Recognition has been growing in recent years that poverty has multiple, interrelated causes and manifestations beyond the core phenomenon of "income poverty". Poor people are especially vulnerable to macroeconomic and environmental shocks and to disease and illness. Their lack of physical and educational assets makes it more difficult for them to create new economic and social opportunities for themselves. Yet they possess rich stores of knowledge, experience and innovative energy. This recognition of the complexity both of poverty and of poor people's responses to their conditions has led to a growing attention to the livelihoods of the poor, the complex set of strategies and practices they develop to navigate both their poverty and the broader social, economic and environmental conditions that reinforce that poverty. This permits an approach to tackling poverty that focuses not just on increasing the incomes of the poor but on reducing their vulnerabilities, tapping their experience and innovation, and creating the enabling conditions for sustained economic and social empowerment of poor communities.

World Bank

There is some degree of understandable skepticism about whether ICTs are appropriate tools for addressing the needs and challenges of the poor, particularly the rural poor. Yet even the poorest people and families in rural areas have information and communication needs. More generally, technologies that reduce their expenditure of their few valuable resources (their time, labor, energy, and physical resources) and increase the yield from those expenditures, could have a profound positive effect on their livelihoods and incomes. Innovations and tools that leverage their own creativity, and their own knowledge of their context, could benefit both their own situation and those of their neighbors and of other poor people elsewhere. Given their poverty, and the difficulty of the environments in which they live, it is extremely important to be judicious and practical about the types of technology appropriate to their circumstances and needs. Yet it is equally important to exploit every possible, and practical, use of these technologies for the benefit of the poor, both through their diirect application to their livelihoods needs and challenges and through their role as an enabler of institutional change, capacity building, governmental effectiveness and accountability, and economic growth more broadly.

How can the full range of ICTs, appropriately adapted, help to improve the livelihoods of poor individuals, families and communities, and increase their economic and social opportunities, thereby improving their chances of escaping from persistent poverty? What do we know already, both from research and from experience in the field?   Where do we need to learn more?

infoDev is supporting a major program of research, analysis, good-practice development and policy advice on how ICTs can be used effectively and sustainably as tools to enhance the livelihoods of the poor.