Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
capital exploitation due to a long-hours and low-pay culture, others
have argued that high tech industries can provide social mobility for
women as they offer better employment prospects than agriculture or
the informal sector. As previously discussed in this section, Freeman's
(2000) work highlights the popularity of high tech occupations for
women in the Caribbean and indentifies these industries as sites of
agency for some young women. More recently, there is evidence of a
changing gender division of labour within the off-shoring industries due
to the latest wave of high value ICT and media industries that employ
highly skilled workers, many of whom are male.
One of the most widely publicised and controversial strategies has
been the movement of call centres from the global North to countries
such as India and South Africa. Although development gains have
been seen in terms of jobs, income, economic diversification and for-
eign capital creation, the wider external benefits to countries may be
limited. Although the development of India's IT sector has added a
significant amount to growth and export revenues in the country,
much of the development has been in fortified enclaves like Bangalore's
Information Technology Park
(Graham, 2002). Poorer communities
are unlikely to gain directly from enclave developments as the major-
ity of service industries, like call centres, are foreign owned and
employ educated and middle-class urban workers. Indirect benefits
may arise from increases in the demand for unskilled domestic and
manual labour to service executive households and businesses,
although the exploitative relations of employment that link poor
workers to the global service economy can hardly be termed 'develop-
ment'. The low cost service economy often employs migrants, women
and other vulnerable workers in insecure and exploitative conditions
(see Chapter 3.3). However, there have been other recent transforma-
tions in ICT, often termed the 'digital revolution', which may bring
more direct benefits to marginalized and disenfranchised communities
in the global South.
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ICTs and the Global South: The Digital Divide
Back in the 1990s, Friedman talked about a 'techno-apartheid' that
divided the world into 'fast' and 'slow' worlds. Although ICT was pre-
dicted to be a 'magic bullet' for development, traditional projects were
