[Sigiii-l] Fwd: June 2010 Issue of " Information Technology in Developing Countries "

[M.J. Menou]

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Dear Subscriber,

Warm Greetings! The June 2010 issue of ‘/Information Technology in 
Developing Countries/’ is now available at: 
http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/egov/ifip/current.htm 
<http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/egov/ifip/current.htm>

The current issue of Information Technology in Developing Countries 
carries articles that assess the impact of CSCs in Meghalaya; examine 
the relationship between women and information technologies; explore the 
various ways through which ICT and its innovations can be used to 
transfer agricultural knowledge to the smallholder farmers; describe how 
India can become the leader of technology; that lament the fact that 
ICTs have not lived up to their full potential when it comes to 
development and delivering benefits to the poor; and describe the 
efforts taken by the Government in Botswana to implement e-governance.

The first article "BASIX: Promoting Microfinance and Rural Livelihoods 
in Meghalaya through Common Service Centres (CSCs)" by Chilman Jain and 
Shivam Kataria investigates the impact of Common Service Centres (CSCs) 
in Meghalaya as a part of their consulting project at BASIX. A case 
study approach is adopted and the impact has been analyzed based on the 
two theoretical frameworks. The findings suggest that implementation of 
CSCs has led to Easy access to various e-services, improved service 
delivery process and helped in entrepreneurship development. The study 
concludes that BASIX has adopted a right strategy in collaborating with 
the village community through a public-private-people partnership.

This is followed by an article on “Information Technologies and Women" 
by Dr Emine Demiray which examines the relationship between women and 
Information Technologies and attempts to understand the personal gains 
of women from using different information technologies. It also 
determines through a survey conducted that how, why and how often women 
use information technologies, which were designed for men. The article 
concludes that women value information technologies as an important part 
of their lives, use them frequently, and are gradually catching up with 
men on IT use. The next article by Obayelu Elijah discusses the impact 
of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) on agriculture knowledge 
transfer to smallholder farmers in Nigeria. After careful assessment, 
the paper posits that agricultural innovations in Nigeria must be 
properly transferred to smallholder farmers for productivity increase in 
view of emerging information technology.

Korath Mathew's article on “Relativity of Technology... Unique 
Opportunity for India" discusses how lack of speed in adoption of new 
technology would prevent India from being a developed nation. The author 
feels that the real challenge is to bring about implementation faster 
than contemporaries to give the citizens and companies the real 
competitive advantage. This is followed by Kentaro Toyoma's article 
"Lessons of History" which emphasizes that mere adoption of technology 
is not important and does not accrue any direct benefits as is 
considered by any ICT project, what people will do or not do with 
technology will determine the success or failure of it.

The next article on " E-Government Implementation in Botswana: A 
Snapshot View" by Kelvin Joseph Bwalya describes implementation of 
e-government in Botswana and probes whether the e-Government endeavors 
embarked on by the government and different other stakeholders are worth 
it. It discusses the general perception on e-Government of ordinary 
people in Francistown (second biggest city in Botswana). It can be 
inferred from the study presented in this paper that the supply side of 
e-Government services in Botswana conforms to acceptable levels. 
However, the demand side is still at an emerging stage.

Conference announcements include the 6th Annual eINDIA 2010 conference, 
the 6th International Conference on E-government to be held in cape 
town, South Africa and the 2nd International Conference on Mobile 
Communication Technology for Development (M4D 2010) in November 2010 in 
Uganda.

We hope you will find this issue interesting and we look forward to 
receiving your feedback on the same. We welcome your contributions for 
the forthcoming issue of the IFIP WG 9.4 Newsletter. Interested 
contributors are requested to refer to the guidelines for authors 
available at: http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/egov/ifip/guidelines.htm or may 
mail us at: ifipnewsletter at iimahd.ernet.in 
<mailto:ifipnewsletter at iimahd.ernet.in>

The June 2010 Issue can be directly accessed at: 
http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/egov/ifip/jun2010/jun2010.htm 
<http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/egov/ifip/jun2010/jun2010.htm>. A 
downloadable PDF version of this Issue is also available on our website 
(URL: http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/egov/ifip/jun2010/jun2010.pdf 
<http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/egov/ifip/jun2010/jun2010.pdf>) to ease 
access and facilitate printing.

With Best Regards,

Editorial Team, IFIP WG 9.4 Newsletter.

Centre for Electronic Governance,

Indian Institute of Management,

Ahmedabad - 380 015, India

Tel.: +91 79 6632 4128, URL: http://www.iimahd.ernet.in/egov/ifip/wg.htm



-- 
Anuradha Parekh
EDITORIAL OFFICE
Centre for Electronic Governance,
Indian Institute of Management,
Ahmedabad 380015, India.
E-mail: ifipnewsletter at iimahd.ernet.in 
<mailto:ifipnewsletter at iimahd.ernet.in>
Phone: +91-79-66324128
Fax : +91-79-26306896

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