This article examines the relationship between information and communication technology (ICT) access and the empowerment of rural people through the Union Information and Service Centres (UISCs) established at the Union Council, the lowest administrative unit of the Bangladeshi government. Based on ethnographic research that explores both everyday peoples’ and beneficiary perspectives, this study reveals that given the conditions of poverty, the illiterate and relatively powerless majority of the rural poor failed to access and use the facilities provided through UISCs, which were inevitably controlled by the power elites in the service area. The study concludes that while access to and use of relevant information is a key component of empowerment, the way UISCs have been organized in a particular kind of socio-economic arrangement, the services delivered neither succeeded in providing equality of access nor has the information available through these centres been deemed relevant to promoting rural investment or reducing social disparity in any significant way. This article argues that empowerment from ICTs does not follow automatically after their implementation, but rather the success of technologies and their access is subject to power relationships within communities.
In the wider context of growing digitalisation in South Asia, this article examines the impacts of a public–private–people partnership (4Ps) information and communication technology (ICT) initiative of the Bangladesh government, administered through local governmental offices, the Union Information Service Centre (UISC). Scrutinising the operation of six UISCs in rural communities across Bangladesh, the study researches the potential of ICTs to influence existing asymmetrical power relations and empower local people. Asking to what extent ICTs enable more people to actively participate in their communities and what the implications for empowerment are, it is found that top-down ICT intervention by itself cannot bring substantial change for people at the bottom of the social pyramid. Asymmetrical power relations continue to deprive marginalised groups from receiving the claimed benefits of ICT facilities. The study suggests the need for a more critical, practice-focused understanding of relationships between ICTs and rural empowerment, while also highlighting the changing modalities of connecting states and their citizens in postmodern South Asia.
This paper looks at the extent to which journalistic culture in Muslim-majority countries is shaped by a distinctive Islamic worldview. We identified four principles of an Islamic perspective to journalism: truth and truth-telling (siddiq and haqq), pedagogy (tabligh), seeking the best for the public interest (maslahah), and moderation (wasatiyyah). A survey of working journalists in Africa (Egypt,
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