ICT-Enabled Education for Poverty Reduction

There is increasing recognition that local ownership is critical to the success and sustainability of poverty reduction initiatives.  This requires creation of capacity at the local level.  While many countries have large numbers of agricultural extension workers with valuable intimate knowledge of local society and conditions, these workers often lack the needed breadth of knowledge and skills that would enable them to become effective creative problem solvers in their local communities and enable them to draw upon available funding.  A highly innovative new professional Bachelors degree program in Poverty Reduction and Agriculture Management (PRAM), developed under the Wetlands Alliance and piloted by the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Lao PDR, has shown the tremendous value of providing such training at the grass roots level.  A particularly unique feature of this degree program is the use of poverty reduction outcomes to evaluate student projects and to measure the overall effectiveness of the program. 

The challenge is now to find a mechanism to scale up this program in Laos and other countries.  ICT holds the promise to enable this scaling and at the same time link local and global agendas.  Private sector development in Laos, like many other developing countries, has begun to provide a viable ICT infrastructure in rural areas, including 3G Internet connectivity, inexpensive computing devices, and access to power through solar technology.  Under a strategic partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Lao PDR, UNU-IIST, in collaboration with the University of Bremen, has begun to design and build the software that will tap the potential of this infrastructure to support capacity building at the grass roots level in the country.  The system being built will form a repository for valuable local-level knowledge concerning successful poverty reduction projects.  It will enable extension officers to share this knowledge and professionally network with one another in order to create a broad peer-to-peer learning community.  In addition, the information gathered at the local level will be aggregated so as to inform policy and enable provincial and central offices to monitor the effectiveness of poverty reduction programs.  Building such a system presents novel challenges from the perspectives of computing, cognition and participatory design, creating rich research opportunities.  Because many developing countries have conditions and challenges similar to those in Laos, it is expected that solutions being developed there will have widespread applicability. 
 
Website of PRAM:
www.pramlaos.org

 

Contact Person: 
Prof. Peter HADDAWY