New report: ICT for Development: empowerment or exploitation?

From Barbara Filip on the ICT4D mailing list:

ICT for Development: Empowerment or exploitation?

- Has for background a rights-based approach to development
- looking at the value of ICTs from a rights and empowerment perspective
- report based on the Reflect ICTs project, with pilots in Burundi,
India and Uganda

Quote from the report:
"ICTs can be used to strengthen local traditions and cultures of
communication, but only by design: people need to appropriate the
technology and give it functions which suit their needs and motivations.
This requires sensitivity to the communication practices and prejudices
of the people in question, both in the way the technologies are designed
and marketed, and the way that they are chosen and introduced within a
project."

This is missing from many projects. Donors are in a hurry to show
results and they don't want to spend time doing truly participatory
needs assessments. There is an assumption that ICTs on their own are
"empowering" so that if you build telecenters, people will just come. I
don't think it works that way. It's not that simple.

I liked the fact that the document is written for non-techies (probably
by non-techies as well), but the appendix providing details about the
various ICTs is so simplistic that I don't know who is going to learn
much out of that. I was specifically looking for some mention of power
issues (meaning "energy" issues) but power in this document refers only
to power relations in the context of "empowerment" vs. "exploitation".