Tag Archives: Nalaka Gunewardena

At an ICT policy consultation meeting in Dhaka, organized by the APC (http://www.apc.org/), two participants prompted a much needed reality check for a room full ICT4D professionals. Mridul Chowdhury, a research affiliate at the IT Group in the Berkman Centre, Harvard University also a director of D.Net, kick-started the discussion with a presentation that questioned some of the key assumptions that that form the premise to much work in the ICT4D space. For instance, a lack of community information can be resolved by building a telecenter; poor governance can be solved by introducing ICT systems into governments; a lack of market information can be solved by building e-commerce portals. Chowdhury stressed that certain underlying factors had to be taken care of first; the information gaps that we’re really trying to solve need to be identified; the governance process needs to be reformed before throwing ICTs at it, etc. ICTs cannot solve all the world’s problems, and before one tries to throw ICTs at it, one should really assess whether ICTs are really the optimal solution. Nalaka Gunewardena, Director at TVE Asia Pacific continued the discussion in his aptly titled presentation, ‘Rhetoric vs. reality.’ He raised a pressing question: do good ..read more