Engineering civil society: information and communication technologies and NGOs in Tanzania
Claire Mercer · 2004
The international development community has recently focused attention on the potential role Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs; taken here to refer to email and the Internet) can play in promoting democratic development. The ‘Zapatista effect’ has prompted claims that access to ICTs will strengthen civil society by giving voice to the poor and marginalised, widening popular participation, and encouraging informationsharing and alliance-building. Drawing on research carried out in Dar es Salaam and Arusha, two of Tanzania’s ‘most connected’ cities, the present paper critically analyses such claims in the light of the experiences of non-governmental organisations’ (NGOs) use of ICTs. In the first instance, only a minority of well-resourced, urban and/or international NGOs have access to ICT facilities. Moreover, NGOs are not using ICTs in the ways imagined by donors, who ignore the social, cultural and political contexts within which they would wish to embed technological professionalism. Access to ICTs has facilitated limited networking among Tanzania’s elite NGOs whose advocacy and lobbying activities have had some impact upon national policies. Overall however, the paper concludes that while donors may enjoy limited success in engineering an elite civil society, the political economy of the broader NGO sector, to which donors contribute in large measure, mitigates against the emergence of an electronically-networked civil society. Despite donors’ ICT fetishism, email and the Internet are unlikely to prove ‘technical fixes’ through which civil society is engineered.