This blog is based on my input to the ICT4D-North workshop at Salford University. I was asked, “What are some emerging risks or blind spots in global digital inclusion efforts that we should be paying more attention to?”

One blind spot is how digital inclusion projects work as a form of ‘anti-politics’. As you know, James Ferguson argued that the development industry often functions as an “anti-politics machine”. He argued that the development industry oversimplifies complex socio-economic problems and offers pre-packaged technical solutions. This he argued that well-intentioned development projects fail to identify and address the root causes of inequity and even exacerbate them.

I think digital inclusion may be a form of anti-politics machine. It offers simplistic technical solutions that direct attention away from the root causes of structural inequality. It sustains the illusion that supplying more digital devices, digital connectivity, and digital literacy will produce a more equitable society. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite – here we are in the UK, in a country which has experienced decades of digital transformation – and yet we only see growing inequality and enduring digital exclusion.

I say this as a person personally guilty of promoting digital inclusion for over 40 years. Of all the people involved in digital inclusion anti-politics I am among the most guilty.

My first job in ICT4D was in 1988 providing computer training in the parliament of Nicaragua. For 10-years I ran digital literacy projects in Central America and later Southern Africa. Then for 13-years I ran an ICT4D agency called Computer Aid International which provided a quarter of a million computers to schools and NGOs around the world to combat the ‘digital divide’.

After more than 25-years of pushing digital inclusion, I began to worry whether providing countless millions of computers would ever lead to social equity. So, at the age of 50 I went back to school and did a PhD at the ICT4D Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London. Today as an academic I am now working on two digital inclusion projects – one on digital-ID and another called Inclusive Digital Public Infrastructure. I continue to be concerned that these grand global projects of digital inclusion might in fact be part of the anti-politics machine that contribute to directing attention away from the root causes of structural exclusion.

I have lived through multiple waves of digital ‘revolutions’ touted as was to achieve digital inclusion: the rural telecentre movement, the laptops in schools project, the mobile phone revolution, the development apps years, and now – God help us! – inclusive AI4D. Yet is seems to me that, so long as access to digital devices and connectivity are determined by the market – and by a people’s purchasing power – the rich will benefit most and the poorest are excluded most from each wave of digital transformation.

My fear – coming back to your question about the emerging risks and blind spots in digital inclusion is that our endless investment in inclusive digital development is actually a form of anti-politics that blinds us to the enduring fact that every wave of digital technology so far has reflected and reproduced familiar patterns of advantage and disadvantage – and continues to divert our attention from identifying and tackling the root causes of structural inequity.

I know that I at least am guilty of this.

Question 2:
From your work with participatory video and women in Zambia, how has your view evolved on the role of participation in digital inclusion work?
I think the role of participation in digital inclusion work could provide a way to address the anti-politics of digital inclusion.

In general, we see any inclusion as a good thing and we don’t ask critical questions like:
Inclusion of whom?
Inclusion in what? or
Inclusion at what level of power or influence?

In my research I’ve made a habit of developing very simple evaluation tools and frameworks. A few years ago, I published a paper that outlined the 5’A’s of Technology Access. It provides a simple way of systematically thinking through whether the principal barriers to inclusion in any population are about availability of technology, affordability of technology, awareness of which technologies exist, abilities to make effective use of technologies, or the necessary agency to adopt technologies. Although the 5’A’s framework has now been used productively across many sectors and in many countries, it only focuses analysis on barriers to digital inclusion.

We felt we also needed a second simple framework –to structure a three-dimensional analysis of who is included or excluded, at each stage of the project cycle, and with what level of power and influence. Often inclusion-talk is binary and quantitative – about numbers of people included. Inclusion analysis rarely includes power analysis. So, we drew consciously on the long history of participation analysis including right back to Arnstein’s 1969 ladder of participation to incorporate power analysis into inclusion assessment.

To do this we borrowed our IDS colleague John Gaventa’s popular powercube idea and we used it to develop a participation-cube. My colleague Jo Howard (who leads IDS’s large participation research team) worked with me to develop a simple tool (and co-author a published paper) on the participation-cube and what we call participation tracing. It outlines a simple tool to track what level of power and influence each actor has over decision-making at each stage of the project cycle. This enabled us to develop a much more nuanced, qualitative, and differentiated picture of inclusion in projects.

So, in answer to your question, about the role of participation in digital inclusion: I think that we can profitably draw on the very long and rich tradition of power analysis in critical participation studies – and use it to combat the tendency towards anti-politics in digital inclusion work.