ICT and Poverty: The San Bushmen

Earl Mardle uses the Kalahari Bushmen (the San people) to illustrate his point that there are flaws attributed to a technology-driven approach to poverty alleviation. He suggests that the alternative should be to "use technological capabilities to engage the economic needs and resources of the communities involved and create new opportunities out of existing capabilities."

The Kalahari Bushmen are an example of a community that has become marginalised by becoming excluded from their traditional nomadic range. Up until now, the San people have relied on their knowledge of where they live to survive comfortably. With changes including fences that brought new boundaries, they fell into poverty until a "CyberTracker" was introduced to them. This is a device that takes their traditional knowledge about the migratory movements of wild animals in southern Africa and makes it accessible by means of handheld portable computers. As a result, The San people's skills are benefiting the national parks, which can now reliably monitor their game stock.

Some of the benefits of this project have included a decline in poaching as well as preserving the Bushemen's knowledge about the landscape and species. It has also helped establish a base of information on animals' behavour patterns and migratory movements.

The tracker has taken what used to be a time consuming process into one that takes just minutes. A warden enters his or her data onto a handheld computer with a touch-sensitive screen. The information connects to a Global Position System where the data has a specific date, time and geographical location. The author points out that the CyberTracker brings down the net cost to the park authority while the quality of the information from the San culture improves.

The author makes the case that poor communities have their own economies and have developed their own knowledge that produces good information and that this is "simply in an economic or social or scientific language that rich communities don't understand." He states, "I do not mean by this that these communities have mystical knowledge to which rich Westerners are no loner privy, I mean simply that they could not have survived in their environment for many millennia unless they had a science, an understanding, a knowledge about that place that was intimate and precise and valuable." The author suggests that Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) can act as a translator in which case "we have to agree on a fair price for the information while leaving the knowledge intact and in the ownership of those who created it."

The author also provides another example of a product that the San people have used for generations which is now being marketed internationally. It is an appetite-suppressant called "P57" that comes from a desert plant known as Hoodia Gordinii. The San people have chewed it for "thousands of years" to suppress their hunger and thirst while on long hunting trips in the Kalahari desert. The South African San Council and the country's Scientific and Industrial Research Council (CSIR) signed an agreement and royalties earned by commercial sale of the San's ancient knowledge of the plant will be shared. The author points out that "engaging with the knowledge of communities in poverty, respecting that knowledge, and, wherever possible, using technologies to translate its inherent value into the revenue they need, is a practical, but subtle and difficult, good first step."

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