By: Jonah soe kotee

*Photo by: Ruthie Ackerman

Information and Communications Technologies -ICTs, including the Internet, play a very imperative function in the poverty reduction of a developing country like Liberia. These technologies revolutionize our markets and public sectors of our economy. They are improving our socio-economic and political activities in helping to reduce poverty, educate and improve the minds of our people to assertively interact with local and international partners.

Information and communications Technologies (ICT) helps reduce poverty and contribute to national development in enabling networking prospectives that would reduce transaction costs, change the structures of the market by catching the attention of many investors and humanizing the skills of the local marketeers to be able to find clients and sell their merchandises to other regional bazaars. ICT development can also improve the global incorporation of our public services and foundations, markets, develop manpower, and accelerate the budding morals of human capital. ICT development can  manage mammoth knowledge and can serve to empower people at community and national levels, which helps to reduce poverty.

The introduction, advancement and usage of Internet Communication Technologies generally occurred in output, growth and poverty reduction. Liberalization and opening of ICT segments, and designing comprehensive ICT regulatory policies to include the poorer community is chief to our national government of Liberia. Premeditated government intervention and support are also both generally indispensable. Poverty reduction and ICT development in Liberia should be an unequivocal constituent of our national strategies for enlargement and development. Education and technical skills are either qualifications or strong investment areas for Liberia poverty reduction strategy, which are mostly cases of major economic/social reform and reorganization. Both a national ICT-knowledge economy fixture plan and thorough ICT infrastructure outlay are essential, and there are precious imminent to the growth of Liberia economy and recovery.

The dispersal of ICT to poorer communities will help government settle in a universal enhancement key to poverty reduction – education, health and social services delivery, broader government transparency and accountability, and helping empower citizens and build social organization around rights and gender equality.

In conclusion, effectual convention includes e-commerce and market information services, translation of some web pages into local vernaculars, education, health-education, gender empowerment, social and political empowerment, and amalgamation of these in multi-purpose neighborhoods gives admission to investments. Poor communities in most of the world are progressively more aware of the potential of ICT development and, with some help, enthusiastic to adopt ICTs and help other communities do so.

Obviously, poverty will not be stamped out by ICT development – and for many poor populations, more basic needs may take primacy. But likewise, poverty will not be eradicated without these technologies, and failure to capitalize on them slows the process of poverty reduction. In this PRSP/MDG epoch that would be absurd. The positive dynamic often created by ICT development and the oath of their beneficiaries and sustaining groups, appear decidedly valuable to large-scale poverty reduction objectives, and it is hard to see poverty reduction subsequent if a large part of human race is excluded from the knowledge shared by everyone else. What is done today for ICT4P will also be critical for new-fangled technology revolutions, notably biotechnology, whose essence is linked inextricably with informatics, and whose and supervision and benefits will be highly exhaustive in acquaintance, networking and prevalent ICT literacy.