http://funredes.org/mistica

MISTICA: Re: Development Gateway ICT4D Topic Community

From: Daniel Pimienta ([email protected])
Date: Mon Apr 15 2002 - 11:40:48 AST

>I am a long term reader of the Mistica listserve, and I appreciate the work
>that has been done (on a small budget).
You are welcome :-)

I would not call the Mistica budget "small". The amount of the budget for
the 2 years project was around 400KUS$ which I consider a large budget. The
question at stake is that 2 years is not enough to make such a project
sustainable and there is a tendency in funding agencies (that our friend
Jos� Ignacio Lopez stressed many times) to prefer to fund "new fancy
projects" rather than to strenghten existing proven projects (which then
has lost their fanciness)...

I would call "seed funds" something lesser than 10KUS$ and small project
something lesser than 100KUS$. In that scale, the total budget of the DG is
not large but <exceptionnaly huge> for a single project in our field (if I
rememeber well something around 60 MUS$).

<If people from civil society and NGOs don't participate, the Portal will
increasingly represent
<the interests of the participants from other segments of the development
community.
Which was a predictable outcome before the start, the "other segments of
the development community" being what I named "the politically correct
segment of the civil society as perceived by the World Bank". One should
wonder if that was not anyway one of the strategical objective of the WB...

I just hope that in case of failure of the project the "not politically
correct part of the civil society will not be blamed for it and the World
Bank will face its responsibility for the fruitless expense of the
equivalent budget of 1,500 large field projects (such as Mistica or
Somos@Telecentros) - read an average of 10 per each country in the word or
better some 200 regional projects- or 15,000 small projects or 150,000 seed
funded projects (such as the Mistica pilot applications). This type of
approximative accounting maybe boring but it does tell the nature of the
"devgateconomics".

The point goes obviously beyond the World Bank strategy and does concern
the European Union whose ALIS much waited project has taken the strategy of
funding 20 projects in an average of 3 MEuros rather than 750 "large
projects" or 7,500 small projects ... or better a balanced combination of
each category.

Everybody agrees that the new paradigm is about bottom up and capillarity
(self-empowering of communities) but the blood keep going top down to the
arterias, with, in many times, a subtle (or less subtle) way to select the
veins to inject...

... and apparently, if we judge by the fast reactions in that thread, some
type of allergical mechanism has been triggered on the skin were the
capillars irrigate and the descentralization cream is not removing enough
histaminic susbstance :-)

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