29 Jul
2005

















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     mantras, credibility and other gaps

The 1987 Australia Card arguably failed through poor marketing, hype about benefits or problems, disagreement within government and inept implementation rather than because a national identity register is innately bad or unacceptable by the community.

Over the past eight months moves towards 'Australia Card II' have been similarly bedevilled by uncertainty, conflicting statements by government ministers and federal bureaucrats, a failure to address substantive concerns about privacy and cost.

That has instead encouraged what one official recently characterised as 'scare-mongering', inhibiting an informed community debate about objectives, mechanisms and likely outcomes and recognition that identity registers/cards are potential building blocks rather than silver bullets for intractible problems.

We were thus interested to see reports that the UK Government has admitted "overselling" the benefits of identity cards. That "enthusiasm" has eroded the credibility of its plans and fuelled opposition, such as the No2ID campaign, that arguably has equally oversold the downside of identity registration and has spun some of the more nuanced studies such as the recent LSE report highlighted in our discussion of the Oz Card.

Tony McNulty, minister responsible for the UK card programme, has used a Fabian Society meeting to position the government for a graceful backdown, admitting that the card will not be a panacea for tackling terrorism, identity fraud, migration abuses or benefit theft.

Perhaps in the past the Government in its enthusiasm oversold the advantages of ID cards. We did suggest or at least implied that they may well be a panacea for ID fraud, benefit fraud, terrorism and entitlement, and access to public services.

Doh! So, it's on to Plan B: promoting the card as "a useful tool for consumers".

We have been arguing what the state can get out of it rather than what it can do for the individual in providing a gold standard in proving your identity. There are now many, almost daily, occasions when we have to stand up our identity.

     e-thiopia

Meanwhile the Guardian has blessed an example of digital divide silver bullets, enthusing about e-government in Ethiopia.

That state is supposedly spending 10% of its GDP on IT each year, with the expectation that government offices and schools will have broadband and that by 2007 none of Ethiopia's 74 million people "will live more than a few kilometres from a broadband access point". The Guardian does not indicate whether those people will be able to afford the connectivity or ask whether money would be better spent elsewhere. Don't ask difficult questions about misuse by local kleptocrats in considering the "dream to skip an entire generation of infrastructure by going directly to internet technology", with ICT providing a shortcut to development of commerce, education, government and presumably civil society.

Ethiopian PM Meles Zenawi uttered the usual grantspeak, saying

I want to see ICT pervade all our activities as a government, not just in the urban areas. We want to connect all our villages in two to three years. All education services, likewise. We would also like to provide a bit of telemedicine.

All very worthy, but digital cargo-cultism is to be regarded with caution after considering studies such as Exporting Communication Technology to Developing Countries (New York: Universities Press of America 1999) by Emmanuel Ngwainmbi, Information Technology in Context: Studies from the Perspective of Developing Countries (Aldershot: Ashgate 2001) edited by Chrisanthi Avgerou & Geoff Walsham, Information Resources & Technology Transfer Management in Developing Countries (London: Routledge 1997) by Richard Ouma-Onyango or Beyond Structural Adjustment: The Institutional Context of African Development (Basingtoke: Palgrave 2003) edited by Nicolas van de Walle, Nicole Ball & Vijaya Ramachandran.

As with ID cards, connectivity is a building block, not an end in itself.

In building Ethiopia's capacity it might be more effective to ensure that all teachers are paid - and paid at more than a subsistence wage - and ensure that all hospitals are stocked with pharmaceuticals priced for affordability by poor farmers, rather than enthusing about opportunities for telemedicine. It is a state ranked 114 on the global corrupt index (equal with Sierre Leone), with 41% adult literacy and adult life expectancy of 45. Last month the BBC reported on Rwanda's dream for Hi-Tech Africa (at its most simplistic, 'fibre will make the nasty genocide go away') and on the Eduvision project, where "textbooks are out, customised Pocket PCs, referred to as e-slates, are very much in" as Kenya "pilots handheld education".

A handful of students have been supplied with wi-fi Pocket PCs, characterised as e-slates.

The e-slates contain all the sorts of information you'd find in a textbook and a lot more ... They contain textual information, visual information and questions. Within visual information we can have audio files, we can have video clips, we can have animations. At the moment the e-slates only contain digitised textbooks, but we're hoping that in the future the students will be able to complete their assignments on these books and send them to the teacher, and the teacher will be able to grade them and send them back to the student.

Quite. Trivialities such as the unavailability of electricity in schools and homes for recharging the devices or the fragility of the devices relative to paper apparently are not of major concern. Studies in the latest issue of the International Journal of Education & Development Using Information & Communications grapple with some of those questions.

The Guardian might also have been more measured in its endorsement of Close the Gap, the Brussels-based organisation that

aims to contribute towards closing the digital divide between the north and the south by using the existing potential of people. By activating existing local talent, Close the Gap supports the (re)construction of African countries. In other words, Close the Gap does not provide development aid but reacts to a real existing demand.

Reticence about using the 'a' word is probably sensible, as a skeptic might argue that Close the Gap's mission of enabling businesses to donate used IT equipment to the Third World is as much about helping donors to get round pesky EU e-Waste restrictions (in a way that's perfect for corporate promo) as it is about activating subsaharan talent ... a digital version of sending cast-off clothing to the missions.



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