of simply trying to do it in ICT. He wants it to have a purpose for development.
I wholeheartedly agree with him as did many others in the room. There is, however, a very subtle yet critical point that often gets overlooked. Development, much like public health, is not so much about the individual, it’s about the community. It is not about individualized medicine, it’s about initiatives where the greater whole benefits (and because of this collective good, a greater number of individuals benefit). I’m not saying that projects that focus on individuals are not important or shouldn’t be done, but to have a wider impact, this framework needs to be considered for ICT based interventions.
