International financial crisis and development

Well another week is over and we are still reading a lot of articles, mostly about digital divides... Instead of taking about what we read, I decided to do an article about the consequences of the international financial crisis for people living in less developed countries, LDC.

As we live in a globalised economy the problems experienced in America, will influence both our European economy as well as the rest of the worlds. Let's therefore start by looking at the crisis from a macro level or a top-down approach. For almost all countries it will mean a slower growth and a rising inequality. LDC's will most likely experience a reduction in capital inflows because of higher interest rates and also a falling export because of a slower growth in industrial countries. This will lead to a required national budget reduction, which will most likely cut expenditures such as social programs and infrastructure projects. Poor people will be the first to feel such reductions, hence leading to inequalities. This was a quick view of the macro level of course the impact for the individual LDC depends on the actual reliance on export, financial situation and national assets, such as gold or oil.

Looking at the crisis from a micro level or bottoms-up view is a little difficult, as you would have to take the individual person's context into consideration. But "generalising" the micro view the prospect will look something like this. Until today it has already been very difficult for poor people to borrow money through their local bank, and hence in the international financial system. Noticeable exceptions to this is the concept of Microfinance e.g. Grameen bank and MyC4.com and Microcredit such as kiva.org. These initiatives gives poor people the possibility to connect with people or institutions who are willing to lend them money, often with a background charity motive and hence willing to accept a greater risk. If this is true, it will be possible for poor people with good ideas to get funding for their projects, and creating new jobs in their local context. Putting all these local contexts together, thus minimized the impact of the international financial crisis.

Having presented these two view, let my elaborate a little on my own thoughts about this. Kenneth might very well look completely different on this, and probably does. This is complete my own view. Something which I think should not be forgotten here is that history shows that in situations like this, it is always the poorest people who are hit the most. This holds true both in LDC's but also in the industrialised countries. Hence I lean towards the macro view on this topic, acknowledging that the microfinanced or microcredited loans will make a huge difference where they are provided, but not nearly enough to actually make a real difference. With a micro view, development is often associated with just economic growth, but remember that it is also e.g. education and good health to the individual.

What will happen by the end of this month when the interest rate is due for everybody? Hopefully the Bush administration reaches an agreement on how to eliminate the current credit mistrust between the financial institutions before this interest rate is due. Otherwise the consequences will be enormous.

What do you think? Have I forgotten something very important? Perhaps you think that I'm right in my analysis about the macro view but would like see the micro view succeed? If so, go to myc4.com and start lending people in LDCs money. If you have a blog, you can go to blogactionday.org and register. Blogactionday.org is on October 15, and is an annual nonprofit event that aims to unite the world’s bloggers to post about the same issue on the same day. The advertisement profit your blog generates on this day, can then be used to lend to entrepreneurs through e.g. kiva.org, further enabling the point of the micro level view.

Happy birthday!

Tuesday Thomas, Sudhanshu and I attended the partial birthday conference for Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and partial launch of the new Asian Dynamics Initiative. I already mentioned in a earlier post that we were going so I'll skip the overall agenda here. The conference was opened by Lykke Friis from University of Copenhagen and a substitute for Per Stig Møller, a guy from the Danish Foreign Ministry.

The real essence of the conference were the four key note speakers, three of them professors from United States and one from Oslo, but not native. Two of them were Indian and the two others American.

The first one talked about the subject of an Asian Culture. It is typically conceived that people from a named space share a culture which allows us to ignore difference of class, ethnicity and gender. This often leads to very large spaces that have severe difference such as Asia. That Europe are separated from Asia at Caucasus, Transcaucasia and Turkey is common understood but are borders really that fixed? Western Asian culture differs a lot from Eastern Asia and so on. What I got out of the lecture was that cultures are difficult to define and encapsulate and you have to work with a very dynamic understanding of cultures and their borders.

Next topic was much more concise. The speaker questioned China and its potential for peaceful rising and proclaimed them as a fragile superpower. Fragile because of their domestic challenges and their way of handling crises. The speaker was a former member of Bill Clinton's state department from 1997 to 2000 and raised various examples of China's fragile situation. Very interesting but in my opinion a protective pro-American attitude and single-sided. She didn't bring in her own country and mentioned at the end that her Chinese friends didn't perceive China as a Superpower at all.

My hypothesis while discussing with Thomas during the break was that all Superpowers are fragile. History also seems to prove this. Funny enough America constitutes themselves as a superpower but refuse their own fragility. Just look at their financial crisis now. Other "superpowers" such as Russia and India also have their challenges. So bottom line is that China of course has it challenges too, especially domestically. They have their own agenda which other nations and superpowers feels threaten by but so do other superpowers, if we really have to use that word. I won't go into a discussion about human and animal rights and so on, but simply state that superpowers are fragile and to cope with that they form their own agenda which others might not like and that can create tension in a global environment as we see with China today.

After the break, the third speaker funnily came with some of the same arguments that Thomas and I had discussed during the break. So we were not alone in our understanding obviously. He continued discussing if India would become a Superpower some day. From the beginning of India's history as an independent nation it has been regarded as an unnatural nation and an unlikely democracy because of the extreme diversity in the country. But so far they have proven otherwise. It has been one of the fastest growing democracies and some expect India to be a rising power of the twenty first century but others questions that because of the extreme diversity.

The fourth and last lecture and speaker was a professor from MIT talking about ownership and entrepreneurship in regards to nationality/nationalism. I did not really agree with her understanding so won't spent time on describing it here.

It was fun to participate in an international conference and especially lecture two and three gave some interesting insight and considerations. Not necessarily in regards to our master thesis but in general.

Innovation and Digital Divide

This post is divided in two... A "digital" divide. Alright, lousy joke, I admit :-)

But really, first my thoughts on innovation in regards to our professor Sudhanshu's new blog as Thomas mentioned, done on a Monday morning after a heavy weekend without any academic work except studying beers on the European Beer Festival in Valby, Copenhagen. Quite a lot of fun :-)

Next my input to the digital divide topic as Thomas has already talked briefly about. I better say something academic about it so it doesn't seem like Thomas is doing all the reading :-)

Well, innovation... My personal definition as of today would be: "Innovation is about walking new ways in old shoes, while improvising is taking the chance of walking new ways without shoes at all" - Thinking purely out of the box. I know there are multiple definitions of innovation and no right answer. Some would definitely say that innovation is also thinking out of the box but quite often I see what people call innovation is merely just new ways of thinking but with old traditional habits hanging on. I also acknowledge that with academic and scientific work and by putting new things alive you have to build your work on an existing foundation in some sense but habits can be a limiting factor of imagination. Our master thesis will definitely be a test of that. Our hope is to end up with some new conceptual ideas about application of ICT in the context of the illiterate population in developing countries but will we innovate or improvise? We have to build on some foundation (all the literature and stuff we are reading now and our empirical research data) but also improvise in some way I think. Our "young" bright minds and improvising skills must be tested :-)

I know my thoughts on innovation and improvising is taken from a different angle than our professor stated and plenty of other scholars would properly like to shoot me down now with arguments that I'm not discussing the two ideas in context, framing it properly and so on but that's the good thing about blogging. I can be subjective to the bone! :-)

To satisfy the objective (maybe more appropriate social constructivistic) thinkers here are the definitions from wikionary:

Innovate: "To do something for the first time; To introduce something new to a particular environment".

Improvise: "To make something up or invent it as one goes on; to proceed by guess rather than by a careful plan. To invent or create something quickly or without a plan; to wing it ".

Now you can make up your own mind about innovation and improvising :-)

Most of my readings the last week has been about the digital divide and the wider aspect of social exclusion. Digital divide is a very popular topic to discuss these days and maybe views exists. Some say it is the biggest challenge of mankind ever and some say it doesn't exist. Very short the digital divide is: "A gap in access, ability to use or gap of actual use or impact of use of ICT". I think I stand somewhere in between. In absolute terms it exists but relatively it is more diffuse. This is also the statement of one of the articles (Fink & Kenny, 2003) I've read recently.

In relative terms developing countries show faster rates of growth in network development than developed countries. This suggests that at present ICT growth rates, the developing countries have a good opportunity to leap-frog and catch up with developed countries, in absolute terms. The problem though can still be the benefits of ICT. Penetration might be high but productivity growth in accordance maybe lower because of agglomeration, front- and backroom activities etc. There is no digital divide but a digital opportunity.

This view is very interesting in conjunction to the more pessimistic literature in the field of digital divide. Now back to reading and tomorrow the NIAS conference.

Our supervisor now has his own blog

Our supervisor, Sudhanshu, just send us a link to his new blog, and I thought that I would share it with the rest of you. The blog is titled "Improvise or innovate, which is which" and through our own study at CBS we have participated in a course about what innovation actually is. Again a subject which at first sight seems quite easy to solve, but as Sudhanshu enlightens it isn't. Go read and comment on his blog at:

http://stepbystepinnovation.blogspot.com/

In the weekend I read another couple of articles, always reading articles... And still feeling energized and happy about our subject and progress. And looking forward to our Master Thesis. One of the articles I read was about digital divide. The argument for a digital divide goes something like this: ICT is good and enables economic growth. As people in the developed countries have access to ICT and people in less developed countries do not, we have a digital divide, where the economic performance between counties will only become bigger. The solution to development is then to provide people with ICT. The article argues against a digital divide in the following way: it is by no means enough to just provide ICT, the software provided needs to be contextualised to be relevant (specific prises for farmers or fishermen), people must to be educated to use ICT and perhaps the society needs to change to educate and empower it's population.

We already acknowledged this dilemma when we took the course ITI last fall. What was interesting in this article, was that it used the dilemma of literacy<->illiteracy, in precisely the same way as the digital divide, talking about this dilemma also not being a literacy divide, but being much more nuanced. As our current research focus is to do ICT for illiterate this article has provided us with a a starting ground for articles talking about what illiteracy actually is, hereby saving us from some time to do literary searching. And no we can't just use Google to search for articles...

NIAS 40th Anniversary

On Tuesday, 16 September 2008, Thomas and I will attend a conference in Copenhagen together with Sudhanshu in celebration of Nordic Institute of Asian Studies (NIAS) 40th Anniversary in conjunction with the launch of Copenhagen University's new Asia Dynamics Initiative.

Four international Asia scholars will be keynote speakers in the conference entitled: "Asia in the 21st Century – New Perspectives". The conference will be opened by the Danish Foreign Minister, Per Stig Møller and Copenhagen University's Pro-Rector, Lykke Friis.

After the conference, NIAS and Copenhagen University's Asia Dynamics Initiative will host a reception for invited guests. We are not sure that we are invited to the reception but Sudhanshu are convinced that he will get us in :-)

Funding, common sense and scientific knowledge

Blogging this week has been a little bit slower than last week. We'll have to see how many interesting entries we can do each week. I think we'll aim for at least two entries each week. One from each. Hopefully more.

This week started out with a meeting Monday morning with Eva. The agenda of the meeting was for us to get a sense of how Eva and Stine managed their Master Thesis “Social empowerment through ICT-education: an empirical analysis of an ICT-educational program in Tanzania". As the title suggest they went to Tanzania last year to collect their empirical data, and we discussed how their trip went and how they applied for funds. We are beginning to see how complicated applying for funds are. Each fund wants it's own kind of documentation, which is rather time consuming. Hopefully our hard work pays off, with our own trip. We also talked with Eva about the positive and negative things in how they developed their master thesis. All in all we had a good meeting, with recommendations and things to look out for.

The rest of the week has gone with reading articles primarily about what development is. Which at first glance might look like an easy answer, but which is isn't. Some will argue that development is all about alleviating poverty and others e.g. that it is gaining freedom. An easy solution would be to make a new meta-synthesis with all these different views on development put together in a new embracing position. The problem is that each view, values different things. If we take China as an example, can they be considered developed in the sense of alleviating poverty? In the sense of freedom? If we must answer no in the sense of freedom, has freedom then anything to do with development? Are the democratic values that Western societies treasure so much irrelevant in the context of development? Of course the terms poverty, freedom and democracy must be examined further, as their meaning is highly overloaded. What do I actually mean by using these words? Now we are entering the field of communication, so I'll stop for now.

Last week I wrote about reading an article discussing the possible differences between the knowledge of indigenous and western science. Some would say using 34 pages on concluding that there are no profound difference and it all comes down to context should be common sense and not least a clear waste of my time. On the basis of the mentioned perspectives on e.g. development it has hopefully been made clearer why writing 34 pages might be necessary to explain ones actual view and also provide some empirical evidence for it. By using a stated methodology to express you view, you actually provide scientific knowledge. By choosing not to state your methodology, you might actually say something which is common sense and useful, but have you created new knowledge? At least not in a scientific way.

What we do...

Some family members, friends and colleagues think that we are dynamite computer scientist, wizards, geeks, or you name it. We will come up with a new fancy software package or hardware thingy - developed in mind, programmed and shaped by hand. That will almost certainly not be the case though. We don't expect to write one single line of code. Both Thomas and I come from that line of business and worked there several years before going back to school. We wouldn't want to change that but today our focus is just different. The purpose of going back was to go in a new direction and we have. Almost from day one.

Our interest today is what encapsulates ICT and makes it a success or failure. People. Human beings. You, us and properly your annoying neighbor as well. That is not unusual for a cand. merc. dat. student. Even though some end up as programmers/developers most graduates end up as project manager, consultants etc. in that line of business. And damn good ones. Understanding people in the context of ICT and vice verse. But most are practitioners. They use their skills acquired from management-, organization- and strategy-related courses. Meta-theoretical courses, such as "Philosophy and Sociology of science and methods", are usually not so popular. We know! We have been instructors in one of these :-)

What Thomas and I do best (not compared to other but compared to ourselves) is to combine the more practical theory with reflection on a meta-theoretical level and utilize it to extend and create knowledge. You could argue that this is the case for all academics but it varies a lot in our opinion. Practitioners often lack this insight. This is not a critique but what we do different from most others we know.

What does all that mean for our master thesis? Well, as said we won't be designing a new software package or hardware thingy physically. Design is definitely not our strong side so be grateful for that :-) We won't be making a strategy and road map for an ERP implementation in a mid size Danish manufacturing company either. To many master theses, books and articles already covers this. No fun in meta-synthesis really :-)

ICT4D is still a rather unexplored field and theory scattered. No books or journals will cover our topic in any sense and give us an easy recipe to establish theoretical viability, methodological reliability and so on. Currently we have a vague idea of research questions and working our way through the scattered theory on ICT4D. At some point this should narrow down our research questions, enable us to propose our theory, and by methodological considerations go out and collect our data, analyze it and end up with a conceptual idea for improvement to status quo. Bottom line, we are not developing software or hardware but conceptual ideas hopefully, grounded in theoretical and empirical research.

I actually wrote this post to outline in a simple way what we will be doing and not doing. Right now I fear to have caused some confusion but I'm sure it will become much clearer along the way :-)

New facebook group

The first week with four days allocated solely for our master thesis project is about to be over. We have made good progress on our funding raising quest. Several funds have encouraged us to apply.

As a consequence of the four days our actual literature reading is speeding up. Today I read an article about possible differences between the knowledge of indigenous and western science. The articles main point is that profoundly there are no differences. Whatever works or seems to work for people at that time is captured and preserved as knowledge. If knowledge at some point in time becomes useless it is discarded. The article thus proposes to think of many different knowledge systems in countries and areas around the world. The usefulness of this to us is that if/when we are going to India/Bhutan to collect data, we must acknowledge that the data we collect will be "coloured" by our way of thinking and collecting data. There is no neutral standing point for us to stand on and observe. Even though the article is solely about development, it is also utterly important for us to remember when designing ICT interfaces.

At our weekly Thursday meeting with Sudhanshu we introduced him to Google Doc. Kenneth and I use Google Docs extensively to share information between us. It will be interesting to see what Sudhanshu thinks about it.

As the title suggest we have created our own Facebook group, there people who supports us can sign up. Please do. Now. :) Here is the link. This way we can see if anybody at all is interested in our work. We will definitely use it to find comfort when the progress on our Master Theses seems to have stopped.

To night I will go to Fælledparken to participate in DHL stafetten with friends and family. DHL stafetten is a social running of 25 km where 5 people each runs 5 km. You know going to a country with as high mountains as Bhutan, requires that you are fit.

Have a nice weekend.

Starting up in August

Spring 2008 was crazy for both of us. We had a full 30 ETCS semester with two courses and two term papers where we had full responsibility for course plan and reading list with no lecturer or professor. One of them was even an advanced study in "Semiotic Philosophy and IT". Next to that we took up the challenge to be instructors on the cand. merc. dat. course of "Philosophy and Sociology of science and methods". It all ended like a fairytale but we needed a loooong summer break to recharge the batteries.

Fortunately we had contact with Sudhanshu Rai in late June and were privileged to have him as a supervisor for our master thesis. The overall idea for the thesis was also discussed. July was a month totally off from studies and August was decided to be a slow starting month.

In August we have been meeting two or three times a week discussing all the details about the topic, making project appetizers, initial framing, context and discourse, and talking quite a lot about going to India and Bhutan :-)

Such a trip doesn't come along by itself so of course we have also spend a lot of time looking for funding. Sudhanshu and a former master thesis student on ITU, Eva, has been very helpful. No money has been raised yet but they will come. They have too!

An evolving ready list of articles, books and academic papers is also looking better and better. Currently more than 1500 pages in +50 articles are being processed.

This is where we are. We now have lift off! Don't worry. We have brought both oxygen and medical kits with us. Watch us fly high and low the next 6-7-8 months or what ever it will take us! :-)

ICT4D and us

Why create a blog for your master thesis you might ask? Properly a good idea if you are writing about blogging but we're not. We are writing about people who most likely doesn't even know what a blog is. Well, from our point of view it's actually very simple. First of all we want to document our process of writing the master thesis. It is common practice to include documentation of your work process with the written master thesis and we think this blog will be a good collection of data to write a summary later on.

Secondly we want to keep family, friends, colleagues etc. posted on our progress and our well being, ups and downs, happiness, sadness, confusion, anger and so on.

Thirdly we hope this blog will enable us to engage in an enriching dialogue with all of you. We will have a lot of crazy ideas, questions etc. as we go along and feedback will be much appreciated. Feel free to ask questions in Danish.

Now, what are we really studying and writing our master thesis about? Well, it all started in the fall of 2007 when both of us signed up for the cand. merc. dat. course "IT, Institutions and Development" with the Indian professor Dr. Sudhanshu Rai.

Most people think that development (not to be mistaken as software development!) and information and communications technology (ICT) has no linkage. A poor Tanzanian, Vietnamese, Bhutanese man, woman, boy or girl don't have a computer and they don't need it. They need food, shelter and so on. But what if ICT somehow actually can be an enabler for this? Today there has proven to be a considerable linkage between economic growth and ICT. Economic growth is usually also linked to development. Of course it's not just as simple as that but ICT for Development (ICT4D) is being taken more serious now than ever.

The course really opened our eyes for a completely different perspective on ICT and that have stuck with us ever since. It was therefore very naturally to continue with this topic for our master thesis combined with our interest in philosophy, sociology, strategic planning and business management.

So what is our approach right now? As mentioned ICT is already applied as an instrument to development. India has a long tradition for software development already and new places like Vietnam is coming along. Here ICT have already made an impact on development. Most of this is unfortunately limited to urban development. In remote villages in the Bhutanese highland the population is far from everything and most of them are illiterate. They have no usage of ICT, as ICT today requires literary skill such a reading and writing. But is ICT really limited to this? Can ICT be applied differently to empower illiterate people in developing countries with knowledge gain and transfer, democratic participation and more. This is what our master thesis will be about!

Are we the utterly philanthropic in our approach? No, ICT4D is not only charity but also business. Business for everybody hopefully.

So are we just going to read tons of articles and academic papers and write 120 pages about that and our own ideas? No! A large part of our master thesis will hopefully be a field study in India and/or Bhutan early next year for three till six weeks. It all depends on the funding we will raise. So if you know of any contributors please let us know :-)

Why in English? We have decided to write our blog mainly in English even though it might bring on more typos, weird language etc. and complains from family. But interest from abroad for our master thesis have weighted higher. In the pipeline we also envision some pod casting with Thomas on cam presenting much exciting stuff about our daily progress. That will properly be in denglish :-) Make sure to return for some of this fun.

We will end this long post with a quote:

"The potential of the modern information age seems overshadowed at every turn by the ancient forces that separate the rich from the poor." (Dertouzos 1999)