Refurbishing the women’s empowerment strategy – The new ICT opportunity

This paper was written for the second IGF – Access Plenary Panel (Rio de Janeiro, 2007). It posits that ICTD models for poor people cannot be driven by financial considerations, and neither can they be demand-driven. Access to ICTs for the information poor has a very direct impact on their development status; consequently, ICTs cannot be conceptualised merely as business infrastructure. They instead need to be seen as development infrastructure. This calls for state intervention for creating an ecosystem which makes access to ICTs by marginalised communities a real possibility.