Are ICTs about to deliver a new type of socio-economic development: personalised development?
ICTs can only have a significant development impact if they work at scale; touching the lives of thousands or better still millions of people. Traditionally, this meant a uniform approach where everyone gets to use the same application in the same way.
Increasingly, though, ICTs have been enabling “precision development”: increasingly-precise in terms of who or what is targeted, what is known about the target, and the specificity of the associated development intervention. The ultimate end-point would be “personalised development”: interventions customised to each individual.
Elements of digitally-enabled individualisation have already emerged: farmers navigating through web- or IVR-based systems to find the specific information they need; micro-entrepreneurs selecting the m-money savings and loan scheme and level that suited them. But there is still rigidity and constraints within these systems.
Though we are far from its realisation, the potential for truly personalised development is now emerging. For example:
- Personalised Learning: “a methodology, according to which teaching and learning are focused on the needs and abilities of individual learners”[1]. ICTs are integral to personalised learning and technology-enabled personalisation has had a demonstrable positive impact on educational performance[2].
- Precision Agriculture: though around as a concept for at least two decades, precision agriculture is only now starting to find implementations – often still at pilot stage – in the global South[3]. Combining data from on-ground sensors and remote sensing, precision agriculture provides targeted guidance in relation to “seeds, fertilizers, water, pesticides, and energy”. The ultimate intention is that guidance will be customised to the very specific soil, micro-climate, etc. parameters of individual farms; even smallholder farms.
- Personalised Healthcare: diagnosis and treatment may appear personalised but typically involve identifying which illness group a person belongs to, and then prescribing the generic treatment for that group. This is becoming more accurate with improvements in electronic health records that provide a more person-specific history and context[4]. Precision medicine prescribes even more narrowly for the individual; typically based on genetic analysis that requires strong digital capabilities. Though at early stages, this is already being implemented in developing countries[5].
ICTs are thus leading us on a precision development track that will lead to personalised development. The promise of this can be seen in the examples above: individualised information on learning level, farm status, or health status that then enables a much more effective development intervention.
It will be interesting to log other examples of “ICT4PD” as they emerge . . .
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[2] Kumar, A., & Mehra, A. (2018). Remedying Education with Personalized Learning: Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment in India, ResearchGate.
[3] Say, S. M., Keskin, M., Sehri, M., & Sekerli, Y. E. (2018). Adoption of precision agriculture technologies in developed and developing countries. The Online Journal of Science and Technology, 8(1), 7-15.
[4] Haskew, J., Rø, G., Saito, K., Turner, K., Odhiambo, G., Wamae, A., … & Sugishita, T. (2015). Implementation of a cloud-based electronic medical record for maternal and child health in rural Kenya. International Journal of Medical Informatics, 84(5), 349-354.
[5] Mitropoulos, K., Cooper, D. N., Mitropoulou, C., Agathos, S., Reichardt, J. K., Al-Maskari, F., … & Lopez-Correa, C. (2017). Genomic medicine without borders: Which strategies should developing countries employ to invest in precision medicine? Omics: A Journal of Integrative Biology, 21(11), 647-657.
ICTs for Development 