By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Mar 7 2001 (IPS)

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who places high priority on narrowing the growing digital divide between the world’s rich and poor nations, will soon launch his new initiative by naming a 37-member UN Task Force on Information Technologies (IT).

The proposed Task Force will be mandated to help strengthen information communications technologies (ICT) of developing nations and also mobilise resources to achieve that goal.

A 22-member UN high-tech panel last month concluded that information technologies – notably unrestricted access to the Internet – will have a key role in achieving the UN’s goals of poverty reduction.

The High-Level Group of Advisers, headed by former Costa Rican President Jose Maria Figueres-Olsen, said there is wide agreement among its members that ICT can be “a potent instrument for accelerating broad-based growth and sustainable development and for reducing poverty”.

“However, we are concerned that at present the huge potential that the Information and Technologies (IT) revolution provides for development is not yet adequately reflected in development policies, programmes and projects,” the Group said in a report submitted to Annan.

The report recommends a set of guidelines to the yet-to-be- established Task Force whose creation was proposed by the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) last year.

The Task Force, the report said, should consist of 18 representatives of member states, eight representatives from the private sector, four representatives from the non-profit sector, including academia and non- governmental organisations (NGOs), and six representatives from the UN system, with the President of ECOSOC as an ex-officio member.

The high-level panel also told the Secretary-General that the Task Force should be given a three-year mandate “in view of the rapidly changing circumstances under which ICT operates”. The Task Force is to meet no more than twice a year and that it report annually to the Secretary-General.

In a 10-page report to Annan, the panel said that new information and communications technologies are creating a new economy and a new global information society.

“The challenge before us is to enable the bottom four billion of the world’s population (of six billion) to participate in and benefit from the information revolution.”

ICT, it said, is not an end in itself but a means to an end. “The Task Force should aim to harness ICT to bridge the social and economic gaps that divide our world, not as a substitute for broad development efforts, but to complement them as a leveraging factor that can empower the poor with the knowledge and skills they need to grow out of poverty.”

The report also argued that the United nations “with its moral authority and its universal and representative character is uniquely positioned to shape a vision for ICT as an enabling factor to build a poverty-free world.

“Under the leadership of the Secretary-General, the United Nations can lend a truly global dimension to efforts to bridge the global digital divide, foster digital opportunity and thus firmly put ICT in the service of development for all”.

The report said that one of the mandates of the Task Force should be to promote universal and affordable access to ICT, particularly bringing ICT to the poorest men and women for improved income, health, education and information.

In its World Employment Report 2001 released last year, the Geneva- based International Labour Organisation (ILO) said that given the different speed of diffusion in rich and poor countries, the information and communications technology revolution is resulting in a widening global “digital divide”.

“The ICT revolution offers genuine potential, but also raises the risk that a significant portion of the world will lose out,” warned ILO Director-General Juan Somavia of Chile.

The ILO pointed out that the east Asian economies of China, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines and others, for example, have been able to make rapid progress in high-tech areas and were able to capture a significant share of the world market for semi conductors and other data-processing equipment.

Annan has argued that “our future depends on technolgy – especially new information technology”. Unlike earlier technologies, he says, this one does not require vast amounts of hardware, financial capital or even energy. “What it does require is brain power – the one commodity that is equally distributed among the world’s peoples.”

“So, for a relatively small investment – mainly investment in basic education, for girls and boys alike – we can bring all kinds of knowledge within reach of poor people, and enable poor countries to ‘leapfrog’ some of the long and painful stages of development that others had to go through,” he adds.

Last year, a joint study by the Washington-based World Information Technology and Services Alliance and International Data Corporation said that worldwide spending on ICT reached 2.1 trillion dollars in 1999, and is expected to exceed 3.0 trillion dollars by 2003.

India, one of the few developing nations to make giant strides in IT, exported over four billion dollars in software last year while its projected exports of software are expected to reach 50 billion dollars by 2008.

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