Source: infoDev

There is some degree of understandable skepticism about whether information and communication technologies are appropriate tools for addressing the needs and challenges of the poor, particularly the rural poor. Yet even the poorest people and families in rural areas have information and communication needs. More generally, technologies that reduce their expenditure of their few valuable resources (their time, labor, energy, and physical resources) and increase the yield from those expenditures could have a profound positive effect on their livelihoods and incomes. Innovations and tools that leverage their own creativity, and their own knowledge of their context, could benefit both their own situation and those of their neighbors and of other poor people elsewhere.