Information and Communication Technologies for Development

I read an article in "THE TECH" by Diana Jue - It's a Big, Big World; The showdown. You can find the article here .

In the article she stated..."Politics — the art of getting things done — work differently in developing countries with weaker governments...I reflected on the fact that anyone can make up perfect solutions, but their real life implementation, constrained to conditions like budget and corruption, is incredibly difficult"

Yes, this is an ICT class and we are concentrating on technology. But after all is said and done, what happens to the politics? If the rulers decide the solution will not be implemented, does that mean all that effort has gone down the drain?

Part of the principles we have learnt in class is to take cognizance of the target environment whilst designing the solution. This has spurred things like the "store and forward solution" where having determined that real-time online access is not necessarily a requirement, solutions can be developed to aggregate information and send them out in batches.

So now, I wonder, what about doing something similar for political factors? Is this possible? Basically, this would involve studying the target country and noting down things like steps, events, phenomena, etc that cause political "bottlenecks" and designing solutions around these things.

For example, if there is the possibility that certain officials will embezzle money generated from a certain solution, can the solution be designed so that it will be cashless. If solutions deployment can be hampered by excessive bottleneck in getting approvals, can a solution be designed instead which will potentially not require approval or can a solution be designed which involves specific type of materials which will thus put approval in a specific ministry which is known to function efficiently versus using a material which puts approval power in the hands of another ministry which will tie it down?

Can a solution be classified differently so that it falls under the purview of an authority that is not hampered or limited? This would be equivalent to the consultant mantra which says "Ensure that your project has C-Level sponsor'

This is just a thought...but then thoughts are what spur innovation