There are many ways to draw a cynic's scorn. One of the latest is to say that Africa's poor urgently need access to the Internet. That didn't stop the United Nations from subtitling its 2001 human-development report: "making new technologies work for human development".
Nor did it discourage the Government from giving £100,000 last year to the UN's newly formed Information and Communications Technology Task Force. And Japan last month pledged $15 billion dollars in aid over the next five years to address "the international digital divide" between the northern and southern hemispheres.
Have Western-led development efforts lost touch with reality? Is it not bizarre to prescribe the Internet to a country such as Senegal, which the UN Development Programme ranks 145th out of 162 in terms of human development and where there are eight physicians per 1,000 people, 67 per cent of adults are illiterate and 37 per cent of five-year-olds are malnourished? Aren't there more pressing needs?
"That's the sort of complaint only advanced by people in the North, never by those directly concerned, i.e. the citizens of developing countries," says Olivier Sagna, the founder of the Senegalese chapter of the Internet Society, in a recent interview on Le Monde's website.
"The countries of the South need the Internet more than the already developed nations, because it is a tool we can use to address problems peculiar to Africa."
One such problem is the inability to follow market trends. The International Development Research Centre of Canada, for example, provided grants to women in southern Senegal to cultivate market gardens and send the resulting fruit and vegetables to cities. Much of their produce was left unsold, however, because of oversupply.
So the centre equipped poor communities in the region with Internet access, so small farmers could keep abreast of what others were producing as well as of demand.
As Sagna says: "when you speak of e-commerce in the North, you imagine somebody typing in their credit-card number to get something from afar delivered to their door. In Africa, it may simply be about getting information on something that's happening right in your locality, but which has hitherto been very difficult to find out."
One of the principal activities conducted by donors and developers in these early days of "making new technologies work for development" is e-health.
In most African countries, doctors, and certainly specialists, are concentrated in urban areas, meaning a rural dweller may have to travel hundreds of miles just to make an appointment.
The UN is funding the Lincus programme in South America and the ASARI project in Africa, in which old truck trailers are towed to remote villages and fitted out with computers and Internet access, through mobile phones where there are no landlines, to provide locals with a link to urban amenities.
By the simple apparatus of an e-mail to a doctor in a city hospital, villagers can describe their symptoms and receive expert advice, perhaps saving a costly and time-sapping trip to the city.
"It's not just about handing over a stack of PCs and saying 'problem solved'," according to the Department of Public Enterprise, which is represented on the UN task force.
"It's about creating a meaningful information society."
Ah yes, meaningful. There is little point in e-mailing a bulletin to someone who can't read or doesn't understand the language it's written in.
That's why one of the principal recommendations of a workshop on "cybercitizenship" held last year in Bamako, the capital of Mali, was that any such Internet centre must be equipped with "tools appropriate for Africa's oral tradition and multilingualism, such as IP voice-overs, touch screens, etc.".
All a bit costly, especially when you add the price of connecting to the Internet in a country such as Senegal, where one telephone company has a monopoly on line access.
That's not an obstacle easily overcome, as maintaining high prices is often crucial to governments' privatisation plans.
The Tanzanian government, for example, recently outlawed the use of IP voice-overs, which many individuals and businesses were using to avoid paying enormous international calling rates, because the two European companies planning to invest in the Tanzania Communication Company saw such Net services as a threat to their profitability.
Such expense explains why the real communications revolution taking place in Africa is in radio.
Independent stations are sprouting up at a phenomenal rate, broadcasting in local languages on everything from disease prevention to restraint in times of conflict.
Earlier this month, the Bawara people, of the remote Ghanzi region of Botswana, sought funding for a radio station in their language so they could keep their increasingly dispersed tribe up to date on births, deaths and marriages.
Although radios are all the rage, there is debate within many African societies over the cost of Internet access, which is a remarkable change for those countries where discussions of national interest were confined to government chambers until recently.
The owners of MΘtissacana (www.metissacana.sn), west Africa's first cybercafe when it opened, in Senegal in 1996, have already got thousands of local Net surfers to sign their petition for cheaper line access.
If democracy is central to development, as most of the Western world would have us believe, then the Internet has furthered African development. Until the Internet was brought to bear on elections in Senegal, for example, the announcement of results was inevitably and immediately followed by claims that polling cards were withheld from known government opponents and that deceased or fictitious government supporters got one or more.
The independent body responsible for overseeing the 2000 presidential elections therefore decided to make Senegal the first state in the world to publish the electoral list online, enabling people to check that they were on it - and that their opponents weren't on it more than once.
The winner, Abdoulaye Wade, recently took part in a two-hour online chat with Senegalese surfers, during which he fielded questions such as: "so, Mr President, what was the real reason for your recent trip to France?" and "do you seriously have a national development plan or are you just freewheeling?" The previous president, Abdou Diouf, would have trembled at the prospect of such direct dealings with his subjects.
Though more Web-conscious than most, Senegal is not an exception. The 2001 presidential elections in Benin were also the subject of probing investigations and irreverent lampoonery on the Net.
The Internet does not just inform Africans, it also enables Africans to inform. For the likes of Michel Ben Arrous, this is critical. In his introduction to a new collection of essays on journalists in wars, he writes: "the big Western media remain the principal providers of information to Africa . . . but they are impelled by the urgencies of their own public, its expectations of exotic news . . . so they draw only caricatures. For tribalism, regionalism and fanaticism, read obscurantism."
If indigenous websites like that of the Pan African News Agency (www.panapress.com or www.pana.sn) can provide more accurate information on conflicts, then Ben Arrous believes more wars will be avoided and, when they erupt, those fleeing them will be better understood wherever they arrive.
And from wherever they settle, these refugees may use the Internet not only to keep in touch with home, but also to mount projects for channelling their money and skills into developing Africa. Mobilising the diaspora, the United Nations calls it. Or, more simply, making technologies work for human development.
pdoyle@irish-times.com