Tim Unwin on digital inequality, education reform and the future of development

Professor Tim Unwin is one of the world’s leading experts on the use of technology in education. Emeritus Professor of Historical Geography at the University of London, Unwin is a long-term collaborator with various United Nations’ initiatives. He was the CEO and then Secretary General of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation and is a co-founder (and “catalyst”) of ICT4D (Information and Communication Technologies for Development). He has written and co-authored 18 books and his latest publication, Digital Inclusion in an Unequal World, will be released by Routledge in spring 2026. During his visit to Turin this week to participate in the pre-launch of the book at ICTILO’s Innovation Lab, ETF took the opportunity to interview Unwin, resulting in a wide-ranging analysis of the state of education, the digital revolution, the delivery of development projects and the challenges of inclusivity. 

ETF: Professor Unwin, your new book is an eloquent ‘j’accuse’ against the so-called Digital Barons. At the outset you pose the question of whether technological advances are beneficial to the world’s poorest and most marginalised or are actually “enslaving and exploiting” them. What changes would you make to educational curricula to ensure that technology is liberating and inclusive?

Tim Unwin: We have to free ourselves form the shackles of digital slavery. If we don’t, the vision for the future is very bleak and that’s not a message people want to hear. Very practically, I think we should be giving everybody a technical education that includes cyber-security, ensuring a safe, wise and secure use of digital tech. Almost nobody is giving that training. Tech. will always change, but if everyone has instilled in them a safe, wise and secure use of it, it would be hugely beneficial.

We’re already at an existential point in which machines can do everything better than humans. Unless we do something about it, the triangular economy of the future will be cyborgs producing things for companies, which are taxed by governments, and those governments then give tokens to what’s left of humanity to buy those products. If the human race is going to survive, we have to offer not just technological education, but also training about what makes us human. The biggest problem today is the collapse of our political systems so understanding, and educating about, civil responsibilities is incredibly important.

ETF: You’ve worked on many development projects over the years, including for the Prime Ministerial initiative, Imfundo (an isiXhosa and Zulu word for “education”). What are the lessons you’ve learnt about leadership and effective delivery? You’ve often spoken and written about partnerships - does that derive from humility, from a sense that the leader doesn’t have all the answers?

Tim Unwin: Actually I think I’m still very arrogant! [laughs] People do say I’m incredibly bright and I’m usually sure I’m right, so that would run counter to what you’re suggesting. But I learnt more about development in the first three months I was at Imfundo than during my previous 20 years as an academic. I learnt how very, very difficult it is to develop any sustainable intervention and that having diverse teams is essential to getting tasks done. And I’ve seen first hand the real arrogance of some aid agencies and their staff. I was very privileged: when I was working for Imfundo, I was met by drivers at the airport. I would always talk to them, they were the best source of information: we had great chats and gossiped. But I would sometimes go in cars with people from other agencies and they were so superior, they would tell the driver where to go and that was it.

I wrote a booklet for UNESCO about building partnerships, because there need to be rigorous, structured ways of crafting partnerships and the UN doesn’t know what partnerships are. I’ve always been interested in building relationships. I was a very pure academic - historians are amongst the purest! - but when I was Head of Department I got really interested in the potential of partnerships. I created an external advisory board for our department to advise us because I wanted us to be the best. It was about the externalities - funding, attracting undergraduates. My viticulture course was sponsored by Guinness and Sainsburys…”

ETF: Partnerships, egalitarianism and inclusivity are fine principles, but presumably at some point tough decision-making by appointed individuals, old-fashioned leadership, is required.

Tim Unwin: When I was Head of Department I had around 50 staff - academic, technical, secretarial - and there was no kind of hierarchical structure. I always had an open-door policy, which is what many people who come into leadership aspire to. It took three years to realise that you have to shut the door sometimes and make tough decisions. If you have even half the people agreeing with you, you’re doing well!

And until you’re delivering a development intervention on the ground you have no idea of all the complexities of doing so. As academics you’re always criticising the development process - it’s much easier to criticise than actually do something. Then I was thrown in to delivering something whilst managing a complex, diverse team that was always changing. There was a very high turnover of staff. It’s about understanding the political context of your organisation but also those you’re working with. You learn a lot by dealing with heads of state and leaders of governments, about what makes ministers tick.

In a close-knit team working in education and technology, everyone has a clear role and different people bring different skills: someone provides the laptops, someone the connectivity, the curricula and so on. There’s a common cause, but people don’t always get on. As a leader, I sent myself on a training course about mediation for conflict in the workplace to try and resolve certain issues…

ETF: How would you assess the state of higher education in the UK, and Europe more generally, at the moment?

Tim Unwin: Before the ‘massification’ of higher education we had about 10% of the UK population that was considered bright, and they went to university to pursue knowledge for the betterment of society. Then you had Tony Blair saying that half of the population should be going to university. But half the population doesn’t have the ability or the knowledge. During all the Covid restrictions, students didn’t say ‘we’re not having a good opportunity to learn’, they said ‘we’re missing out on student life’. University now is three years of having fun, getting drunk and learning is just a tiny bit of that and they get a certificate which is pretty worthless. The cheating, even at PhD level, is horrendous. There’s been a total collapse in student interest in their subjects and there’s been grade inflation, with more and more people getting higher grades and universities - academics aren’t stupid! - changing the marking system to make that happen. Personally I would close two thirds of British Universities because what we actually need, and don’t have, are technical institutes and academies. 

It’s not an argument about elitism but about excellence. We’ve accepted mediocrity and what we need to do is ‘deprivilege’ the notion that a university or academia are the most important peaks in a person’s learning journey. Successful societies in the future will be those that empower citizens to have a love for learning throughout their lives, and I’m optimistic about that: I don’t think people are too thick to continue learning throughout their lives…

ETF: Where did you interest in computing come from?

Tim Unwin: A whole set of things came together: my PhD was modelling medieval settlements in Nottingham. Working with a professor of statistics in Bath and a deck of punch-cards, I was using computers to see whether the actual settlement pattern differed from a pattern generated by random numbers. I got that kick from technology, from the whirr of machinery, the hot oil, the excitement of discovery. And from there I’ve always been interested in the use of digital technology in schools.”

ETF: “And your interest in wine?”

Tim Unwin: “That goes back to camping in Europe as a family in the 1960s. Vineyards are always in beautiful places, like the vineyards in Valais [to the east of Geneva]. As a student I got to know and like wine. In my second year, a friend and I would pool our money once a week and buy a bottle of wine and invite friends over to taste it. In 1974 we went on a drive around the vineyards of Europe and that interest took a massive professional leap when I was at Durham and took students on field trips to Portugal, in the Douro, to get to know people in the Port trade. In the 1980s, I went back to Portugal working on rural change and farmers’ perceptions of innovation. 

We’ve lost our intimate relationship with the physical environment. As a historical geographer, I can see the past in any landscape I walk through, but most people haven’t got a clue about that. We’ve become much more urbanised, and have lost our connection with our historical landscapes.

In the mid-80s, during the reorganisation of London university, I had the opportunity to redesign some of our courses and all of that research came together in the creation of a course about the historical geography of viticulture. SOAS [London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies] had a course on the geography of oil, but wine is culturally much, much more significant. I started doing lots more research and it really fascinated me how many books on wine copied things from previous books and how myths were created. I got speaking to the Masters of Wine and they wanted to become more rigorous academically, so I said ‘why don’t you have your own journal?’ We created a journal and for a decade I was the Masters of Wine external, academic invigilator.

ETF: There’s a real urgency, almost indignation, in your new book. Where does that missionary zeal come from?

Tim Unwin: I’ve often been asked what drives me. In part it’s my faith: ‘to whom much  is given, much will be demanded’ [Luke 12:48], but that’s maybe for another conversation. I’ve seen so much poverty and death, and I feel it’s my responsibility to do what I can. When I lived in an old mining terrace in the late 1970s, the glass of water by my bed used to freeze and if you needed to go to the loo in the winter, you had to dig your way through the snow. In one African country where I worked there was a real problem with the sexual abuse of young girls and parents didn’t want to send girls to school when they reached puberty because 80% were being assaulted in some way. From my first research posting in India, I’ve understood that we should be servants of the poor and marginalised, that we shouldn’t be happy with things as they are but try to make a difference.”

Sample Quotations from Tim Unwin’s new Book, Digital Inclusion in an Unequal World:

“Are these technologies going to make the world a ‘better’ place, especially for the world’s poorest and most marginalised peoples? Or are they instead going further to enslave and exploit them, incorporating them into a system whereby they become increasingly unfree, with the ‘Digital Barons’ extracting ever more surplus value from the data of their day-to-day lived experiences?”

“The dominant neoliberal global system until recently led by the USA, focusing on the capitalist requirements of expanding markets and reducing labour costs… requires poor people from whose labour surplus value can be extracted and converted into profits by the owners of capital. It also requires expanding markets so that this profit can be realised.”

“There needs to be a moral reawakening in the tech sector”.

“International agreements have been essential for enabling global telecommunications and digital infrastructure to be constructed and maintained. However, with the privatisation of the telecommunications sector from the 1980s onwards an entirely new dynamic was created. No longer were telecommunications seen primarily as being a service for all citizens provided by their governments, but rather as an opportunity for private capital to invest in businesses across the world and from which substantial profits could be generated. The profit motive, rather than primarily a service model, has enabled the creation of a vast swathe of new digital technologies, but it has come at a cost. That cost has been the potential for inequalities between rich and poor to be increased, both between countries and within them.” 

“Global inequalities declined in the latter part of the 20th century, but are now at least as high as they were at the peak of European imperialism. As the World Inequality Lab report notes, ‘Income and wealth inequalities have been on the rise nearly everywhere since the 1980s, following a series of deregulation and liberalization programs which took different forms in different countries…’”

“Regulation in the interest of the many rather than the few should be an urgent priority for governments that seek to serve all their citizens.”

“…we have already entered an era of digital enslavement. If slavery is defined as a loss of freedom, then the Digital Barons, mainly in the USA but also increasingly in China, have already enslaved most of those who are digitally connected, from whom they extract very considerable amounts of surplus value.”