digital divide

21 st century is the century of Hi-Tech. Recently Hi- Tech comprises IT, ICT, BT and Nano-Technology. Today ICT (Information Communication Technology) is a unique technology which is used universally in all span of life. ICT plays a predominant role in the creation and development of knowledge. The ICT revolution has changed the learning process of childhood up to the real world. E-learning is a combination of learning services and technology to provide high values. Internet plays a vital role in e-learning. Elearning is attaining significance in the world of internet.

Despite the political turmoil that had swept up the region over the past two years, the Arab world continued to make significant progress in the adoption of information and communication technology (ICT) in 2011, taking big strides towards enhancing ICT infrastructure and performance. Driven by the GCC's remarkable mobile penetration figures, mobile phone subscriptions in the Arab world nearly matched the region's population – to reach 346 million as of end 2011.

This publication, the first of South Asia Department’s South-South learning series, aims to showcase lessons, replicable practices, and other insights which development practitioners can learn from, and apply in, the context of their respective countries. Projects discussed here represent various sectors such as energy, urban development, transport, information and communications technology (ICT), irrigation, and disaster risk reduction.

From 2007 up until early 2011 Spider supported various gender-focused initiatives that sought to uplift women particularly in the rural regions of the global south. This report offers an analysis of the impact on the lives of the women that participated in the projects. The publication covers five different projects carried out in six different locations.

From activists in Egypt to coffee farmers in Colombia, the Internet has transformed the lives of billions of people. It functions as a gateway to ideas, resources, and opportunities that never could have been realized before. All around the world, the Internet is helping people to imagine new possibilities—and then, to make them happen. But women and girls are being left behind. On average across the developing world, nearly 25 percent fewer women than men have access to the Internet, and the gender gap soars to nearly 45 percent in regions like sub-Saharan Africa.

Although improved access to ICT has been put forward as a possible pathway from poverty, the mechanisms by which this takes place remain unclear. This is partly due to the need to further develop the conceptual and methodological tools necessary for such analysis. This article suggests a way in which indicators of multidimensional poverty can be incorporated into the analysis of access to ICT. Using data from four countries in East Africa, households without ICT are found to be poorer in all dimensions than those with ICT.

This report explores the ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) can contribute to efforts towards meeting child-focused development goals. The diffusion of ICTs has been highly uneven, and it is clear that digital divides not only trace but can also further deepen existing social divides, between income-rich and income-poor, between urban and rural dwellers, between women and men, and girls and boys. The report therefore supports UNICEF in efforts to further develop and disseminate good practice regarding ICT4D and children.

This article attempts to quantitatively measure the various influences on mobile phone adoption at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Thailand. Based on an existing theoretical framework, adoption is modeled by fitting a logit model to a large sixcountry dataset. The study finds evidence for the importance of social influence in mobile adoption in two modes: one that exerts pressure on individuals to adopt, and another that helps to generate benefits via social networks that are tied in with economic and business networks.

This report analysis the status of mobile technology in the world, acknowledging that despite the growth and increasing pervasiveness of mobile networks over the last decade, there is still a section of the population with minimal or no coverage. There have also been experimentswith alternative connectivity technologies backed and promoted by big internet players.