Top 7 Reasons Why Most ICT4D Projects FAIL

This video features interviews of development practitioners from African countries at the Information and Communication Technologies Summit held in Winneba, Ghana, in August 2010. The interviews seek to understand why commonly held beliefs about information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) are actually erroneous and provide 7 reasons while ICT4D often fails in the field.

Top 7 reasons for ICT4D failure:

1. ICT4D ideas/results are not directly connected to improving end user economic conditions;
2. ICT4D ideas/results are not relevant to local context, strengths, needs;
3. ICT4D ideas/results are not consistent with an understanding of infrastructure capability;
4. Budget planners underestimate maintenance costs and related issues;
5. Projects are supported only by short-term grants;
6. Planners are not looking at the whole system;
7. Projects are built on assumptions unconnected to participant input or are organisation-centric rather than planned for local realities.

Examples from the video:
#3 - "Dust, heat, lack of electrical energy for air conditioners are all issues that impact any project bent on bringing computers to rural areas. Gifts are good, but when they are dumped on people, even disposal becomes a problem."

#6 - "Giving plumbers mobile phones does not increase the number of actual plumbing jobs; it may direct the jobs to plumbers with phones, driving other plumbers out of business."

#7 - "It is essential to look at the strengths of the people you are working with rather than assuming that they have nothing to offer - look at the amazing interventions that people do locally just because they need things to work rather than simply import ideas from the Global North."


The video ends with a series of questions based on the 7 failures of ICT4D that development workers and funders could ask themselves before designing their next ICT4D project in order to overcome some the weaknesses and/or reasons behind past failures.