Developing ICT skills for personal and livelihood improvement is vital to attain self-reliability. Self-reliability is the first step to break the cycle of poverty that is handed down from one generation to the next.

Self-reliability is a concept that has to be stressed in community development, only if the individuals we are working with are taught how to rely on themselves to attain their personal and community goals do we have made a behavioural change that has the potential of continuous empowerment.

ICTs introduce a new way of life as they are opening the possibility of self-teaching, research and exploration that is independent from the physical location one is in. At the same time however these advantages are challenged by the demand for “lifelong learning”. Today, to maintain one’s edge in the marketplace, each individual has to be in a continuous quest for information, techniques, skills and knowledge.

This permanent learning cycle demands a constant re-skilling and learning update that has be done at the individual and the collective level. The introduction to ICTs is only one little step in the self-improvement, self-reliability and self-empowerment cycle that individuals and communities have to attain as a way of life.

Our role as development facilitators is to introduce our target communities to ICT and to make them aware of the requests that the information age is making on each one of us if we, as individuals and as countries, want to maintain a competitive edge in the economic market.

To have the biggest developmental impact ICTs should be taught to children at schools. ArabDev the targeting poor school children in deprived areas to teach them how to use information technology to improve their present and their future.

Children are the biggest developmental investment, they are the agents of the future. By teaching them how to use ICTs they gain knowledge of these technologies early in their life and learn how best to use them to further their education and their general knowledge.
Language is an important element in the use of ICTs. Children have greater linguistic assimilation capacities than adults. English is the Internet’s first language, for example. Arab content is being build slowly, but a linguistically diverse Internet is going to remain and children are well posed to learn languages easier. The children of today will furthermore be responsible of the Arabic content of the Internet in the near future

Children are the creative element of the future and the bearers of the culture of their ancestors, their early exposition to ICTs is an added vehicle to use it creatively and to respectfully represent their cultural heritage.

Furthermore, early introduction to ICTs give children a chance to become interested and proficient in their use and to encourage them to pursue further knowledge in these new technologies in their more advanced studies. The use of ICTs becomes a part of life for these children as it is for the more privileged of them and we are able to close the knowledge gap in the upcoming generations.

Girls and women are customarily the most disadvantaged segment of the society, with strict limitations on movement and reach out. ICTs are an ideal tool for females to be able to surpass their limitations and participate in the workforce through the outreach capacities of the new communication technologies.

ICTs bring work closer to home, if not even afford access to work from home. Women who are the caregivers for their children and families benefit most from bringing work closer to the physical home.

In the Arab region moreover women are often limited in their educational and work pursuit to locations that are geographically close to their home. ICTs as a tool offers more options to women in their present marginalized role to circumvent some of the limitations imposed on them by the dominant culture and participate in mainstream life.

ICTs also offer a means to find information about legal, societal and life issues that is wide open to women who know how to use these information accessing tools.

Increasing rates of unemployment among educated youths is undermining societal and individual efforts for self-sustainability through earned income. By learning new ICT skills youths might be able to find revenue earning opportunities.

Unemployment is a daily reality for an increasing segment of the youth in Egypt. By ILO estimates in the late 1990s, 34% of Egypt’s youth were unemployed. Another problem facing youths coming out of the educational system at its varied levels is the discrepancy between market needs and the offered educational degrees. Many diploma graduates, for example, find themselves lacking the skills to find work in their field of specialization. On the other hand, youths with college degrees end up in manual jobs because they are more profitable and available. The latter have often a feeling of personal dissatisfaction though because societal values rate wide collar work higher than manual work.

The insufficient local job absorption capacity was masked when other Arab countries had a high demand for Egyptian labour. This trend has markedly decreased in the last decade and the numbers of youths that cannot find the needed income to establish and independent life is increasing.

There are many community development initiatives in Egypt and the Arab world that can be models, lessons learned and are liable to scaling by other NGOs, CBOs, communities and individuals. ICT enables the transmission of selected initiatives to a large public cheaply and across large geographic expanses.

With many diverse community development initiatives in countries that have a lot of similarity in terms of language, culture and aspirations one should not reinvent the wheel. Development initiatives in the Arab region could learn a lot from each other and thereby economize on time, efforts and money – not to say minimize the repetition of mistakes.

The communication technologies are ideal for the transmission cost-effective of models and pilot developmental projects across different parts of a country or across nation states. The unified language and similar culture in most of the Arab region are also factors enhancing the lessons learned, replication and scaling of developmental initiatives.

The Arab world needs more of a sub-culture of development that is suited to its particular needs and is more in line with the aspiration of its grass-roots. To make different developmental experiences available on the Internet is a way to reach this collective goal.