By IPS Correspondents
TOKYO, Jan 15 2003 (IPS)

The hundreds of people who attended a conference that ended here Wednesday agreed on the need to bridge the digital divide in Asia, but their proposals for exactly how to do that differed from that point onwards.

Some look at the issue of information and communication as more of technology, while some focused more on access. Still others saw it as a tool that can be used to achieve development goals.

Activists say the digital divide also had a gender aspect to it, since women are often sidelined in the region’s leap toward an information society and end up doing lower-level work in the technology industry.

While information technology (IT) has become a buzzword, attracted investments and helped steer many Asian economies from South Korea and Taiwan to Malaysia to these industries, it is still seen as a mainly male turf, the activists explain.

In the end, the Tokyo Declaration issued by the conference, the Asia preparatory meeting ahead of the World Summit on an Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva later this year, committed countries to pursue ways of narrowing the digital gap while preserving the region’s diversity and cultural heritage.

"The document is important as it provides a directive and provides the needs in Asia. The next step in developing country strategies and finding the money to do it," said Indonesian official Wijino Perwitorini.

Officials of Japan, among the world’s top donor countries, focused on the kind of development aid that countries could use.

Toranosuke Katayama, minister of public management, home affairs, posts and telecommunications, pledged Japanese aid to promote the expensive infrastructure needed to be built in Asian countries.

”Affordable network access is a challenge but is an important challenge to facilitate the Asian regional ICT (information and communication technologies) networking,” said Katayama. He cited the Asia Broadband Programme, a Japanese initiative aimed at connecting Asian countries.

One third of the region’s population has access to ICT, mostly in rich countries such as Japan, South Korea, Singapore. South Korea is Asia’s leader in Internet access, with 56 percent of its population able to surf the Internet. Other countries, however, have very low access levels.

Some of the some participants, who came from government, business, IT sector and non-government groups, said they wished the meeting focused more on how ICTs can change people’s lives, especially in the poorer parts of Asia.

"The aim of an information society is to provide ubiquitous and equitable access towards building a value-based society, ” said Joba Menon of the Britain-based oneworld site, which carries information on the developing world. But the ”value-based” part of this equation remains unaddressed, Menon added.

In a separate NGO statement, activists pointed out that ICTs must only be a means to pursue the ultimate goals of promotion of sustainable development.

The issue of gender disparity was a good example of the divide between citizens’ groups, government officials, private sector people and technological experts at the three-day conference. After strong campaigning by activists, the declaration noted the need to pay special attention to women ”who must be empowered to confront unequal power relations and other social and cultural aspects against them in the region”.

"In the end, the Tokyo Declaration was a compromise,” said Mavic Cabrera-Balleza of Isis International, a non-government group that works on issues around women and communication.

Over the past few days, activists discussed gender discrepancies in IT management jobs. Women are often found working as data collectors or word processors, leaving them at the bottom of the pile in the lucrative industry. ”Many are software programmers but very few are in hardware design," said Cabrera.

The lack of concrete gender-based surveys in developing countries has made it difficult to have an estimate on Asian women employed in IT. But individual studies report that women’s access to the Internet is marginal and concentrated in main urban centres, skewed toward the educated, and the middle and upper classes.

In South Korea,the highest number of women above the level of assistant manager is in the IT industry, but still at a dismal 25.6 percent compared to men.

Neelangani Wanasundera of the Sri Lanka-based Centre for Women’s Research says that women comprise 80 percent of those enrolled in work processing and Internet courses in mainly urban centres, showing the lack of women in programming or engineering – which represent the better paying and challenging jobs.

Surveys in Sri Lanka indicate that employers’ perceptions were that women were unable to work long hours due to domestic responsibilities and were " unsuitable" for technical work.

In Japan, data compiled by Coper, which works on gender and ICT, showed that from 1999-2000, the number of women ICT engineers decreased from 11 to 10 percent despite the 6.9 percent growth in the industry during the period. Men comprise 83 percent of the staff of big ICT firms.

Chat Garcia Ramilo, head of the Association for Progressive Communications Women’s Networking, added: "It is no longer a question of how to look at technology, but to be able to participate in decision-making to make sure technology will not be harmful to women.”

But for others, the bigger problem is general access to technology in the first place.

"Gender is not an issue at this conference," said Datuk Mohamed Arif Nun, chief executive officer of the Malaysia-based Multimedia Development Corp. ”This conference is about the information economy."

Robert Roger of the group Global Information Infrastructure, which comprises 50 chief executive officers of telecommunications firms, says while environment and gender are important issues, they fail to take account of the first problems that need to be tackled first.

”Before those important issues, we have to address the urgent need to get people connected," he said, pointing that four-fifths of the world’s population has no access to the Internet.

Excerpt: