If you ask the average Asian farmer if she would like to have a computer and access to the internet, as I have done in many Asian countries, you will probably be answered with a blank stare or a polite but bewildered smile. If you then ask if she would like to have better education for her children, or better health services for her family, or more opportunities to sell her produce at higher prices, or more information on how to increase her yields, or an easier way of contacting her family spread around the district, then she will probably “snatch your hand off” as the colloquialism of the country of my birth goes.

How is access to technology effectively converted into such tangible benefits for the majority poor and disadvantaged of the world? From the earlier experience of the times when the governments and corporations of the western world were the major users of computers, it was discovered that it wasn’t how much technology you had that mattered but what you did with it¹. The ability to innovate and re-engineer traditional practices was a key ingredient of achieving significant returns from investments in information technology. Now that the world’s citizens form the largest group of computer users, it is time to re-enforce this message. Recent interest in the problems of the digital divide necessitates development practitioners to understand this lesson, as attention turns to e-inclusion.

E-inclusion means employing modern Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to address the problems of the access-divide and social exclusion and to promote opportunities for economic and social empowerment of the citizen. It necessitates a shift in the focus from technology per se to promoting equal access to ICT-centred economic, social and cultural opportunities to disadvantaged people ². E-inclusion demands initiatives and actions focused on the challenge of reducing poverty and exclusion through the exploitation of the digital opportunity ³. The UN recently announced a call to developing countries to shed the emphasis on connectivity and access and to substitute it with a focus on inclusion for all groups in the population⁴. The European Union has similarly acknowledged that e-inclusion and social inclusion are highly correlated. Access to ICT tools, networks and services, and even digital literacy, are merely preconditions for e-inclusion. The issue is one of empowerment rather than access and empowerment is not an automatic consequence of access⁵. The default with ICTs is that their benefits will go first to those who are already advantaged, usually the educated urban minorities. It is therefore possible to narrow the digital divide without increasing social inclusion. Achieving e-inclusion requires the use of ICTs within innovative approaches to the problems of the socially excluded; poverty, poor health, low education, lack of opportunity and so on.

If innovation is important, where do we find it? As Jeffrey Sachs has pointed out, governments do many things but never for the first time⁶. But, we have seen an explosion of experimentation and innovation in the use of ICTs in poor communities, much of it by NGOs and small entrepreneurs, and this is yielding successful new models and a growing body of experience that can inform bottom-up development strategies⁷. C.K. Prahalad argues for the business opportunity offered by the millions living in poverty across the globe. His first condition however is challenging; there must be a mind-shift in the way we look at poverty. Rather than considering the poor as a problem, they should be seen as an opportunity to innovate⁸. Moreover, as Prahalad points out, contrary to popular belief, bottom of the market consumers accept advanced technologies readily; they are more willing to adapt to new technologies because they have nothing to forget. Combined with the increasingly lower costs of technology, innovations in business models appear to hold great promise for placing ICT within gainful reach of the world’s poor. Yet there is much in development practice that prevents this from happening.

Conventional approaches to the diffusion of ICTs to the world’s poor, such as demand analyses, minimum subsidy auctions and market gap analyses, fail to adequately account for the innovation imperative. Poverty reduction programmes often emphasise capacity building whilst neglecting the capacity that is already in place. Linear cause-and-effect thinking and bureaucratic programme practices contradict the roles that relationships, vision and innovation play in sustainable development. Poor people are often in possession of valuable assets that they are unable to turn into cash, or which are exploited by others to their detriment. Superficial evaluations accentuate the presence and use of technology rather than its contribution to poverty reduction, which is harder to isolate. So called ‘failures’, from which valuable lessons can be learned and shared, go unreported.

The poor can and should be facilitated towards opportunities to innovate with ICTs. Innovation should be encouraged rather then avoided. As an example, consider the following. Poor rural communities, especially those that are remote and made up of indigenous or ethnic minorities - which usually means the poorest - are often extremely rich in natural assets; scenery, lifestyle and culture. They offer valuable experiences to sensitive visitors with an interest in authentic encounters with cultures that are markedly different from their own. As tourism is rapidly becoming a mainstay of the poorer economies, where it is growing the fastest, such communities have the opportunity to organize community-based tourism operations that generate important cash contributions to their economies. As the search for new travel destinations widens and access to the internet becomes more prevalent in rural Asia, there is an opportunity for introducing innovative pro-poor tourism practices that can benefit from the use of ICTs.

Asian Encounters is a social entrepreneurial initiative that combines a new style of tourism with a new style of community development and poverty reduction⁹. The new style of tourism is characterized by ‘geo-tourists’, ‘neo-consumers’ and ‘rich-packers,’ - one-time back-packers who have progressed in life yet still hanker for the travel experiences of their youth without being constrained by a tight budget. Such travellers are fed up with traditional and homogenous sun and sea vacations; and they are disturbed by the stark contrast between the luxury and opulence of the typical resort to be found in a developing country, and the surrounding squalor and hopelessness of the residents. The new tourists are socially aware and concerned that their activities do not damage the ecology of their destinations. They are attracted by opportunities to promote the preservation of the natural and cultural assets of their destinations, and they are particularly drawn to the learning opportunities that can be had through close and authentic encounters with other cultures.

Asian Encounters mobilizes suitable communities towards innovative community-based tourism (CBT). The visitor stays with a local family and participates in their daily lives. Their role is to make the residents happy. Simultaneously, Asian Encounters partners with, or establishes, community telecentres, of which many are now springing up in Asia, providing shared access to ICTs for poor people, but which often struggle to stay afloat financially. Asian Encounters then provides software tools in the form of a customised content management system that enables the community to maintain and operate its own web site to promote local tourism. The system requires only basic computer literacy to operate. We call this e-CBT. It is run from community telecentres that thereby directly target income generation, which provides a financial foundation for fostering further ICT-based innovations related to education, health care, enterprise development and agricultural improvement. e-CBT innovatively disintermediates the global tourism value chain by connecting distant travellers directly with the villages they visit, thereby cutting out the agents whose only role anyway is the transfer of information. Most travel and tourism operations are based away from the destinations to which they take visitors and they exploit and despoil the rural locations in which they operate, generating little benefit for the residents whilst subjecting them to the environmental degradation that they cause. With CBT, more revenue is earned by the people who actually provide the experience and who occupy the environment in which it takes place.

This style of tourism addresses an important and expanding niche market. It is the opposite of mass tourism, which is usually the primary focus of the industry and the national tourism authorities, and it is small in comparison. But it can be important to individual communities. E-CBT, as promoted by Asian Encounters, is a disruptive innovation. Mainstream tourism operators ignore it because it doesn’t generate revenues for them. Development practice, with a few notable exceptions, is largely sceptical of tourism as it has seen the damage it can do. Asian Encounters puts rural and indigenous communities at the front of the queue for ICTs instead of at the end, allowing them to formulate their own approaches to hospitality and entertainment, which are often at the core of their culture. The opportunities for such tourism are far more geographically widespread than those for beach-bound resorts.

E-CBT re-engineers pro-poor tourism and opens the door to e-inclusion for large numbers of marginalised communities. By restoring a sense of discovery in global travel, it generates incomes for large numbers of the poor, who are then able to appropriate the technology for further innovative applications. So as more travellers find their way into rural Asia, and they ask a typical farmer if she would a like a computer, we can expect that more will say “yes please” seeing an opportunity to promote local tourism and to implement their own innovative ideas for local development; health, education, farming and so on.