Dear All:

I hope the definitions below help to inform the discourse?

What is local content?

Answer

After decades of emphasis on providing access to the new communication and information technologies, the international community and development agencies are now asking themselves a very crucial question: access to what?

During the last few years there has been a growing recognition of the need to generate local content and make it available through new and traditional media in order to empower communities and lead them to an inclusive knowledge society. Local content is the expression and communication of a community’s locally owned and adapted knowledge and experience that is relevant to the community’s situation . The process of creating and disseminating local content provides opportunities for members of the community to interact and communicate with each other, expressing their own ideas, knowledge and culture in their own language.

A community is defined by its location, culture, language, or area of interest. A community can comprise a whole region, a sub-region, a nation, a village or a group of people with strong cultural, linguistic, religious or common interest links. Thus, a community may comprise of a handful of people or include millions; its members may share the same location or be geographically dispersed. Communities are not static or exclusive and individuals may belong to many communities at the same time. For example, a woman living in a village in Mali may feel strong ties with the community of women in her sub-region, take active part in the life of the community of her village and, at the same time, be a member of the Muslim community and the artists’ collective of Mali.

The need for local content

The lack of local content is evident across all media and information channels. One needs to spend just a few minutes in front of a television or computer screen to notice the overwhelming presence of content coming from content providers in the developed countries, reflecting language, values and lifestyles which are often vastly different from those of the community “consuming” the content.

Content does not flow of its own accord; it needs owners or originators with the motivation to create, adapt or exchange it. Obviously, the agencies that ‘push’ global or non-local content are more powerful and resourceful than those disseminating local content. With a few exceptions (e.g. the telephone, community radio, or indigenous knowledge systems), most formal content and communication ‘channels’ in developing countries help to push ‘external’ content into local communities. Counter efforts to distribute local content (such as African film, Asian research publications, ‘southern voices’ in the media, or the e-trading of traditional crafts) to global networks face an uphill struggle.

While the importance of local content has often been raised in many international meetings and by numerous donors and cooperation agencies, concrete initiatives and expertise in this area are scarce. Many, if not most, content initiatives using ICTs tend to ‘push’ external content towards local communities. In other words, they mainly provide ‘access’ to other people’s knowledge. With a few exceptions, new technologies are not used to strengthen the ‘push’ of local content from local people. Generally, the balance between ‘push’ and ‘pull’ – or supply and demand – is heavily weighted towards non-local rather than local content.

It is important to note here that, while everyone is impressed by the potential that the new ICTs offer for sharing and exchanging local content, in many cases the ‘new’ technologies are still tape recorders, radio, television, newspapers, or telephones. ICTs and the Internet are still a small percentage of the ‘toolkit’ used to create and communicate local content.

Regards

Eric Aligula Magolo, PhD

Senior Analyst

Infrastructure and Economic Services Division

Kenya Institute for Public Policy Research and Analysis (KIPPRA)

P.O. Box 56445, 00200 Nairobi, Kenya
Telephone:       +254-20-2719933/4
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E-mail:            jairah@kippra.or.ke
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From: kictanet-bounces+jairah=kippra.or.ke@lists.kictanet.or.ke [mailto:kictanet-bounces+jairah=kippra.or.ke@lists.kictanet.or.ke] On Behalf Of aki
Sent: 18 November 2008 15:27
To: Eric Aligula
Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions
Subject: Re: [kictanet] Tandaa - An Honest Analysis

My last thoughts on this before it becomes more like a blogging site. Robert, you are still unable to define local content and therefore unable to match any criticism or critic. Mixing small words with bigger words for the sake of it is the usual illusion. I think the severe arrogance and phobia of local everything ( of course with the usual spices such as politics, leaders and events, esle the traffic to sites would not exist )  is over-rated and the best effort so far according to you for local content  is a website that I'd never visit or waste any time on.  

So simply moving forward, and as Josiah and the others mentioned : Define local content and we will start to get somewhere.

Get to the point.