positive knock-on effects for the poor. Some models are more fit than others for meeting development and sustainability goals (Table 2-2).

     The growing recognition of the complexity of knowledge processes and relations among a multiplicity of diverse actors has led to renewed attention to the role of information and communication processes (Rogers and Kincaid, 1981). All parties in communication play roles of "senders" and "receivers," "encoders" and "decoders," of information but communication typically is neither neutral nor symmetric: empirical studies demonstrate the extent to which social, cultural and political factors determine whose voices are heard and listened to (Holland and Blackburn, 1998). The history of the last sixty years may be read in part as a history of struggle to get the voices of the poor, of women and other marginalized people heard in the arenas where science and technology decisions are made (Leach et al., 2005; IDS, 2006).

     By the 1980s the technologies of the digital age began to revolutionize the ability to obtain and disseminate information. Computer communication technologies and mobile telephony are becoming available to populations in developing countries (ITU, 2006). Mobile telephony by end 2006 had become a US$25 billion industry across Africa and the Middle East and Indian operators were signing up 6.6 million new subscribers a month. In the last five years low cost mobile telephony has begun to overtake computerbased technology as the platform for information-sharing

and communication. For the first time, poor producers in remote places no longer have to remain isolated from market actors or to rely on bureaucrats or commercial middlemen for timely market information (Lio and Meng-Chun, 2006). Initiatives such as TradeNet (Ghana) connect buyers and sellers across more than ten countries in Africa and Trade at Hand provides daily price information to vegetable and fruit exporters in Burkina Faso and Senegal.

     The new ICTs are also opening up formal education opportunities, ranging from basic literacy and numeracy courses to advanced academic, vocational and professional training. Free online libraries (e.g., IDRIS) and new institutional arrangements offer potential for further innovation in knowledge processes. For instance, the Digital Doorway, a robust portable computer platform with free software for downloading information, is being initiated at schools and community forums throughout southern Africa by Syngenta and the University of Pretoria to support locally adapted curricula for Schools in the Field covering a range of crops, animals, poultry, small rural agroenterprises and soil and water management. Insufficient information is available as yet to make robust assessments of these trends but the early evidence is that their impact may be at least as important as technologies originating within AKST development. Nonetheless, the rate of expansion of access to modern ICTs continues to be much greater in developed than developing countries and among urban more than rural populations, raising concerns about how to avoid ICTs reinforcing