ICT for livelihoods

Reflection and some links to ICCO’s views and other experiences.

By Rob Witte

The last few days I attended an international knowledge exchange workshop organised by GINKS and IICD. IICD calls these events “Cross Country Learning Events”, CCLE. The theme of the workshop was “ICT for livelihoods”, especially of agricultural producers. Participants came from Africa and Latin America (see IICD’s blog for the reflections of the facilitator and some participants’ impressions). In the workshop I presented some of the lessons learned of ICCO’s Fair Economic Development programme and a short overview of ICCO’s role in the Connect for Change Alliance. You can find this presentation here.

In the margins of the workshop I discussed several issues with participants and organisers, and I will use this blog to share a few with the general public.

- Gender concerns

- Rural entrepreneurship

- Multi-stakeholder cooperation

Gender: Similar to what ICCO has experienced in its Fair Economic Development programme in the last few years, my observation was that gender balance is still an unresolved issue in the ICT for Livelihoods programme. A few questions and remarks in the workshop and its fringes show that there are several barriers for an equal participation of women:

- More than a few times they cannot attend capacity building workshops that require overnight stay.

- Some women avoid the use of novel technologies, assuming that they cannot comprehend them

- Unwillingly some choices of activities creates a male bias, such as market-information that focuses on typical “male crops”

- In mixed groups women’s issues or even women’s competencies or leadership skills may go unnoticed because of “dominant” male behaviour.

In the weeks preceeding this workshop I have studied a few documents on ICT and gender, and the one I especially like is Researching ICT-Based Enterprise for Women in Developing Countries: A Gender Perspective, as it puts the IT and gender issues in the context of “ overall” gender equality barriers. I really recommend reading this document while we continue preparing for the Connect for Change programme.

Rural Entrepreneurship: One of the participants asked me to explain what ICCO had in mind when referring to “rural entrepreneurship” and whether we had any documents to clarify this concept. I answered that it is related to the role of rural producers in our value chain approach. On this approach we are discussing emerging issues in a special ValueChainDevelopment wiki (please send me an e-mail if you experience problems in accessing this wiki…). Rural entrepreneurs can be individual producers, producer organisations or cooperatives with an entrepreneurial and market oriented outlook, but also traders, transporters and other service providers (including ICT services…). The kind of issues involved in capacities of producer organisations are very well summarized in a new approach to the appraisal of POs, as highlighted in this web-link of newforesight

Multi Stakeholder Cooperation: As I already stated in my presentation of ICCO on day one of the workshop, we are convinced that poverty reduction is a complex issue that often needs cooperation between various (types of) stakeholders, such as grassroots organisations, NGOs, (responsible elements within) the business sector and government instiututions at various levels. This approach compares well with IICDs “national roundtable” approach, and I would be interested to share experiences on the issues that partners encounter in such national cooperation processes. For an overview of what ICCO sees as Issues in Multi-Stakeholder Cooperation arrangements, please have a look at the latest briefing paper of February 2009: