Zimbabwe’s Development through ICT

This our land, our Zimbabwe. We love our country we have the intelligence, we have the colossal companies Econet; NetOne; Mweb to name a few so where have we been going wrong whilst our neighbouring countries progress. Information Communication Technology (ICT) is one way to step it up a notch.

ICTs in essence are information-handling tools—a diverse set of products, applications and services that are used to bring into being, accumulate, process, distribute and exchange information. They include the ‘old’ ICT of radio, television and telephone, and the new’ ICT of computers, mobile phones, satellite, wireless technology and especially the Internet. With appropriate content and applications, these tools are now able to work together, and combine to form a ‘networked world’—a massive infrastructure of interconnected telephone services, standardized computing hardware, the Internet, radio and television—which reaches into every corner of the globe.

ICTs present a revolutionary approach to addressing developmental questions due to their unequalled capacity to provide access to information instantaneously from any location in the world at a relatively low cost. This has brought down global geographic boundaries faster than ever thought possible. The resulting new interconnected digital world heralds the fluid and seamless flow of information, capital, ideas, people and products.

Five characteristics describe the modern ICTs:

1-Interactivity: ICTs are effective two-way communication technologies.

2- Permanent availability: the new ICTs area available 24 hours a day.

3- Global reach: geographic distances hardly matter anymore.

4- Falling costs: relative costs of communication have shrunk to a fractional of previous values.

5- Multi-media: The digital ICTs permit the exchange of information in writing, sound and picture.

If appropriately deployed, ICT can help facilitate crucial economic and social development objectives in all sectors:

=> Efficiency gains: ICT reduces the unit cost of information by increasing the speed with which it can be collected, maintained, and disseminated.

=> Scrapping of technology import duties in Zimbabwe and the global decreasing cost of ICT products, makes access more widespread. At the same time, the non-proprietary nature of the internet makes more information available to everybody.

=> ICT applications enable the linkage to global markets, groups, and organizations.

=> Because it makes information freely available to all, ICT is potentially empowering and democratizing.

=> The faster information flow and its public availability combine to create greater transparency and accountability in the functioning of organizations.

=> New ICT applications, especially using mobile technology, can deliver services to remote, otherwise unreachable locations. An example: GPRS which is yet to be officially introduced in the country.