Technology Leapfrogging in Developing Countries – An Inevitable Luxury?

Introduction Over the last two decades, much of the developed world has been transformed by what are now termed Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). These technologies exert an impact on most aspects of our lives-in economic activities, education, entertainment, communication, travel, etc. They have also been inextricably linked with economic prosperity and power, as, through media such as the Internet, they are exerting what Tarjanne (1998) refers to as a "revolutionary impact on the way the world does business and, more importantly, on the way the world and its citizens communicate". The technologies have, to a large extent, been developed in, and for the cultural and social norms of, a small number of developed countries in Western Europe and North America as well as a few more in East and South East Asia, and Australasia. As a global information infrastructure emerges, developing countries must ensure that they are not isolated from this technology. They too need to use ICTs in order to grow and prosper. In this context, the Internet is widely seen as having the potential to "break the bounds of isolation and bring remote communities in with the rest of the world" (Tarjanne, 1998). However, the sad reality is that the participation of many developing countries in the global information society remains insignificant. This is attributable to many causes, including perceived incompatibilities between cultures and technologies, an idealistic preference for self-reliance, and simple lack of economic or human resources to acquire and utilise the technology. Notwithstanding these causes, effective use of ICTs is biased by race, gender and location. For example, only a tiny percentage of Africans enjoy Internet connectivity (Amoako, 1998), perhaps one in ten thousand outside South Africa. These people are effectively invisible in an electronic world. As Roche and Blaine (1997) have observed, if one measures the IT capacity of countries in terms of millions of instructions per second (MIPS), then it has been estimated that most of the developing world suffers from a " MIPS gap ratio " in the order of something like 1:26 with the developed world. Another estimate of the disparity suggests that developing countries, whilst representing around 80