Social Media in the Developing Country Context

From Lakeinnovation.org

Social media and developing countries

1.) Connectivity

a.) Infrastructure and access: There have been lots of investment in this, but this hasn’t resulted in equal access. In addition to this, any kind of investment isn’t maintained.

South Africa example: companies and government are speeding up access – the World Cup has accelerated this. The biggest challenge from SA is the maintenance of this after the World Cup. Despite this, access is unequal. In Township communities less than 10% of people have connections at home – and mostly it’s via the phone line and it’s pretty slow.

b.) A secondary challenge is energy thanks to power cuts.

c.) The final challenge is the availability of hardware. The corporate world uses the country as a place to dump stuff. The cost of hardware varies hugely and you have to maintain it after that. Government regulations and tax incentives make this worse.

2.) The importance of mobiles

• big mobile penetration
• lots of younger people are well versed in using this kind of mobile tech
• what do you lose with the use of mobiles? Do you lose the ability to write?
• generational digital divide exists: other digital divides exist too: gender and wealth
• what skills is this really creating?

3.) Censorship

• in a number of countries, government censorship is obviously an issue in control of the web

4.) So what is good?

• Networking: people are using social media
• Research: finding info about the country
• People find ways around the access problem: using hotels, restaurants, generators, many people use on computer (so access isn’t always about computer ownership)
• Mobile phones are also a good thing – and they’re using the internet on their mobile phones
• Cable access is also improving
• Youth access is also positive

5.) What are the things that this addresses?

• political participation i.e. ‘Light Up Nigeria’ campaign on Twitter

• access to education and information

• economic activities/job creation: new economy around internet cafes, mobile phones, charges, typing

• using technology to create systems which governments/companies haven’t: banking and finance (m-pesa, kiva), m-pedigree, government and politics (Ushahidi),

• The ease of content creation can be a great thing for local production of film, news etc – you don’t just have to distribute western content: story telling around local communities and keeping local language and culture alive: particularly important in places where cultures are very aural

• You don’t even need the web: recording news on a mobile phone and passing it around. Hyper local media can happen on a really small scale. The importance of stuff that comes from the developing world; development is not about becoming westernized.