World Dialogue on Regulation

ICT deployment and adoption have been identified as fundamental to achieving development goals. Thus, progress and efforts need to be monitored and evaluated to feedback into strategy and policy processes. Traditional indicators used by policy makers in the telecom sector are blunt instruments – useful for crude comparisons between countries, but not for informing national policy and regulation. National teledensity rates, for example, say nothing about the disparities between urban and rural communities, men and women, or rich and poor. Nor do many of the available indicators capture the range of new network technologies, services and applications or account for innovative usage adopted by the poor. Yet another problem arises in situations where research has been conducted but the data is locked in proprietary databases with the keys priced out of reach of developing country policy makers and regulators.

This thematic area is thus concerned with developing and accessing indicators that can capture and provide information about penetration and use of ICTs in developing countries.

There are many established indicators for measuring the penetration of telecom infrastructure. These have been built upon to be extended to ICTs more generally, but are still limited in their ability to assess access as ICT infrastructure reaches into new contexts. Traditional notions of universal service, for example, do not fully capture access in terms of shared and communal use characteristic in rural and developing country situations. More generally, network technologies engender the need to count and measure new elements. This has already occurred with efforts to document internet reach (number of hosts, secure servers, computers per household, etc.). But again, this information must be refined to better measure and assess ICT reach into society – which may also occur through intermediaries, or despite the presence of ICT infrastructure, not at all due to other technological constraints such as insufficient energy resources, or laws and regulations which restrict usage.

The choice of indicators can have a significant impact on policy (and vision) for extending the benefits of  ICT infrastructure, applications and services to different sectors of the population. In this respect, gender is of paramount importance – especially for accounting for the women of already marginalized communities. The ITU, for example, is committed to gender disaggregation of its statistical indicators and this must be a priority for all existing and new indicator collections. Women’s access to technology may be prohibited or discouraged by physical, social or affordability factors. But these cannot be identified and remedied unless there is first information on whether or not women do have access. This concern – the politics and priorities of who and what is measured by  indicators –  extends to marginalised communities of users generally.

The indicators available can provide a snapshot of where priority areas lie: these may be geographic (e.g. rural regions, inner city), social (e.g. gender, youth), or economic (e.g. facilitating ICT access to promote certain national markets). Without clear indicators, there cannot be correspondingly clear policies or regulatory strategies targeted toward correcting these weak points in infrastructure reach.