Development is not a quality or attribute of a group of countries and not others. Like poverty, there is less of it in some countries than in others. Just like there is a need to reduce poverty in poorer as well as richer countries (with proportional urgencies, I would add), there is also the need to advance development in places where there is a lower degree of it (eg. using UNDP’s Human Development Index), be it in Missouri or Malawi.

The tools and processes to advance development will depend on the context and characteristics of a given place (eg. a poor city in a mid HDI country, a country with low HDI, or a region with heterogenous national HDIs). In our discussion, it’s about ICTs and ICT-powered processes.

I find questionable the tenet that ICT4D is necessarily linked to poorer countries (or developing countries). Would ICT4D exclude public health targets for worse off people in richer countries? What if ICT integration into public education systems in a lower-middle HDI country ends up benefitting its middle classes (think of Negroponte’s OLPC initiative)?

Fortunately, Amartya Sen and Manuel Castells give us a hand here. Sen, with his Human Development paradigm that favors choices and freedoms; Castells, with his Network Society paradigm that maps and connects nodes of production, power, etc. Merging the two together, underdevelopment becomes a function (or expression) of exclusion, and we´re conceptually freer to dispose of geography.

From this perspecive, ICT4D would be applicable to reducing or eliminating exclusion, wherever it occurs. The more intense ICT4D work, and possibly the better results, would likely occur in places of more intense and widespread exclusion. thus I´d advise against strict distinctions between the ICT4D field in higher or lower developing countries – such as those inferred by different terms.

So is is time for ICT4i?

In my opinion, ICT is a much broader concept than IT. Indeed, the “C” in communications is what I think that really matters and what makes ICTs more “human” than simply IT — it’s not only about managing information, but about people communicating with each other in unprecedented ways.

In any case, I would include IT4D in the same pack than ICT4D :)