WHAT IS DIGITAL DEVELOPMENT?

Digital development or ICT4D (information and communication technology for development)

describe the use and application of technology and digital tools in international development. 
WHY IS ICT4D IMPORTANT?
For many of us, technology is a core part of everyday life. We use phones, tablets and computers
to search for information, navigate to new places, pay bills and connect with our family and
friends.
Technology also plays a key role in international development. While the digital revolution has
not advanced at an equal pace across the world and marginalised groups continue to be excluded,
the introduction of new tools has brought improvements. 
Vital health information has been shared via SMS messages, radio has been used to educate
people about issues like child marriage and television has been an effective medium for sharing
information about social change. 
Today, the number of digital tools at our disposal are endless. Smartphones offer a range of new
ways to communicate, learn and collaborate. Drones can deliver medical supplies to remote
locations. Solar powered devices are in use in the most remote locations, offering power to
people with no access to an electrical grid.
When used smartly, technology can offer us new ways to address the challenges faced by
children. We can make our work more efficient and more transparent with digital data collection
and analytics, and we can ensure the voices of marginalised people reach decision makers and
leaders everywhere
Principles of Digital Development
Design With the User
Successful digital initiatives are rooted in an understanding of user characteristics, needs and
challenges. Starts with getting to know the people you are designing for through conversation,
observation and co-creation. Information gathered through this engagement leads to building,
testing and redesigning tools until they effectively meet user needs.
Understand the Existing Ecosystem
Well-designed initiatives and digital tools consider the particular structures and needs that exist
in each country, region and community. Dedicating time and resources to analyze the ecosystem,
or context where you work, helps to ensure that selected technology tools will be relevant and
sustainable and will not duplicate existing efforts.
Design for Scale
Achieving scale is a goal that has been elusive for many digital development practitioners.
Achieving scale can mean different things in different contexts, but it requires adoption beyond
an initiatives pilot population and often necessitates securing funding or partners that take the
initiative to new communities or regions.
Build for Sustainability
Building sustainable programs, platforms and digital tools is essential to maintain user and
stakeholder support, as well as to maximize long-term impact. Sustainability ensures that user
and stakeholder contributions are not minimized due to interruptions, such as a loss of funding.
Be Data Driven
No amount of data will lead to accelerated impact if it is not used to inform decision making.
When an initiative is data driven, quality information is available to the right people when they
need it, and they are using those data to take action.
Use Open Standards, Open Data, Open Source, and Open Innovation
Too often, scarce public and international development resources are spent investing in new
software code, tools, data collection, content and innovations for sector-specific solutions that
are locked away behind licensing fees, with data only used by and available to specific
initiatives. An open approach to digital development can help to increase collaboration in the
digital development community and avoid duplicating work that has already been done.
Reuse and Improve
Instead of starting from scratch, programs that “reuse and improve” look for ways to adapt and
enhance existing products, resources and approaches. Reuse means assessing what resources are
currently available and using them as they are to meet program goals.
Address Privacy & Security
Addressing privacy and security in digital development involves careful consideration of which
data are collected and how data are acquired, used, stored and shared. Organizations must take
measures to minimize collection and to protect confidential information and identities of
individuals represented in data sets from unauthorized access and manipulation by third parties.
Be Collaborative
Being collaborative means sharing information, insights, strategies and resources across projects,
organizations and sectors, leading to increased efficiency and impact. This Principle brings all
the others together in practice. People working in digital development have a shared vision to
create a better world, and collaboration is essential to making this vision a reality.

WHAT IS TECHNOLOGICAL CHANGE

In economics, a technological change is an increase in the efficiency of a product or process that
results in an increase in output, without an increase in input. In other words, someone invents or
improves a product or process, which is then used to get a bigger reward for the same amount of
work.
The telephone is an example of a product that has undergone a technological change. It has
undergone many different changes over the years that have made it more efficient. Processes or
products, such as the telephone, move through technological change in three stages:
Invention - the creation of a new product or process
Innovation - the application of the invention for the first time
Diffusion - how fast others begin to adopt the innovation
Impacts of Technological Change
We have all likely experienced the impact of technology. Let's take a look at the ways, both good
and bad, technological change has impacted our world:
Creates new products and processes
When telephones were first invented, the object was to be able to verbally communicate with
someone. Due to technological changes, we have multiple ways to communicate using our
phones, such as text, email, or talk.
Increases efficiency, lower costs
Technology makes it possible to perform everyday tasks faster and with less energy on our part.
For instance, some people have a vacuum cleaning robot. Instead of spending 30 minutes
vacuuming, they push a button and go do something else. That's efficiency.
Helps economies evolve
People are able to increase the ways in which they create wealth. It also has a ripple effect. When
one technological change occurs, it changes how we live. With the integration of technology,
societies evolved from traditional hunting and gathering to industrialized. So that fewer people
are growing crops and more are moving into other industries.
A technological change can be defined as an increase in the outputs possible with a given level
of inputs through the processes of invention, innovation and diffusion.
Advatage of technological change
*Hospital
*Education
*Communication
*Transportation
Disadvantage of technological change
*Education
*Less man power
*Mental Health & physical Health
*Laziness
SOCIAL EVOLUTION
This theory claims that societies develop according to one universal order of cultural evolution,
albeit at different rates, which explained why there were different types of society existing in the
world.
Social evolution is what scholars term a broad set of theories that attempt to explain how and
why modern cultures are different from those in the past.
E. B. Tylor, Lewis Henry Morgan, and Herbert Spencer (a sociologist) were the most notable of
the Nineteenth-century social evolutionists.

Edward Burnet Tylor

-Asserted that there is a progressive development of human cultures from the most primitive to
the highest stages of civilization.
-All societies passed through three basic stages of development: from savagery, through
barbarism to civilization.
Lewis Henry Morgan
- Subdivided savagery and barbarism into upper, middle, and lower segments providing
contemporary examples of each of these three stages.
- The stages were based primarily on technological characteristics, but included other
things such as political organization, marriage, family, and religion.
- Postulated that the stages of technological development were associated with a sequence
of different cultural patterns.
- Speculated that the family evolved through six stages
Universal Evolutionary Changes
• SAVAGERY
• BARBARISM
• CIVILIZATION
Lower Savagery
Humans exists through sustenance based on fruit and nuts. Mankind were then living in their
original restricted habitat and subsisting upon fruits and nuts. The commencement of articulate
speech belongs to this period. No exemplification of tribes of mankind in this condition remained
to the historical period.
Middle Savagery
Marked by the acquisition of a fish diet and the discovery of fire. It commenced with the
acquisition of a fish subsistence and a knowledge of the use of fire, and ended with the invention
of the bow and arrow.
Mankind, while in this condition, spread from their original habitat over the greater portion of
the earth’s surface. Among tribes still existing, it will leave in the middle Status of savagery, for
example, the Australians and the greater part of the Polynesians when discovered.
Upper Savagery
Invention of bow and arrow.  It leaves in the Upper Status of Savagery the Athapascan tribes of
the Hudson’s Bay Territory, the tribes of the valley of the Columbia, and certain coast tribes of
North and South America; but with relation to the time of their discovery. This closes the period
of Savagery.
Lower Barbarism
Humans start making pottery. Lower Status, the Indian tribes of the United States east of the
Missouri River, and such tribes of Europe and Asia as practiced the art of pottery, but, were
without domestic animals.
Middle Barbarism
It commenced with the domestication of animals in the Eastern hemisphere, and in the Western
with cultivation by irrigation and with the use of adobe brick and stone in architecture, as shown.
Village Indians of New Mexico, Mexico, Central America and Peru, and such tribes in the
Eastern hemisphere as possessed domestic animals, but were without a knowledge of iron. The
ancient, Britons, although familiar with the use of iron, fairly belong in this connection. The
vicinity of more advanced continental tribes had advanced the arts of life among them far beyond
the state of development of their domestic institutions.

Upper Barbarism
Began with the smelting of iron and use of iron tools. Here civilization begins. This leaves in the
Upper Status, for example, the Grecian tribes of the Homeric age, the Italian tribes shortly before
the founding of Rome, and the Germanic tribes of the time of Cesar.
Civilization
It commenced, as stated, with the use of a phonetic alphabet and the production of literary
records, and divides into Ancient and Modern. 
Phonetic alphabet-  any of various systems of identifying letters of the alphabet by means of code
words in voice communication.
EVOLUTION OF FAMILY IN SIX STAGES
FIRST STAGE-  Human society began as a “horde living in promiscuity,” with no sexual
prohibitions and no real family structure.
SECOND STAGE- Brother-sister mating was permitted.
THIRD STAGE- Group marriage was practiced, but brothers and sisters were not allowed to
mate.
FOURTH STAGE- Evolved during barbarism, was characterized by a loosely paired male and
female who lived with other people.
FIFTH STAGE- Husband-dominant families arose in which the husband could have more than
one wife simultaneously.
SIXTH STAGE- The stage of civilization was distinguished by the monogamous family, with
just one wife and one husband who were relatively equal in status.

Western Societies were put to highest rank of society due to their possession of the most
advanced technology at that time.
Societies at a stage of savagery or barbarism were viewed as inherently inferior to civilized
society.

HERBERT SPENCER
-Social Darwinism (Spencer’s theory of evolution)
-Proposed that war promoted evolution, stating that those societies that conducted more warfare
were the most evolved.
-Coined the phrase “survival of the fittest” and advocated for allowing societies to compete,
thereby allowing the most fit in society to survive.
-opposed social policy that would help the poor.
PSYCHIC UNITY AND THE SUPERIORITY
OF WESTERN CULTURES
Psychic unity is a concept that suggests human minds share similar characteristics all over the
world. This means that all people and their societies will go through the same process of
development.
The assumption of Western superiority was not unusual for the time period. This assumption was
deeply rooted in European colonialism and based on the fact that Western societies had more
technologically sophisticated technology and a belief that Christianity was the true religion.

CONTEMPORARY VIEWS
Contemporary anthropologists view nineteenth-century evolutionism as too simplistic to explain
the development of societies in the world. Here are some examples why:
1. Racist views of human development that were popular at that time.
2. Different levels of intelligence. (Lewis Henry Morgan and E. B. Tylor)

REFERENCES:
https://plan-international.org/approach/digital-development-ict4d?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIhd-
Q7Iuh6wIVTdeWCh0IWQjyEAAYASAAEgJXQ_D_BwE
https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/social-evolutionism/#:~:text=unilinear%20social
%20evolution%20%E2%80%93%20the%20notion,ultimately%20at%20a%20common%20end.
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/culturalanthropology/chapter/anthropological-theory/
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/morgan-lewis/ancient-society/ch01.html
https://www.google.com/search?
q=advantage+and+disadvantage+of+technological+change&oq=advantage+and+disadvantage+o
f+technological+change&aqs=chrome..69i57j0l2.21099j0j4&client=ms-android-
vivo&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8