Informations- und Kommunikationstechnologien in Entwicklungsländern: Trends und Potentiale

Since the mid 80s information and communication technologies (ICT) played an ever increasing role within the developed world. Industrialised and newly industrialising economies make big financial and organisational efforts to enhance technical infrastructure and human capacity in the field of ICT. Low income countries, though, are in danger of lagging behind this development. Compared to industrialised countries their ICT infrastructure is poorly developed both, in quantitative and qualitative terms. This is despite a lot of potentials exist for the use of ICT in developing countries: Education could be distributed more easily and in more appropriate forms; Researchers can benefit through the access to data bases and online discussion groups,worldwide; Market information and communication networks could enhanced the competitiveness of enterprises and provide opportunities to find a place in international value-added chains; Households, even poor ones, could retrieve relevant information to organise their life and income generating activities more efficiently. The realisation of these potentials, however, imposes great challenges to developing countries. Human capabilities have to be developed to create abilities to efficiently exploit the new means of communication. Apart from that, the development of the ICT-infrastructure and an everlasting adoption of rapidly changing technologies is crucial. This requires considerable investment. To enhance the development of their ICT networks many countries are in the process of privatising and liberalising the sector. To achieve the desired improvements, a political framework that regulates these technical and institutional developments has to be established. The private sector and international development agencies appear to underinvest in ICT in low-income countries although this field seems to be predestined for fruitful public-private-partnerships.