TECHNOLOGY: Experts Discuss Ways of Bridging ‘Digital Divide’

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Federico Nier-Fischer

VIENNA, Sep 29 2001 (IPS) - The Information Society Technology (IST) that was intended to create an inclusive society in which all citizens may have an easy access to information and virtual communities, is actually widening the existing gaps between North and South, rich and poor, men and women, young and old.

According to experts who attended an international workshop here last week, the so-called ‘digital divide’ is also posing a grave threat to a sustainable information society and a global service economy.

This, they said, should be of particular concern to Europe also. The European Union (EU) is aiming to become “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world”.

The workshop, held in the Austrian capital on Sep 25-26 was sponsored by the EU Commission as part of a programme launched last year to encourage the civil society develop strategies to bridge the digital divide between and within societies around the globe.

The workshop was co-organised by the Research Institute for Applied Knowledge Processing (FAW) based in Germany, which acts as office for the EU-initiated Global Society Dialogue, and the Austrian Official Development Assistance Programme.

The FAW chairman Franz-Josef Radermacher said studies done by his institute evidenced that the IST was creating a new environmental stress, reducing cultural diversity and excluding a growing number of people.

An important task for the future would therefore be to evolve “adequate frameworks of global governance” that included co-financing and redistribution of income through taxes on a global scale, he added.

Radermacher pointed out the need to redress the existence of a “global apartheid”. 80 percent of the world’s population shared no more that 20 percent of global income and the 20 percent cashed 80 percent

As long as such global inequalities persist, a sustainable information society will have no chance.

More money on the global scale was needed to help poorer societies to catch up. The funds should, however, be spent exclusively for education, pension schemes, health, empowerment of the people and capacity building.

Access to internet was also unevenly distributed within the EU, which was making special funds available for programmes for education, said Peter Johnston, Director at the European Commission in Brussels.

He pointed out that while 73.1 percent of the students in the EU had access to Internet, only an average of 34.3 percent of the population enjoyed that privilege.

Women’s share amounted to 28.5 percent and that of the unemployed 24.3 percent. Among the low-income sections of the EU population only 19 percent could access the Internet.

Particularly the elderly and disabled persons in the EU were getting the feeling “to be left behind”, warned Kendra Bartsch and Maja Goepel from Youth for Intergenerational Justice and Sustainability (YOIS), an organisation based in Germany.

Several socio-psychical and cultural barriers have to be overcome before such populations could be motivated to use IST, the researchers stated, while pointing also to the need to adapt the design of devices to the needs of the people.

For sustainable development in India, cheap and easily accessible computers were needed, said Jyoti Parikh, a Professor at the Indira Ghandi Institute for Development Research.

“The Microsoft way is not accessible to us”, she said, not only because of costs, but also because people required better designed hard- and software for basic needs.

IST, web sites and information packages were required to directly address basic needs such as water, sanitation, health care, environment, hygiene and nutrition, she added.

Similarly, Lachhe Bahadur from the Information Society Forum of Nepal, described the needs of small countries. Appropriate ITs were required to suit the needs of regions with poor infrastructure, he said.

“We need a solution for a global and easy-to-use technology covering the whole country, in order to ensure communication for everybody with everybody “, he told IPS.

Bahadur complained that there was much talk about the wonders of new technologies, but donors were actually not offering any assistance for IST.

This view was shared by Assefa Bahta from the African Information Society Initiative in Ethiopia. Bahta said the digital divide reflected the gap between the rich and the poor in Africa too.

South Africa, Libya, Egypt and Nigeria were however better off in terms of IST than the other countries in the region.

However, a regional initiative assisting countries to develop national IT plans was now starting to also assess the impact of new information technologies in African society, particularly in the economic sector.

According to Mauricio Martinez from the Brazilian Information Society Forum, information technologies pose a critical challenge to sustainable development, because of their capacity to empower citizens through direct access to information, services and other interest groups.

IST could enable developing societies to get a common base for innovation in all social and economic activities, he said.

Several intergovernmental initiatives related to digital inclusion already existed. One of these was the Digital Opportunity Task Force launched in 2000 at the G-8 Okinawa Summit of major industrial nations (G-8 DOT Force). It had submitted at the Genoa Summit in June this year a report entitled “Digital Opportunities for All”.

The United Nations had also launched an ICT Task Force last year.

Such initiatives however lacked adequate developing country participation, said Martinez. He stressed the need for involving the civil society at all levels of decision-making as a “critical complement to governmental roles”.

Dismay in regard of the digital divide was expressed by the director of the Austrian Development Cooperation Programme,Georg Lennkh. “Who can decide what is more important for an African village – a water pipe or a computer?” he asked participants in the workshop.