Share the benefits of information technology with the poorest countries and shape its use to fight illiteracy and poverty: this is the gist of appeals to rich countries and business organisations at the first global summit on information.
Political leaders from 175 countries, some 4 900 representatives of 660 non- governmental organisations (NGOs), and 636 business representatives have joined the conference that began in Geneva Wednesday. The conference is due to end Friday.
The United Nations and several organisations in the UN system are backing the basic appeal by leaders from developing countries.
The rationale behind such exhortations is simple. One billion of the world’s six billion people own 80% of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Another billion struggle to survive on less than a dollar a day.
“The information revolution has completely bypassed nearly one billion people, creating a digital divide that hinders development,” says the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO).
The World Bank estimates that about 1.5 billion people will be added to the world population over the next 25 years. It says 97% of these will be born in developing areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
“Many will experience poverty, unemployment and disillusion with what they will see as an inequitable global system,” says special World Bank representative to the UN Eduardo Doryan. He was addressing some 13 000 participants at what the UN has termed the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).
“There is a further risk that such gross imbalances are and will continue to be further amplified by digital and knowledge divides,” Doryan said.
The so-called digital divide is really several gaps in one: technological, commercial and gender. Women and girls enjoy less access to information technology than men and boys — particularly in developing countries.
Such gaps will not disappear on their own, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said while opening the Summit Wednesday. An open, inclusive information society that benefits all people will not emerge without sustained commitment and investment, he said. Annan called upon WSIS participants to “produce those acts of political will.”
It was in the information industry’s own interest to do so, he said. “The future of the IT industry lies not so much in the developed world where markets are saturated, as in reaching the billions of people in the developing world who remain untouched by the information revolution,” the UN Secretary-General said.
With 54 countries in the developing world poorer than they were in 1990, ICTs (information and communication technologies) have a key role to play in creating a more prosperous world, said Yoshio Utsumi, WSIS Secretary-General and also Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), an inter-governmental body based in Geneva.
Leaders from developing countries affirmed these views.
“The internationally agreed development goals as contained in the Millennium Declaration three years ago as well as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights cannot be realised until an all-inclusive information society is created,” Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo said Wednesday.
Almost everyone in the developed countries has access to ICTs. In sub- Saharan Africa the fixed line tele-density is about 1 to 130 inhabitants. The Internet, computers and television are available only to a handful of elite city people.
“The effects of the ICT revolution should not be limited exclusively to achieving economic and developmental gains,” Egyptian President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak said while addressing the conference Thursday.
They should be extended to strengthening links among nations to bring about world peace based on justice, and to supporting national efforts towards freedom and democracy, Mubarak said.
“All this should be achieved within a framework that respects national identity and maintains the diversification of particularities, religions, and cultures as key components for cooperation and integration among civilisations,” he said. Leaders from many developing countries shared that view.
Bangladesh Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia stressed yet another aspect of the ICT revolution. “It is for developing countries and especially the least developed among them to seize the opportunity and adopt ICT as a priority tool to fight hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, discrimination against women, children, aged and the disabled,” she told the WSIS Thursday.
The Bangladesh Prime Minister and other heads of government and state from Asia, Africa and Latin America strongly support the creation of a Digital Solidarity Fund.
They want the fund to channel technical and financial assistance towards national capacity building, facilitate transfer and use of technology from developed countries, assist in the sharing of knowledge and skills, and develop compatible regulations and standards that respect national characteristics and concerns.
Against this backdrop the WSIS is expected to endorse what its officials call “a shared vision in the declaration of principles and to commit to a plan of action that will lay out a roadmap for targets, and benchmarks to turn this vision into reality.”
Goals include taking ICT to all villages, schools, hospitals and governments by 2015, and ensuring that half the world’s people are within reach of ICT by then.
Roles and responsibilities of all stakeholders, including government and industry are outlined in the action plan of the summit, according to a WSIS statement circulated to the media Wednesday.
The summit is being held in two phases. The second phase will be held in Tunisia Nov. 16 to 18, 2005.