Content creation in Bhutan for ICT mediated sustainable development

The Internet was developed in the 1960's as a primitive network for facilitating communication within small scientific communities. Today there are over 544.2 million users worldwide (Nua internet research, 2002) and those numbers are growing exponentially. As information and communication technology (ICT) makes its way around the world, few can dispute the impact it has on the economic, political and social dimensions of human life. Whether or not this impact is wholly positive with respect to developing countries is currently under debate. In the past 50-years the global economy has been transformed into an information-based economy through successive developments of energy and information technologies. Yet the roughly 4-billion individuals who live in rural populations in developing nations that are beyond the electric power and telecommunications grids are unable to benefit from the opportunities afforded by ICT. The research focus of this paper is the question: how can ICT content be made useful and usable to rural indigenous populations. To focus further on this question, I decided to study this question in the context of the country of Bhutan. This research paper aims to outline alternative research methods used to find and present data on flow of financial assets in the country of Bhutan. By collecting and visualizing this information through ICT infrastructure a new tool for the utilization of ICT for sustainable development efforts in Bhutan is potentiated. In order to effectively apply ICT in the context of development, new strategies and new research models must be developed to explore local content creation and to expand resource utility.