As a consultant with the Gender and Rural Development team at the World Bank, I wanted to post a response to the main thread which also addresses many of the very pointed and important components already raised by other participants while including the input of gender mainstreaming.  I think this is a direct link to Ben's call for viable, sustainable and scalable intiatives.  If providing technologies to small holders is difficult in general, it is even more so in the case of rural women, who often lack access to basic technolgies such as wheelbarrows, let alone more advanced electronics.  There is a basic rub here in that often times those who stand to benefit the most (e.g. overall impacts of even marginal increases in income) are also those most at risk of being excluded: exclusion and information-gaps can be self perpetuating.

There is a continued need to reinforce the notion that agricultural development is not gender neutral.  Two examples from the Gender in Agriculture Sourcebook come to mind.

The Warana Wired Village Project in India failed to include women when it linked 70 villages through Kiosks which housed computers and printers.  Women were not encouraged to utilize these resources which resulted in the poorest, landless labors being exluded and a widening of the digital-literacy gap between men and women.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Grand Coast Fishing Operators' Union in Senegal (a womens-based union) has created a network which utilizes ICTs to share price information among 7,500 users to promote their produce, monitor export markets, and even negotiate prices with overseas buyers before they arrive in Senegal.  By recognizing those areas wherein women play a major role along the fishing value chain, this project was able to collectively benefit a large number of people - both women and men.

ICT is one of these great areas which, in my opinion, has true potential to really impact development through some very simple and cost-effective measures.  The speed at which these potential impacts can grow needs to be properly addressed as well (assuring benefits for those working from a disadvantaged technology vantage point).  I think one of the most basic steps practioners can take to address these concerns is to simply expand the dialogue from rural smallholders to rural women and men smallholders.