Rural Romance—A term used by Nalaka Gunawardene of TVE Asia Pacific to describe the development community’s romanticization of battling poverty by means of arming the rural poor with cool gadgets and modern ICT tools.

Like Sheau Ching, Nalaka urges the development community to re-assess where ICTs can best add value to helping the world’s poor. While images of indigenous and farming communities using laptops and mobile phones can be alluring, is the return on investment being maximized? Nalaka insists that experts and activists act on evidence, rather than perceptions and prejudices to create a more multi-faceted reality of how to combat poverty.

For instance, what about the millions of urban poor in densely packed slums and low community housing that live right next door to modern sky scrapers filled to the brim with ICTs? The technology and infrastructure is right there, but out of reach for this forgotten population.

While ICT enablement of rural communities is an important task, it is as important that the urban poor, who can be just as worst off as the rural poor, are not left behind in the digital divide. Although not as dazzling a picture, spending funds to help provide ICT access to combat urban poverty is a cheaper task than constructing rural ICT infrastructure.

Especially cheap in light of technology such as wireless mesh networking, a potentially great way to connect urban poor living within a 25 km radius of each other, a project eHomemakers is piloting to help its women living in low community housing. Imagine the number of urban poor that could be empowered with employment and educational opportunities if only they had access to mobile phones, cheap computers, some training and technology like mesh?