Content area
Abstract
In 2000, the Egyptian Ministry of Communication and Information Technology (MCIT) established a project to create Information Technology Clubs throughout Egypt. The Information Technology Clubs are telecenters housed in civil society organizations and stocked with 10 or more computers and the Internet. The Information Technology Clubs are meant to provide access to these technologies at an affordable cost for the broader Egyptian public. In the nearly ten years that the MCIT has been running the project, nearly 2000 clubs have been established in every Egyptian governorate. But, many of these clubs are no longer operating at their intended capacity and in many cases the services that patrons of the clubs use are not those services that align with stated goals of the project. Why is this case?
I conducted observation, interviews, and administered a questionnaire of Information Technology Club patrons at 3 sites (4 in the case of the questionnaire) located in different regions of Egypt. This more detailed research was supplemented by shorter site visits to other Information Technology Clubs located in the same region as the other sites and a random phone survey of Information Technology Clubs in Egypt that yielded 11 surveys. Furthermore, interviews were conducted with officials of government agencies, development organizations, and private sector corporations with involvement in the ITCP and other similar projects in Egypt. The motivation for these research methods was to combine club level qualitative findings with an institutional analysis of the ITCP.
The patrons of the Information Technology Clubs studied used the facilities primarily for entertainment and communication, which is consistent with other studies on telecenters. However, these uses did not align with the government's stated goals for the program, which was to improve the ICT skills of patrons so that they can participate in the information economy and better utilize information and knowledge. Despite the gap in practices at the clubs, both the patrons of the Information Technology Clubs and their hosts (MCIT and CSOs), however, did believe that their use of computers would lead to benefical economic outcomes.
Furthermore, many of the clubs were no longer operating at their intended capacity after the period in which they received government subsidies ended. I argue that this is largely a result of institutional impediments. Each club is hosted by a CSO that partners with the MCIT to establish an Information Technology Club. Problems in the way the MCIT selects, monitors, and works with CSOs harm the operation of the ITCP. Futhermore, CSOs in Egypt are underdeveloped as a result of the strict regulations placed on them by the Egyptian government.
At an individual level, the potential uses of public technology resources are limited by restrictions on the use of information in Egypt that are in direct contradiction to the aims of the ITCP. The Egyptian state security services have developed informal and formal mechanisms for curbing the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of expression. Using extra-legal means, the state security services have made it virtually impossible to have anonymous access to the Internet or at the very least that there is a single person identified with each point of connection from the home to a café with wireless Internet. Individual users of the Internet that challenge the state through acts of expression or coordinating opposition activity have been detained and harassed on a regular basis.
