Fono,

What’s up, man? I just had a read of your blog. The “WHYCT for development” post caught me, as I too, have wondered about the theme.

Let me put it this way. Yesterday was a holiday in Bangladesh, the day this young nation proclaimed its independence from Pakistan in 1971. The following months were tragic and heroic: Pakistan began a systematic genocide of its ethnically Bengali citizens; freedom fighters gave their lives in a war that eventually resulted in Bangladesh’s full independence from Pakistan. Bangladesh’s birth was extraordinarily and uniquely violent.

As I wandered through the city yesterday, people of all kinds were on the streets. There were the phuchka and chanachur sellers pressing for holiday business, there were students milling about their university campus, there were couples sitting close together under the shade of trees at an outdoor cafe.

And then there were the unseen: blind beggars working traffic jam queues, people living in street-side bamboo huts with all their meager possessions on display, and finally, people I would describe as the most destitute in this terrible hierarchy: those who had just laid down on some section the sidewalk, under the naked sun of a 35C day and in 80 per cent humidity, their skin dirty and crusted and their hair matted and greasy. Other times I see dogs curled up on sidewalks in just the same way.

This is naked, ruthless and unforgiving poverty, on display in the capital of a country with 140 million plus lives. And these people deserve better. Their lack of human dignity is a blight on our beautiful world. What does our work in ICT have to do with any of this?

My answer is that ICT has everything to do with development work.

ICT offers a unique opportunity of access to information—for those who can participate in it, at least. Even better, ICT helps to make development work far more efficient. As you mention, our goal at VSO is to support the organizations that do the development work—we are not the ones doing the heavy lifting. To increase the capacity of our partners is to create local change, change that happens on the ground and comes from the people who we work with. And above all, this is change that stays behind after we leave. These organizations need more profile, they need to have an existence in the global ethos, they need to participate in the wider world and access its resources. ICT is one of the best means for doing this.

For all the thousands of dollars it cost to send me here, I believe that I am an agent of this change and I can see it in the work I do. The change is not big, nor is it even that impressive in the big picture. But I know that the partners I work with here are better off for my presence. I know that the work I do helps to level the global playing field. Yes, people here need more of the basics like clean food and poison-free water. Bangladesh has shown me that there is no end to this need, and the injustice of it all can be totally disheartening if you let it be. But people here also need to be free of ignorance: they deserve access to the means of improving themselves and access the world’s cheapest information resource—the internet.

For me, it is a not a question of why. It is a question of doing everything we can and doing it now. I think my partners and colleagues here in Bangladesh deserve nothing less.