ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is to describe and criticize the prevailing paradigm that governs policy towards the diffusion of IT in the poorer regions of developing countries.1 Briefly stated, this paradigm consists in the main of efforts by foreign aid donors and NGOs to import information technologies that belong to modern, Western, technological systems into totally different systems prevailing in poor, rural areas of developing countries.2 Such efforts, moreover, usually manifest themselves in so-called telecentres and other forms of communal, rather than individual forms of access to the technologies (see later for discussion of the telecentre concept).
