ABSTRACT
There is an international mandate for national economic development planning and concomitant maintenance of national accounts. It is implicit in the activities of the World Bank and IMF. Evidence of development planning is sought by both private and public donors, even by the United States which is one of the few countries in the world to lack its own domestic planning agency. Scholars hold up successful cases of planned development as models for other countries, and their words are backed up by agencies' ability to deliver billions of dollars in aid. But most economists and government officials in the Third World are already convinced of the merits of planning and national accounts, even where they reject the specific proposals of the IMF and other international agencies. They are graduates of the same university programmes as the IMF officials, and they have been trained to believe in development planning. 1 Yet this pursuit of planned development and effective national accounting runs up against severe limits of both political will and bureaucratic capacity (Rondinelli 1983, Robertson 1984). In particular, serious planning efforts and superficial attempts to meet the requirements of international donors and other agencies both require the management of an enormous range and complexity of information and technology. This chapter is about lessons to be learned from an attempt to use microcomputers to help meet the demand for information management in the Ministry of Finance and Economic Planning in the Sudan. 2
