US Nonprofit Attempts to Bridge Digital Divide With Emerging Nations

Over the Christmas holidays, I spoke with a young woman whose work for a nonprofit took her to a number of emerging nations. The nonprofit's mission, as I understood it, was to help people at the local level build sustainable small businesses. However, the young woman's zealous belief in the combined clout of technology and capital to create a better world made me wary. Perhaps her outlooks were products of her stint at a major US graduate business program. What was most striking during our conversation was her hubris. Her bossiness masked a lust for power that contradicted her idealistic stances. The encounter made me wonder about an organization that would cultivate the young woman's ways of behaving and thinking.

For better or worse, this sort of human capital has become a significant American cultural export. An article in today's Los Angeles Times discusses the mission and impact of a nonprofit called Digital Divide Data (DDD). The organization is not exactly a stranger in the nonprofit night. DDD's co-founder and CEO, Jeremy Hockenstein, has a resume including Harvard, MIT, and McKinsey. Many DDD board members have graduated from the Ivies and/or Stanford. (In this aspect, DDD and the power brokers behind the American charter school "movement" have something in common.) DDD has also generated plenty of high-profile media coverage, including a mention in Tom Friedman's best-selling book The World Is Flat. All of these resumes and publicity presumably add up to an aggregation of connections and clout toward a defined, worthy cause -- the basic ingredients of the early 21st Century nonprofit success formula.

Cambodia Digital Divide Program,
supported via Boeing Co. "scholarships, training assistance,
and purchase of computers." (Photo and quote from Boeing Co.)

It all sounds good on (dare I say it) paper. How does the formula work in practice? One curious note comes across in the LA Times story. The gist is that DDD has outsourced "tedious" digital jobs that "would be prohibitively expensive to do in the United States." The organization's work includes job training specifically toward those people unlikely to otherwise have access to this type of work.

And there's the rub. By exporting these projects, DDD has effectively brought the impact of low-cost, globalized labor into premium areas such as digitization of libraries in American universities. In effect, the projects drive the cost of production down, while not putting any money into an average American's pocket. How's that for a "feel good" project?

This leads us to an uncomfortable question: what is the domestic societal cost of achieving this "greater good"? And who is defining what that "greater good" is? Is it a self-important business school grad filled with a sense of righteous mission? Is it board members with a shared, elite educational background and "successful" endeavors? Where are you in this formula?