Reclaiming Information and Communication Technologies for Development

by Tim Unwin

The development of new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) has transformed the world over the last two decades. These technologies are often seen as being inherently 'good', with the ability to make the world better, and in particular to reduce poverty. However, their darker side is frequently ignored in such accounts.

ICTs undoubtedly have the potential to reduce poverty, for example by enhancing education, health delivery, rural develop and entrepreneurship across Africa, Asia and Latin America. However, all too often, projects designed to do so fail to go to scale, and are unsustainable when donor funding ceases. Indeed, ICTs have actually dramatically increased inequality across the world. The central purpose of this book is to account for why this is so, and it does so primarily by laying bare the interests that have underlain the dramatic expansion of ICTs in recent years. Unless these are fully understood, it will not be possible to reclaim the use of these technologies to empower the world's poorest and most marginalised.

244 pages, Hardcover

Published July 25, 2017

About the author

P.T.H. (Tim) Unwin is UNESCO Chair in ICT4D, Director of the ICT4D Collective and Professor of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He also serves as Chair of the Commonwealth Scholarship Commission in the UK, and Academic Advisor and External Examiner for the Institute of Masters of Wine.
From 2001-2004 he led the UK Prime Minister’s Imfundo: Partnership for IT in Education initiative based within the Department for International Development, and from 2007 he was Director and then Senior Advisor to the World Economic Forum’s Partnerships for Education initiative with UNESCO. He was previously Head of the Department of Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London (1999–2001), and has also served as Honorary Secretary of the Royal Geographical Society (with The Institute of British Geographers) (1995-1997).
He has written or edited 15 books, and more than 200 papers and other publications, including "Wine and the Vine" (Routledge, 1991), "The Place of Geography" (Longman, 1992), as well as his edited "Atlas of World Development" (Wiley, 1994) and "A European Geography" (Longman, 1998). His research has taken him to some 25 countries across the world, from Estonia to Sierra Leone, and Ethiopia to Singapore, and he has worked on subjects as diverse as the role of banknotes as expressions of national identity, and the historical-geography of viticulture and the wine trade.
Over the last decade his research has concentrated on information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D), focusing especially on the use of ICTs to support people with disabilities, and to empower out of school youth. His latest collaborative book, entitled simply ICT4D, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2009.
In 2011, he received a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, UK-China Fellowship for Excellence, and is a Visting Scholar at Peking University. He has also received a Royal Holloway Individual Teaching Award in 2006, and in 2011 received an Apple for the Teacher Award from the Student Union at Royal Holloway.