About the Author

Peter T. Knight is Partner of Knight-Moore Telematics for Education and Development, a virtual firm operating within the corporate framework of Communications Development Incorporated (CDI), a print and electronic editing and publishing company of which he is a shareholder. He holds a Ph.D in economics from Stanford University, and worked at the Brookings Institution, the Ford Foundation, and Cornell University before joining the World Bank in 1976. Before graduating from the World Bank to the private sector in 1997, he held a variety of positions including membership in the team producing the World Development Report 1980, Lead Economist in the Brazil Department, Division Chief of the National Economic Management Division of the Economic Development Institute (predecessor to the World Bank Institute), and Chief of the Electronic Media Center. In this last position prior to his graduation, he participated in the establishment of the Information for Development Program (infoDev) and was task manager for two of its first eight projects (Telematics for African Development Consortium and Toward an Open, Informed Telematics Policy Debate in Russia). As Chief of the Electronic Media Center, a small catalytic unit promoting the use of electronic technologies to conduct the Bank’s business, he became increasingly convinced that distance learning making use of the Internet and other electronic technologies is the “killer application” of the twenty first century and the single most strategic area for economic and social development. He brought his current Partner, Professor Michael G. Moore of Pennsylvania State University to work on a variety of distance education projects for the Bank, and in April 1997 they established Knight-Moore. A complete résumé and full curriculum vitae may be found in the Partners section of the Knight-Moore website, and information on projects undertaken in the Projects section. Peter has continued to work on infoDev projects, and was Task Manager for the CyberSchool Africa project as well as author of the present report.

Executive Summary

This report reviews eight infoDev projects in the field of education, seven of which have been completed, and one still in execution. These projects used US$1.9 million of infoDev resources and mobilized an additional US$3.4 million from other sources, for a total project value of US$5.5 million. These education projects accounted for xx percent of total infoDev grants during the years 1996-1999. The study was conducted entirely through the review of documents, website visits, e-mail correspondence, and interviews conducted either in Washington or by telephone. No field research was undertaken given budgetary constraints, though the author was familiar with some of the projects through previous travel to Brazil, Egypt, and South Africa.

infoDev’s staff, sponsors, supporters, and grantees believe that technology-enhanced education offers the single best potential for dealing with the emerging global digital divide which would otherwise tend to aggravate already unconscionable differences in well-being, income, and wealth between rich and poor countries and individuals. But have infoDev-supported projects helped to demonstrate this? We began with a set of important questions regarding how lessons from these eight projects might provide guidance for international organizations, bilateral development agencies, foundations, private sector investors, developing country governments and infoDev’s own management as it plans its work program for the coming years. We sought lessons to help all these organizations address the global digital divide and its implications for access to the knowledge needed for the information and knowledge poor to catch up with the information and knowledge rich in an increasingly competitive, increasingly knowledge-based, globalizing economy. It is perhaps pretentious to draw major lessons for such important audiences from so few projects, involving InfoDev grants totaling less than US$2 million. But we shall try, couching the lessons in the form of recommendations.

Recommendations for the global development community  

1.      A Global Service Trust Fund to provide access to broad bandwidth for education and health projects in developing countries meeting certain policy conditions is a proposal worthy of support by the international development community, and beyond the scope of InfoDev’s current resources, though InfoDev’s experience as a multi-donor grant-making organization operating within the World Bank Group might be useful for administering such a Fund, whether or not the World Bank Group is chosen as the Fund’s administrator.

2.      The cost of dialup telephone connections to the Internet, especially where “metered” time-based tariff systems exist, is a major deterrent to its use for education and training. Competition and flat rate tariff systems are the best ways to reduce this cost. The international development community should finance studies to verify and support this finding and seek its implementation.

3.      There is high unmet demand for quality distance education even in Africa and the Arab countries. This finding can probably be generalized to all developing countries, suggesting that there are potentially profitable returns to be earned by serving these markets. What is needed are new international and developing country venture capital funds to invest in these profitable ventures and to help them grow to the point where they can attract more conventional kinds of equity and loan capital. Like broad bandwidth infrastructure, such funds are beyond the reach of infoDev’s financial and management capacity.

4.      Introducing computers into schools, whether networked or not, requires important investments in organization, strategy development, training of teachers, and leadership sensitive to teacher, student, and community interests to succeed in realizing the pedagogical benefits expected. These findings should be given broad dissemination and used to shape new computers in schools projects funded by the international development community.

5.      Face-to-face and synchronous electronic communication can greatly enhance the productivity of cheaper asynchronous electronic communication, hence there is still an important role for international conferences, workshops, and videoconferencing in a networked, wired (or wireless) world. Selective support for such conferences should be continued, but conditioned on extensive preparation and follow-up using asynchronous electronic means to maximize the impact of expensive face-to-face and synchronous electronic conferences.

Recommendations for infoDev Management

1. infoDev funding can play an important catalytic role in mobilizing other funding and in general facilitating successful execution of a project because it increases the credibility of the project in the eyes of other sources of project finance. Thus, despite its relatively small financial capacity, infoDev should continue its work, and make greater use of both the print and electronic media to publicize its projects. It should also establish close connections to international sources of venture capital such as SoftBank Emerging Markets to provide second-stage funding for projects that are intended to be profit making businesses.

2.     infoDev should increase the proportion of its total portfolio devoted to education projects, given the central role of education and training in the increasing knowledge-based and global economy. But to leverage this increased investment, a greater portion should be invested in projects involving policy formulation and research, and both should include built-in evaluation and dissemination components.

3. infoDev management should reduce the time taken for project approval and lighten the requirements regarding infoDev ownership of intellectual property.

4.      infoDev should make sure that future grants contain provisions for market analysis (whether or not the project is in the private sector), feedback and evaluation built into the projects, and also set aside funding for independent on-site evaluations of at least a sample of projects.

5.      infoDev should consider being more cautious in providing funding to large bureaucratic organizations and seek additional ways to support relatively small, agile, networked organizations and even individuals with proven records of innovation. 

 Body of the report

Annex - Project Data

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