is IT alone really a solution to poverty?

From Information technology must be used to improve life in poor countries:

"12 September – Information technology should be used to improve the quality of life in developing countries, thus helping to achieve the ambitious goals set by the United Nations Millennium Summit of 2000, Secretary-General Kofi Annan said today."

"Noting that the World Summit on the Information Society is just three months away, he added: 'I hope you will all do your utmost to make it a success, by using it to spread the word about initiatives that make creative use of technology to improve the quality of life in developing countries. By so doing, you will enable others to benefit from your ideas, and to replicate them easily.'"

Lets just hope that the participants at the World Summit on the Information Society do not assume that the very presence and utilization of IT in developing countries will somehow automagically reduce poverty and help the poor.

It has been often stated that technology will solve the problems of poverty. While it might be true that technology has increased productivity in certain areas around the world, it is perhaps very much debatable whether it has decreased poverty in general.

If history is any indication, we should have already learned that technology alone does not solve social problems, not necessarily, and perhaps not unless it can be shown so. For example, it would be beneficial to hear how does information technology help developing countries escape poverty? It might, if the means of production in the developing countries are improved to build self sustainable economy based on access to information and information technology in general.

However, considering the conditions around the world at this stage, I would rather expect that activities related to building sustainable local economies (independently if they are related to information technology or no) are more important in escaping poverty. People in the developing countries can have access to all information technology they want (even this process is questionable because to achieve success with information technology one needs to first create the necessary economic conditions in order to bring the access to information technology to majority of the people) and still might not be able to escape poverty unless some sort of sustainable local economy is established to a certain degree.