Christina Courtright
The World Bank has been the largest multilateral source of rural telecommunications
financing in developing countries since the mid-1960s. This article analyzes
World Bank-sponsored studies of rural telecommunications initiatives in Chile,
Peru, Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Malaysia to identify which lessons the Bank
draws from them and recommends for other countries. The World Bank’s preference
for a “best-practice” approach in its research leads it to attribute
successes and failures to a narrow scope of factors that tend to agree with
its economic policy priorities. Instead, rural telecommunications practices
should be analyzed within their broader socio-institutional and cultural contexts
in order to enable cross-situational applications, and a broad array of stakeholders
should be involved in shaping the lessons learned.