The document reality of an ICT4D program: missed opportunities

I have a lot of stuff on this blog on my analysis of the Millennium Development Goals, the United Nations Millennium Declaration and ICTs for development, but I never got around to posting anything about the research that came from it. Time to rectify the situation.
This post is about a document analysis of an ICT4D program that focuses on what Atkinson and Coffey (1997) have referred to as a “document reality”, i.e. how an organization, institution or other entity presents itself through the documents it produces. My results surprised me somewhat because they reveal what I feel may result in many missed opportunities for the ICT4D community.
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I chose an ICT4D program that is fairly well known and well established and set out to determine how its documentation reflects the role of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and especially how it refers to the MDGs to promote consistency and coherence among a diverse range of activities. I based my assumptions about the MDGs on my previous analysis that can be read here, here, here and here. Basically, this is that, in terms of organizational policy, the MDGs should be viewed holistically based on globalization, the knowledge-based economy and learning as core processes, with poverty reduction as a core issue and goal, to maximize potential cross-cutting benefits of ICTs. For example, let’s say that we have an initiative that focuses on a specific health issue. ICTs may have a specific role to play in the initiative, but because ICTs are not context specific (they’re just very flexible communication technologies that can be used in any number of ways) it’s important that an initiative try to relate specific goals to broader issues to emphasize the flexibility of ICTs. So, let’s say our initiative concerns the development of a database on HIV related information. It should be made clear that the experience and knowledge gained from this specific HIV related project may, and probably will, yield useful experience and knowledge that can be applied to other initiatives – ex. expanding the database to include information on other health issues or linking it to information on health services, etc. Then, future projects can also make use of the results of our HIV related initiatives because that element of expansion was built into the project in the first place.
When I started collecting my data I got a bit apprehensive and quickly started to think that this wasn’t going to be a very useful project. I had collected data and had a quick look through it and saw that it wasn’t really organized the way that I had hoped or expected. But, I was persistent and dove into my data, coding and recoding and reading until I practically knew it all backwards and forwards. Soon, I started to see a pattern and the pattern that was coming to light was rather surprising.
What I saw was that this program, though they referred to the MDGs routinely, didn’t seem to have really thought the MDGs through and the way they were presented in the documentary evidence was very inconsistent across the themes. Nevertheless, in their work program, they claimed to be committed to the MDGs and that they specifically seek to promote coherence across their three main themes. So, they want to make educational projects relevant to entrepeneurship projects and vice versa. One would think that, since the MDGs address these issues within a single framework, they would be an ideal framework for promoting coherence within a program that is so deeply committed to them. The reality was that the MDGs were routinely mentioned in documentation on educational projects, but only referring specifically to MDGs 2, universal primary education, and 3, gender equality in primary and secondary education. The MDGs were not mentioned at all in the small selection of documentary evidence related to other themes.
So I thought, I’ll give them some flexibility and look for other indicators related to the MDGs, ex. globalization, knowledge-based economy, etc. As with the MDGs, these things popped up every now and then but not in a consistent manner. Certainly not consistent enough to reveal any clear cross-cutting benefits.
I started getting apprehensive again and thought, so what? Why does this matter? They still have an integrated program with themes that can benefit from each other. Isn’t the coherence and complimentarity just built into the program as a whole then? That’s when I got to the analysis of the output of some of the projects. Most revealing was a project that aims to collect comparative data on educational ICT projects in various countries. I had already analyzed the requests for proposals related to the project and noted the lack of, or limited, mention of the MDGs and relation to the core processes of globalization and the knowledge-based economy. What was so revealing about these documents was that the authors of the reports clearly wanted to relate their initiatives to the MDGs, globalization and the knowledge-based economy but the project gave them limited opportunity to do so. Therefore, these elements were sort of squeezed into the reports in several awkward ways and places that made them virtually inaccessible for any comparative analysis. Furthermore, if anyone wanted to use these reports to relate educational initiatives to other themes, ex. entrepeneurship and innovation, they would have to navigate through each and every different structure and expression of these cross-cutting elements.
So, what does this tell us? First and foremost, that the document reality that an organization or program constructs is relevant to the outcomes of its projects. The social reality within the organization may be very different than the document reality. In this case, the program studied does not have an exceptionally large staff and they must talk to each other at least every now and then – passing information along on what is going on within their own thematic areas. But, the social reality is not what most outsiders, which would usually include prospective project promoters, have immediate access to. For most of them, it is the document reality that defines the program and constitutes the structure that they will function in as recipients of grants.
For the ICT4D community, as with the bulk of the international development community, the MDGs frame and orient the current development agenda. It is important that these communities have a deep understanding of the MDGs and how they relate to development policy to be able to effectively contribute to the attainment of those goals. In the policy context it is not enough to refer to specific goals that can be related to narrowly defined themes. This goes against what the MDGs are intended to achieve, i.e. complimentarity and coherence of a diverse range of approaches. It is enough to point out the organization of the MDGs to make this clear. They are organized in a hierarchy in terms of their relevance as indicators related to other targets. The first target is poverty reduction because that is the primary goal of the development community. The subsequent targets, although no less important, are all intended to help achieve that first target, each in their own way. This is not to say that ICTs are least relevant since they fall under the last target. It merely means that in terms of measurable progress, they are in and of themselves the most intangible. This is why target 18 is so vague – it needs to have room to be applied to a wide range of issues, some of which may not yet have been identified.
We might ask, is it perhaps overly presumptious to think of the MDGs as a policy instrument at all? I mean, aren’t they just a set of indicators to measure development progress? Indeed, the MDGs do not constitute a policy because they do not attempt to say anything about how the goals are to be achieved, only what measures are considered to be evidence of progress. However, the fact that they emerge from and continue to contribute to broad discourse about development should compell us to relate policy to them in the context of current discourse. But, to do so, we have to view them holistically to be able to relate them to processes that can inform policy in such a way that it aims to address the entire hierarchy of targets. A policy may focus on health related issues, but if it does not attempt to also address educational, environmental and other health related issues in its general framework, its contribution to the overall goal of poverty reduction is undermined. The same goes for the ICT4D agenda. If ICT4D initiatives do not clearly promote bridging between goals, their contribution will be questionable. Current discourse on development and ICTs makes it quite clear that the bridging capacity of ICTs and the context in which poverty is measured are related to globalization and the knowledge-based economy (with an emphasis on learning and innovation). ICTs are the drivers of globalization and the essential tools of the knowledge-based economy. Therefore, the MDGs can be regarded as a policy instrument, but, to be effective as such within the ICT4D community, they need to be holistically related to globalization and the knowledge-based economy, rather than merely to narrowly defined specific development goals.