Technology and Community Development
Technology and Community Development
TECHNOLOGY AND COMMUNITY DEVELOPMENT
KUMAH ERIC JUNIOR
MARCH 2009
ABSTRACT:
In today’s world, technology has invaded many aspects of human life. From its gigantic influence on our education and professional development, to the more subtle presence of little gadgets littering our homes, technology is almost everywhere.
The reasons for such pervasiveness would boil down to some characteristics that technology by itself possesses. One such characteristic, which is of major interest to many scholars, is the seeming lack of barriers to the spread of technology. It easily penetrates societies and even to remote communities, and once it reaches its destination and catches on, it becomes seemingly difficult to stop its spread. As a result of this, consumer technology like cellular phones, computers, PDAs, radios and televisions have become commonplace in places like Africa, even with all the barriers one would have envisaged.
Sadly, it does not need much analysis to realize that even though technology usage is growing rapidly in Africa, we still have numerous developmental problems in our continent. This is a situation where advanced technology is coexisting with underdevelopment in Africa. With all the power that technology wields, it will be a useful exercise to study the ways in which it can be used to solve some of those very problems it has come to meet. In essence, using our little gadgets to solve our big problems.
This is the background against which this study is undertaken. Asking whether our problems can be solved at all, then enumerating instances where development projects that utilize technology have been put to work, and concluding by examining the cases and drawing lessons from them.
CHAPTER. 1.
INTRODUCTION
The limits to what the human mind can conceive and achieve are increasing. More discoveries have been made, more things have been created, more theories have been proved and disproved, more machines have been made and more problems have been created. Scientific technology has been the driving force behind all these. Science has indeed proved to be a powerful tool which has touched many people and has shaped many communities.
According to the Concise Oxford dictionary 10th edition, technology is the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. Clearly from this definition we can see that scientific knowledge may exist theoretically but it only becomes technology when it is used in practical settings. For example we may say the knowledge of the rules of up-thrust and buoyancy is theoretical, however practical utilization of these rules to manufacture airplanes could be termed aircraft technology.
Again according to the Concise Oxford dictionary 10th edition, a community is the people of an area considered collectively, while development is explained to mean to grow or cause to grow and become larger or more advanced. By deduction, community development could be explained to be the growth or advancement of a group of people.
Today, the world has become highly technological, and things which in the seventies would have passed for science fiction are now so commonplace that they have almost become necessities. From every corner of the world, technology has global acceptance, it is ubiquitous and has the ability to dramatically change situations.
Any attempt to ascribe reasons for this pervasiveness of technology will have many suggestions, some of which are that machines have been proven more efficient than humans at some tasks, machines are less error prone, impartial and never get tired like humans. Another could be the increased sophistication of humans and the attendant need for equally complicated messengers to help us perform many tasks, which is linked to the interesting nature of technology that once a more advanced way of doing something is found, it becomes almost unthinkable to try to do it by “old fashioned” means.
With such large scale interplay of these and many more factors, there is little reason to be surprised by the sudden emergence of automatic machines to handle the little tasks of old; cleaning floors, washing clothes, cutting bread, mixing cake etc. the list goes on and on.
And that is far from all and the list of innovative possibilities is endless. In truth, some of these innovations have shaped the world and there are many examples to cite. The discovery of electricity and the radio wave both changed the world. Today, computers are changing the world even faster. Now with cellular phones, new opportunities have come and our imagination has become the only limiting factor. We can only wait for the next big thing to be created and who knows what it will be?
The picture of technological advancement is not a completely rosy one. Indeed, there are