Welcome to my blog! I am a fourth year Anthropology student, and I’m interested in how Web 2.0 might be used in the world of development.  I come into this project with some reservations about Western perceptions of development.  According to one informant, there are very few cases in which development occurs and women’s status improves.  This comment is somewhat disheartening as development should be all about empowering disadvantaged people, women being a large percentage of that population.  When it comes to development, my questions are: whose development? develop for whom? what objective? whose framework? what type of support or follow up proceeds the project? is it top-down or bottom up? All of these questions became particularly relevant in an FAO article I stumbled across when looking for development projects focused on the empowerment of women.

This fascinating little article, http://www.fao.org/sd/2003/Kn0506a_en.htm published by the FAO in 2003, discusses a literacy project for the development of rural women. It outlines a development project in the province of Punjab in Pakistan where 65% of the population lives in rural areas (This accounts for 72 million people). According to the article, 25% of women are illiterate and as the Bunyard NGO believes that the empowerment of women lies in literacy, they have established a education development project that aims to improve women’s literacy and in turn address issues such as high birthrates and poverty. Their program consists of specialized training and literacy training, which intends to aid participants in “traversing from darkness into light and improving their rural lives.”
Say what???? Okay, this article was published in 2003, and it not only smacks of Social Darwinism as it aims to civilize the primitive, but that seemingly innocent statement is inherently racist as it’s the people of colour who they are referring to as the primitives.  It not only perpetuates a Western hierarchical perspective in terms of civilized, but it also adopts the Western notion of the importance of education to “lead forth” the ”savages”.  Clearly, this development project is based on a top-down approach as opposed to a bottom-up focus.  Furthermore, while they appear to be improving literacy rates, they fail to address just what support will follow their program.  For instance, what access will these rural women have to reading material? 

We, in the West, may have some fabulous ideas we want to share with the world. But it might be fitting to ask ourselves how our notions of development fit in with other culture’s world views and experiences of the world.  In terms of the internet, how does it fit in with local cultural ways of communicating?  For some, interaction may be based on human interaction.  A prof I spoke to who works in Papua New Guinea speaks of villages that lack amenities such as electricity and telephones, let alone internet.  But communication is based on walking to a neighbouring village, sitting down together, eating, and visiting.  Not only do they not have access to the world wide web, but they seem to have little interest in the technology and what it might be able to do for them as their cultural form of communication is in person face-to-face communication. 

So, I wonder, is taking on the white man’s burden to spread the use of the internet the new form of colonialization?  Or, on the other hand, is it facism not to offer the internet to those of less developed countries?