By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 8 2000 (IPS)

The world’s developing nations are complaining – rather bitterly – that they are being left to fend for themselves in a technological race where the rich are sprinting far ahead of the poor in a not-so-level playing field.

“If Africa was the poor relative of the world,” says Alpha Oumar Konare, president of Mali, “it was due to the prohibitive cost of advanced technology – where the cost of telephones, for example, was beyond its reach.”

Addressing the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Friday, he said pointedly: “We reject the marginalisation of Africa.”

Complaining about the growing digital divide between rich and poor nations, he said: “You need to help us. It is the only way for the (African) continent to become a full-fledged member of the new global information order.”

The Malian president was one of the keynote speakers at a three- day meeting of the ECOSOC focusing specifically on the role of information technology in the context of a knowledge-based global economy.

The question of world technology, information and communication, he said, raises the issue of overall assistance to Africa. Unfortunately, there was a greater push for cellular phones in Africa, he said, than there was to erect local infrastructures. “Priorities had to be refocused,” he added.

Cuba’s Minister of Communications and Technology Ignacio Rodriguez Plana was equally blunt. Speaking in his native tongue Spanish, the minister complained of the lack of “local content” on the information superhighway, the Internet.

Rodriguez Plana said that more than 80 percent of the contents transmitted on web sites were in English.

The media were becoming powerful tools in imposing standardised cultural patterns, which were often “aggressive and alienating.” “It is a new method of colonising the peoples of the developing world.”

The Cuban minister said that one could not speak of the Internet to half of humankind that had never spoken on a telephone. Nor could one speak of the goodness of software and intangible goods to the almost 1 billion people suffering from hunger, living in absolute poverty or have no access to medical services.

A fundamental change and decisive actions by the international community were needed to narrow the technological gap between the North and the South.

The recognition of the universal right to information, he said, presupposes the establishment of a new international communications and information order, while ensuring a more equitable distribution and linguistic and cultural diversity of digital content.

Anne Kristin Sydnes, Norway’s Minister of International Development, said Africa had 20 percent of the world’s population, but only two percent of its telephone lines.

The continent’s access to the Internet was still marginal, she said, adding that there was a need for local content to increase the relevance and value of available information to African users and users in other developing nations.

She also pointed out that cyberspace was not a value-neutral area. “We all worry about racist propaganda, and our children’s access to pornography.”

The Internet must never be an “ethics-free zone”, she added. “We must bring our values to cyberspace – it must not become a place where the rule of law does not apply.”

Mark Malloch Brown, the Administrator of the UN Development Programme (UNDP), says one of the primary goals should be to connect every capital city and major business centre to the Global Information Infrastructure.

An equally important objective should be to provide at least one Internet and telephone terminal to every community – a goal that can be met in part through the establishment of a new partnership consortia involving private sector companies and local interests on a regional basis that mix equity, loan and vendor financing with local savings.

The need is great, he says, because estimates by the International Telecommunications Union point out that 96 percent of Internet host computers reside in high income nations.

“There are more hosts in Finland than all of Latin America, and more in New York than Africa,” he adds.

Ambassador Makarim Wibisono of Indonesia, president of ECOSOC, said that “radical and decisive action” was necessary if the differential access to information and knowledge was to be effectively redressed and the digital divide successfully bridged.

“With the emergence of a borderless world, collaborative efforts must be inclusive of all relevant actors, governments, multilateral and bilateral donors, the private sector, civil society and other stakeholders, to foster information flows for development,” he points out.

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