Conference draft: Paper presented to the
Chinese Economist Society Annual Meeting, Hangzhou, June 2004
New
interactions, new possibilities: transport, new information communication technology and the reduction of rural social
inequalities.
http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/newinteractions.html
Margaret Grieco, Professor of Transport and
Society, Napier University, Edinburgh
and Visiting Professor, Institute for African Studies, Cornell
University
Abstract
This paper summarises the existing global evidence on the contribution
that
a new
interaction between communication technology and transport infrastructure can make to
the reduction of rural social inequalities. It identifies key dimensions of social and economic
activities which can benefit from this new
interaction; it also identifies cutting edge projects and programs which have harnessed this new interaction in
the reduction of rural social inequalities. The paper concludes by indicating
the potential relevance
of such developments for China.
1. Introduction:
information technology, transport organization and rural development.
“In 2003, the Chinese government launched a
nationwide inter-county and rural highway construction program. Under the plan,
more than 5,300 projects will begin in 2003, representing 78,000 kilometers of
construction for a planned investment of 75 billion yuan. In October, the
Ministry of Construction (MOC) expanded the plan to 15,500 projects
representing 162,000 kilometers of construction at a planned investment of
109.5 billion yuan. This program is an important signal that China will promote
rapid development of rural highways in its efforts to eradicate poverty.” @
http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/reducingpoverty/docs/case-summ-China-ICT.pdf
“While much progress has been made, much remains to
be done. Some 30 million poor people in the middle and western areas of China
still must cope with poor transportation conditions.” @ http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/reducingpoverty/docs/case-summ-China-ICT.pdf
The evidence is clear: China is
undertaking major investment in the development of rural transport
infrastructure as part of its poverty alleviation strategy. Developing rural transport networks is at
the heart of the rural development strategy.
However, it is equally clear that the challenge of rural poverty remains
a major issue and the resource constraints on the near term satisfaction of
major rural transport needs are very severe.
In such a context of resource constraint, it is important that resources
are used efficiently. Constructing
rural highway networks can alleviate poverty in the construction phase – “Food
for Work” Programs have already been used within the Chinese transport strategy
– but in order for such highways to make their full contribution to poverty
alleviation other transport organization issues also require attention.
One such issue is the interaction
between information flows and the utilization of transport infrastructure.
Modern telecommunications are taken as a for-granted aspect of urban
infrastructure and transport organization but the application of such
telecommunications within rural poverty alleviation projects, programs and
strategies is often minimal, side-lined or completely neglected. Yet there is evidence from a range of
countries that information technology aligned with transport organization can
play an important part in rural development.
In respect of China, there has
been a recognition that rural telecommunications have an important part to play
in alleviating rural poverty:
“The next best
investment is rural telecommunications, which gives the second largest impact
on poverty reduction and the third largest impact on agricultural growth.” @ http://www.ifpri.org/divs/eptd/dp/papers/eptdp66.pdf
This recognition of the returns to public investment in terms of poverty
reduction within China is crucial. In fact, the returns to public investment in
rural telecommunications in terms of poverty alleviation exceed the returns to
public investment in roads in terms of
poverty alleviation.
“Investment in rural telecommunications has the third and second largest
impact on production growth and poverty reduction, respectively. Road
investments rank fourth in their production and poverty alleviation impacts.
Investment in electricity has the fifth largest impact on poverty reduction and
production growth. These investments in infrastructure (telecommunication,
roads, and electricity) contribute to poverty reduction through increased
nonfarm employment, as well as through agricultural production growth. The
former often accounts for more than 50 percent of the total poverty reduction
effect. Investment in irrigation has the least impact on both production and
poverty alleviation”. @ http://www.ifpri.org/divs/eptd/dp/papers/eptdp66.pdf
However, the interaction between telecommunications and transport
efficiency remains under-recognised.
Furthermore, the discussion that telecommunications can play in
supporting remote communities within China maintain their social and economic
viability has received little discussion.
2.
Benefitting from a new interaction between transport
and telecommunications: the global evidence.
The time has come to rethink rural infrastructure services and rural
development - and to factor in access to information and communications
technology. Rural infrastructure services can not simply be about village level
infrastructure or local rural transport networks. And the evidence is that in
many locations such a rethinking has begun – most particularly within Asia with
the Pondicherry village information
technology project in India and the
field phone developments of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.
Historically, physical transport and communications were poor in rural
locations as compared with their urban counterparts. Colonial relationships of
extraction left many developing countries with inefficient and highly
imbalanced transport and communication structures - fast transport corridors
were tied to extractive industries such as mining or export crops with little focus
being placed on developing nationally equitable transport and communications
structures post decolonisation. Providing modern transport and communication
structures in the post colonial period was an expensive undertaking with the
consequence that many locations in Africa, for example, are poorly served in
terms of motorised transport and electrical provision.
The prospects of solar power and hand held, satellite linked, digital
technologies open up new rural infrastructure services which can assist the
disadvantaged of remote locations to enter and benefit from the modern ICT
(Information communications technology) world. Through such technologies
information can be obtained on market prices which assist small farmers in
bargaining for the right price for their crops, medical assistance can be
summoned in times of crisis, better banking and credit arrangements can be
organised (both the Grameen bank in Bangladesh and the Self Employed Women's
Association in Gujarat, India, have begun to make use of these technologies in
reducing the social exclusion of women).
Both accessibility planning
(Edmonds, 1998) and mobility
planning are key in undertaking the reduction of social exclusion or poverty in
rural locations in developing countries. Accessibility planning would have
historically been confined to the range of services and facilities which are
physically provided within a locality: in the present, accessibility planning
can be expanded to include those services which can be accessed electronically
within a locality. A good example of
such a service would be tele-health which is now being provided in many forms in many countries across the
globe – remote islands in the Pacific make use of Information Communications Technology to enable remote
diagnosis of ailments and to set up programs of treatment (Pacific Basin
Telehealth Initiative @ http://telehealth.hrsa.gov/pubs/pacific.htm
) and the same technologies which are used to link remote islands can be used
to link scattered, remote mainland communities. Mobility planning should be concerned not simply with whether
roads are built but who can access them
and under what conditions: indeed, research into gender and transport in a range of countries reveals that women
often do not have the same access to motorized transport as men even as
passengers (Grieco, 2002; World Bank @ http://www.worldbank.org/gender/transport/
). There is increasing recognition within development agencies and within
governments that the provision of roads where local communities neither have resources
to maintain the road nor have the necessary income to travel on motorised
vehicles is problematic. Road building must be matched by measures which enable
the vulnerable to make use of such facilities before it can be viewed as a
social inclusion measure: historically this condition has not been well met.
This means that explicit consideration has to be given to transport
organization - that is to say,
attention must be given to developing resources and institutions which enable
local people who are meant to benefit from the construction to properly utilize
the highway facility. This may mean
developing credit institutions which can play an active part in the acquisition
of community vehicles or developing information facilities which permit the
full utilization of the existing local fleet of vehicles in a timely and
economic fashion.
The development of new fleet management technologies combined with
information communication technologies open up the prospect of new forms of
transport organisation in additional to conventional transport markets such as
community transport and demand responsive transport. The principle behind demand responsive services is that rather
than running underutilized fixed route services through technology vehicles can
be pulled towards the customer at the
point of need. Translated into the
developing rural village context,
villages with products ready for market can summon vehicles within the
local fleet at the point of their
need.
The new technologies enable a pooling of resources amongst a wider set
of communities in the joint operation of a vehicle or vehicles and enables the
multi-use of public service vehicles.
Integrated fleet management of the pool of vehicles within a region or
locality through new information communication technologies can be used to
address issues such as maternal mortality.
Information technology under such a mode of organization becomes as much
a part of the transport infrastructure as the road surface itself.
Although these potentialities are already present within the developing
context, and enacted within the rural
context in the developed world albeit as scattered projects rather than fully
developed transport strategies, the joined up thinking which links transport
development with rural telecommunications has yet to happen. Given the development of rural telecommunications
in China and the massive investment in road construction presently underway, it
may very well be that China is the location in which such linkages becomes
fully realized.
3.
Best practice projects and programs: concrete
approaches to reducing rural inequality.
Within my review of the field, I have found
no explicit discussion of the ways in which information technology is used to
coordinate travel and transport organization and there is indeed a need for
such a study. However, that information
technology permits the better coordination and scheduling of transport and
travel is a respectable hypothesis. As
a consequence of this deficiency in the existing literature, the focus of this
section is on best practice within
reviewed rural information communication technology projects (Grieco, 2002).
Within the developed world, there has been a
major discussion of the benefits that the new information communication
technologies can bring rural areas - the death of distance - and of the danger
of new information technology bypassing rural communities unless there is
direct policy intervention. There is a recognition that new information
communication technologies will strengthen urban bias unless effective
intervention takes place. There is a growing and parallel discussion in the
developing world and it is a discussion in which gender is a central theme http://www.unifem.undp.org/pap_itu.htm;
http://www.undp.org/info21/text/bg/b-dary.html.
The development of rural information technology infrastructure services in
India (http://www.mssrf.org/informationvillage/assessment.htm)
provides a useful example of current policy trends. In a group of six villages
in Pondicherry in South India, a
'project has established a hub-and-spoke model of data-cum-voice communication. The village centers can communicate with each other as well as to the Internet. A hybrid of technologies is used-wired with wireless for communication and solar with mains for power supply. The hub provides connectivity to the Internet through dial-up telephone lines, and the staff there creates locally useful content. The village centers receive queries from the local residents and transmit information, collected from the hub, back to them. An important feature of this project is the strong sense of ownership that the village communities have developed towards the village centers. The other key feature is the active participation of rural women in the management of the village center as well as in using it. A system of close consultation between the project staff and the rural users has been evolved, so that information needs are realistically assessed'.
The
Pondicherry model, like the Grameen Bank's fieldphone for women (www.grameen.org ), creates new expectations
in respect of the composition of rural infrastructure services and delivery. Within China’s official poverty reduction
statements, women have been identified as a target group (http://www.chinaembassy.org.il/eng/32276.html
): in this respect, the Pondicherry development is an appropriate Best Practice
for consideration.
Although
using solar power, the Pondicherry project also makes use of mains electricity,
however, there are rural communication infrastructure projects which do
not. The SELF project in Brazil provides
a particularly interesting example.
“The Solar
Electric Light Fund, Inc. (SELF) is a non-profit charitable organization
founded in 1990 to promote, develop, and facilitate solar rural electrification
and energy SELF-sufficiency in developing countries. @ http://www.self.org”
The SELF
project located in a remote area of the Amazon uses solar power, a satellite
dish and a lap top for a range of social and economic purposes. SELF’s own
summary of the project gives us an indication of the benefits achievable in
remote locations through solar powered information communication technology:
“The Problem:
Xixuaú-Xipariná is extremely isolated, accessible only by a 30-40 hour boat
trip from the city of Manaus. This isolation has helped to preserve
hundreds of species, making the Reserve an important element in rainforest
conservation efforts.
However, the viability of the Reserve crucially depends on ensuring that the local people are able (to lead healthy, prosperous lives in ways that keep the environment whole and flourishing. The Reserve's isolation—and lack of electricity—leaves the native Caboclo Indians with virtually no access to modern health care, education, and economic opportunities.
The Solution:Working with the Associação Amazônia, a group largely composed of indigenous Caboclo Indians, SELF has provided solar power and satellite Internet access to the previously unelectrified Reserve. The project was funded by the Ernest Kleinwort Charitable Trust.
Project
Successes Include:
·
Improving health care
for local people by electrifying the Reserve's new health clinic. The
solar-powered clinic now has a Sunfrost refrigerator that reliably preserves
fragile vaccines and snake bite serums. Solar lights allow emergency surgical
operations to be performed at night.
·
Furthering scientific
research and the cataloging of endangered species by powering an
Internet-connected satellite dish that helps the Reserve stay in contact with
scientific research teams.
·
Enhancing educational
opportunities for the local people at the Reserve's new school. The solar powered,
Internet-connected computers provide access to distance learning programs, and
adult education classes are held in the evenings thanks to solar-powered
compact florescent lighting.
· Advancing economic opportunities by coordinating eco-tourism and e-commerce ventures.
The Self project in the Amazon demonstrates
the utility of telecommunications
aligned with solar power to overcome dramatically inhospitable transport
circumstances. It also enables the
summoning of resources from a distance
and improves transport organization on the natural transport facilities which
already exist. It is a development
which is worth considering as useful in the context of extremely remote
communities: pilot projects along similar lines may be useful to consider in the
Chinese context of a large number of such remote communities .
4.
The Chinese context: preliminary indications
From the
literature reviewed, it appears that discussion of the development of highway
networks within rural China and discussion of the development of rural
telecommunications take place within different domains.
“The Roads
Improvement for Poverty Alleviation (RIPA) program was launched with World Bank
support in selected provinces in the mid-1990s. RIPA focuses on linking those
rural villages and townships which do not currently have basic all-weather
access to the existing road networks. In the case of Henan Province,
quantitative analysis resulting from an ex-post evaluation of the RIPA
components showed that remote settlements that had been engaged in subsistence
farming prior to the program had made markedly better progress in economic
development, social development, and poverty alleviation than comparable
populations in control areas. The number of vehicles, and passenger and freight
transportation developed quickly in the RIPA impact zone. With the improvement
of transportation infrastructure and growth of the farmer’s income, more and
more rural household purchased motors and vehicles to undertake nonagricultural
industries or facilitate travel. The improvement of transportation
infrastructure has transferred the potential transportation demand into the
real demand and boosted the development of passenger and freight
transportation.” http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/reducingpoverty/docs/case-summ-China-ICT.pdf
There is no discussion within this
document of the value added that a rural telecommunications component might
make to transport organization and to agricultural organization itself. Relying solely on travel along transport
infrastructure to obtain necessary information on market prices, potential
markets and for the scheduling of deliveries generates unnecessary costs and
substantial uncertainties in the context of a hostile transport
environment. The mountainous conditions
of parts of rural China appear to represent such a hostile transport
environment:
Among all transportation facilities, roads are the
most crucial to rural development. However, the mountainous topography in many
parts of China has hindered
the development of roads. @ http://www.ifpri.org/divs/eptd/dp/papers/eptdp66.pdf
These are the very conditions in
which information communication technology can operate as both a partial
substitute and an important supplement to the construction of physical
infrastructure. The evidence from China is that rural telecommunications is already positioned to play this very important
role:
Information communication technologies, as we saw with the
SELF project, can also be used to render education more accessible. The relationship between government
expenditure on education and the reduction of rural poverty has already been
established:
“Government
expenditure on education has the largest impact on poverty
reduction
and the second largest impact on production growth; it is the dominant
“win-win”
strategy. Government spending on agricultural research and extension has
the
largest effect on agricultural production growth, and the third largest impact
on
poverty
reduction. Government spending on rural infrastructure (communication,
roads,
and electricity) has the second, fourth and fifth largest impacts on rural
poverty
reduction,
respectively. These poverty reduction effects mainly come from improved
nonfarm
employment and increased rural wages. Irrigation investment has had only
modest
impact on growth in agricultural production and an even smaller impact on
rural
poverty reduction even after trickle-down benefits have been allowed for.”
Using information technology as a tool in the education of the most remote communities within distance education programs is worthy of explicit policy discussion.
China's rural poor are mostly
concentrated in the central and western regions, especially in the western
region, living in scattered areas in deserts, hills, mountains and plateaus.
These regions are characterized by the largest number of poor people, and the
deepest degree and most complicated structure of poverty. Of the 592
poverty-stricken counties named by the Chinese Government on its priority
poverty relief list in 1994, 82 percent are situated in the central and western
regions. @ http://www.chinaembassy.org.il/eng/32276.html
Third, development through
relocation, whereby poor households are persuaded to move from their native
places, where production and living conditions are exceptionally bad, to places
with better conditions, so as to help lift them out of poverty. http://www.chinaembassy.org.il/eng/32276.html
The use of information communication technology to service education and health needs as well as to provide routine information access for economic purposes and for the scheduling of periodic travel and transport could be used to diminish the necessity of development through relocation. Under traditional communication arrangements remoteness necessarily reduced high levels of interaction between the remote location and the predominant economic centers and regions: under new information conditions, this need no longer be the case.
Within
China, a strategy of “twinning” wealthy regions with poorer regions as mechanism
for mobilizing support for the poor has already taken place:
Mobilizing the whole of society to
assist with the development of the poor areas. To enlist greater social
involvement in this sphere of endeavor, the state will mobilize society at
large to take part in the poverty alleviation drive, in addition to the
resources provided by the government. In accordance with the
development-oriented poverty reduction program, further efforts will be made to
promote counterpart cooperation between the eastern developed coastal region
and the poverty-stricken western region, enlarge the scale of the cooperation
and increase the momentum of the relief work. It is necessary to encourage and
guide non-governmental exchange and cooperation at different levels and in
diverse forms, especially cooperation for common development between
enterprises. It is also necessary to give play to the important role of all
social sectors in the development-oriented poverty reduction efforts and
actively create conditions for non-governmental organizations to take part in
or implement the government development projects in the poor areas. http://www.chinaembassy.org.il/eng/32276.html
Rural telecommunications
and access to information technology can be utilized to heighten the
effectiveness of such twinning programs over distance. The twinning strategy of China represents a
cutting edge innovation in poverty reduction: combined with an appropriate and
explicit telecommunications/transport
strategy, the potential benefits are great.
5.
Conclusion:
rethinking transport based development.
In the
contemporary world, simply building highway networks without considering other
aspects of transport organization makes little sense. The simultaneous development of highways and rural
telecommunications enables historically disadvantaged populations to better
interact with distant markets and determine the demand for their goods and
skills; it permits the more efficient and more effective organization of
existing transport services as such interactivity can enable the better
coordination of supply and demand across identifiable time windows. In circumstances where the interaction of
cost and terrain combine to preclude high grade roads and electrification, the
combination of portable satellite technologies with solar power can be used to
enable information activities and economic activities within remote communities
and connect them with the greater economy and society. Trips made within such a
framework from and to remote communities can be more productive.
In the
Chinese context, the scale of the poverty reduction programme, the distribution
of the poor, the strategies already adopted for mobilizing society at large in
anti-poverty programs, the character of the terrain, all invite a careful
consideration of how rural telecommunications can be aligned with transport
development in effecting major social and economic change.
References:
Edmonds,Geoff (1998) Wasted Time: The Price of Poor
Access International Labour Organisation: Geneva http://www.ilo.org/public/english/employment/recon/eiip/publ/1998/ratp3/
Grieco, M. (2002) Gender, social inclusion and rural
infrastructure services. Final report: 14th June, 2002.
Prepared for the World Bank @ http://www.geocities.com/transport_and_society/ruralinclusion.html
People's
Republic of China, Information Office of the State Council , (October 2001) The
Development-oriented Poverty Reduction Program for Rural China @ http://www.chinaembassy.org.il/eng/32276.html
Shenggen
Fan, Linxiu Zhang, and Xiaobo Zhang,(2000) Growth and poverty in rural
china: The role of public investments @ http://www.ifpri.org/divs/eptd/dp/papers/eptdp66.pdf
http://www.acca21.org.cn/info21/comm/page6.htm
http://www.worldbank.org/wbi/reducingpoverty/docs/case-summ-China-ICT.pdf Shanghai Poverty Conference: Case Study
Summary