ABSTRACT
INTRODUCTION: THE CASE FOR CONNECTIVITY Recently, there has been a growing emphasis in the development field on the need to pay attention to the "voices of the poor" (World Bank, "Voices of the Poor"), With the help of the World Bank, "voicing" has unambiguously arrived as a development methodology (Ardener, 1993; Gilligan, 1982; Hanak, 1997), International institutions have finally come to appreciate that the experts on poverty are the poor themselves and that the condition of poverty is the outcome of power relations,
As it has developed in the recent policy practice and policy literature, voicing currently has two components: (l) the "capture" of "voices" through the collection of perspectives and biographies and the presentation of these by other agencies on a global stage through the use of new information communication technologies , such as the World Wide Web (i.e. , the World Bank Voices of the Poor Initiative funded by DFID), and (2) the involvement of the disadvantaged in local project design and operation-the participation of all voices in opposition to past practices of project design in whom only "experts" and "leaders" were consulted and involved.
