A group of people outside the medical library in the central Havana neighourhood of El Vedado, where Wi-Fi connection is now available. It is one of the 35 hotspots opened by the government telecoms monopoly around the country. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Sep 9 2015 (IPS)

Young people in Cuba are anxiously awaiting an acceleration of the informatisation of society, which is apparently moving ahead at the same pace as the current reform process, “without haste, but without pause,” according to the authorities.

“Where I would really like to have Internet is at home,” Beatriz Seijas told IPS, sitting in the entrance to a building on Avenida 23, a street in downtown Havana better known as La Rampa, where the state telecoms monopoly ETECSA opened one of the 35 new Wi-Fi access points around the country in July.

Seijas said she came to try the connection here, for two dollars an hour. “As a Cuban, I had never connected to the Internet by telephone or tablet,” said the 19-year-old university student.

“Connecting to the Internet is just a normal thing to do,” said the young woman, who despite the technological and connectivity problems in this Caribbean island nation, sees the new information and communication technologies (ICTs) as a natural part of life, like many of her peers around the world.

Today six out of seven people across the globe have a cell phone and more than 3.0 billion of the world’s 7.1 billion people use the Internet, according to the United Nations, although there is a large gap in ICT access – another reflection of global poverty and inequality.

Digital natives is a term used to refer to people born after 1980, who had access to computers, video games, the Internet, and mobile phones from a young age.

Young people, who represent 26 percent of Cuba’s 11.2 million people, are the main voices calling for greater openness to ICTs.

Internet parlour at the University of Camagüey in eastern Cuba, where the first social network developed entirely in this country, Dreamcatchers, was born. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) ranks Cuba 125th out of 166 countries in telecommunications development.

The U.N. agency estimated that only 3.4 percent of Cuban households had private but state-regulated Internet connections in 2013, most of them via dial-up modems and a small proportion through DSL service, which is limited to certain professions, such as journalists and artists.

In June, ETECSA reported that there were more than three million cell phones in the country.

In 2013, Cuba’s national statistics office ONEI registered 2,923,000 users of the Internet and the country’s state-controlled intranet, where a limited number of international and local sites can be accessed.

In a Jul. 6 online forum in the local media, the Communist Youth Union stated that “more than 60 percent of the people online in Cuba are young people,” without specifying whether they were referring to the Internet or the intranet.

“The prices are not affordable, but people make the effort. I’ve seen that demand outstrips offer,” said Seijas, who uses her allowance to surf the web for fun.

In 2013 Cuba expanded connectivity, opening 118 public Internet cafés, but at a cost that was unaffordable to the average Cuban: between 4.50 and 6.00 dollars an hour.

Until then the Internet was available only in certain government institutions, schools and Young Computer Club community centres, as well as to tourists in hotels.

In 2014, mobile phone email service was made available.

The 35 Wi-Fi hotspots created by ETECSA are on sidewalks and in parks in 16 cities around the island, and up to 50 or 100 users can log on simultaneously at a speed of one megabit a second.

But although the price of surfing the net for one hour at the 35 public spaces with Wi-Fi is two dollars, down from 4.50 in the state-owned Internet parlours, that is still prohibitive in a country where over five million people earn a public sector salary averaging 23 dollars a month.

The demand is driven by a segment of the population who are earning more in the growing number of private businesses, receive remittances from family members abroad, or have better-paid jobs in foreign companies.

It is also fuelled by people’s hunger for new things or the search for higher speed Internet.

Although they can log on at the University of Camagüey, a young professor, José Carlos Hernández, and students Merín Machado and Dany Avilés told IPS that they sometimes pay the 4.50 dollars an hour rate at the cybercafé in the city of Camagüey, 578 km east of Havana.

The team maintains the social network Dreamcatchers, which emerged in 2012 as the first one totally developed by young Cubans – computer science students and professors from the University of Camagüey. The network, which now has 15,000 users, “bolsters research and development in the university community,” explained the 21-year-old Avilés.

Also available over Cuba’s intranet, Dreamcatchers promotes itself as a collaborative social network based on ideas, which brings together “like-minded people,” the computer science student said. It offers a messaging and chat platform and a page for sharing ideas.

The three young people said they were sure there would soon be more Internet access in Cuba which, they stressed, would be a very positive thing for their project.

The socialist government faces the commitment to reach the International Telecommunications Union’s target of 50 percent household Internet coverage and 60 percent cell-phone coverage by 2020 in developing countries.

To meet this and other international goals, early this year the authorities launched a plan to expand computer use in Cuban society and boost the social use of the web in sectors like health, education and science, increase access in public site like cyber salons and parks, and lastly provide access at home.

The programme’s aims include: developing the country’s fixed and mobile telecoms infrastructure, using Wi-Fi and optic fibre to bring in broadband, reducing Internet costs, and fostering e-commerce and the computer industry.

Authorities in Cuba, which has been caught in the grip of economic crisis for over 20 years, have not specified the funds to be allotted to the plan. But they did say it was backed by China and Russia.

The ICT sector does not form part of the package of business opportunities presented in 2014 with the aim of attracting 8.7 billion dollars in foreign investment.

Based on these announcements, experts anticipate that Cuba plans to continue to regulate public access to the Internet along the lines of China and Russia, whose governments exert control over the web.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

Map of broadband speed in Latin America in late 2014, according to a report by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. Credit: ECLAC

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Aug 28 2015 (IPS)

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will include targets for information and communication technologies, such as strengthening the Internet. And Latin America will be behind from the start in aspects that are key to increasing its educational and medical uses, bolster security and expand bandwidth.

That lag is especially visible in the construction of Internet exchange points (IXPs) and the upgrade of the Internet protocol from IP version 4 (IPv4) to IP version 6 (IPv6).

In the first case, the construction of neutral IXPs allows faster handling of greater data flows, because they circulate in the national territory without the need for access outside the country. This reduces costs and improves the quality of service.

And IPv6 provides virtually infinite address space, better security, mobile computing, better quality service, and an improved design for real-time multimedia traffic. That represents enormous potential for social applications in areas like health and education.

But Lacier Dias, a professor with the Brazilian consultancy VLSM, said the advances made in his country have fallen short.

“Investment and infrastructure are lacking,” he told IPS. “It’s a challenge to expand it to the entire country, because of the size of the territory and the distance. Another challenge is offering broadband to all users.”

In the region, Brazil has the highest number of IXPs: 31, according to the 2014 study “Expansion of regional infrastructure for the interconnection of Internet traffic in Latin America”, drawn up by the Corporación Andina de Fomento (CAF), a regional development bank.

The progress made in Brazil is due to a public policy that foments this infrastructure, combined with an effective multisectoral agency, the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee (CGI), which administers the country’s network with the participation of the government, companies, academia and civil society.

In 2004, the CGI launched the “traffic exchange points” initiative to open more IXPs to connect universities and telecommunications and internet service providers.

The 31 IXPs cover at least 16 of Brazil’s 26 states, with a peak period aggregate traffic of 250 GB. An additional 16 potential IXP points have been identified, while at least 47 are under evaluation.

Growth of Internet users in Latin America, country by country, between 2006 and 2013. Credit: ECLAC

In Argentina, the first IXP was opened in 1998 and 11 now operate in five provinces. They connect more than 80 network operators through a hub in Buenos Aires. Total traffic is over eight GB per second.

The hub is managed by the Argentine Chamber of Databases and Online Services, which represents Internet, telephony and online content providers.

Mexico opened its only IXP in 2014, administered by the Consortium for Internet Traffic Exchange, made up of the University Corporation for Internet Development and Internet service providers.

The users of these sites include Internet providers, educational systems and state governments.

The 17 SDGs will be adopted at a Sep. 25-27 summit of heads of state and government at United Nations headquarters in New York, with 169 specific targets to be reached by 2030.

The ninth SDG is “Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialisation, and foster innovation”.

And target 9c is “Significantly increase access to information and communications technology and strive to provide universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020.”

In Latin America, unlike in Europe, regional IXPs do not yet operate to aggregate traffic between countries.

According to the “State of broadband in Latin America and the Caribbean 2015” report launched in July by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), nearly half of the region’s population uses Internet.

Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, in that order, are the countries with the highest proportion of Internet users, while Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua have the lowest, in a region marked by an enormous gap in access between rural and urban areas.

With respect to broadband, or high-speed Internet access according to U.S. Federal Communications Commission standards, the ECLAC study indicates that Uruguay, Argentina, Chile and Mexico report the largest number of connections over 10 MB per second, while Peru, Costa Rica, Venezuela and Bolivia have the smallest number.

Broadband speed in fixed and mobile connections in several countries of Latin America, compared to selected In the industrialised North. Credit: ECLAC

Meanwhile, the highest level of consumption of mobile broadband devices is found in Costa Rica, Brazil, Uruguay and Venezuela, and the lowest in Paraguay, Guatemala, Peru and Nicaragua.

“The region must become more interconnected, and in order for that to happen, regional traffic and IXPs must be fomented,” David Ocampos, Paraguay’s national secretary of Information and Communication Technologies, told IPS. “There is a lot to be done in terms of traffic exchange. There are no hubs. Infrastructure has to be built, with regional rings.”

Paraguay is now opening its first IXP.

Only 30 percent of the content consumed in Latin America is produced in one of the countries in the region, which can be attributed to the availability of broadband and to infrastructure like IXPs and IPv6, according to the study “The ecosystem and digital economy in Latin America” by the Telecommunications Studies Center of Latin America (CET.LA).

Of the 100 most popular sites in Latin America, only 26 were created in the region, although consumption of cyber traffic per user rose 62 percent in the last few years, higher than the global increase.

In the countries of Latin America, 150 billion dollars have been invested in telecoms in the past seven years, but another 400 billion are needed over the next seven years to close the digital gap.

CAF proposes the construction of three inter-regional IXPs, in Brazil, Panama and Peru, as well as three kinds of national connections in the rest of the region, to be included in the inter-regional ones.

With respect to IPv6, which was launched globally in 2012, Latin America and the Caribbean are slowly moving towards that standard.

In June 2014 the region officially ran out of the IPv4 address space it had been assigned.

Last year, Brazil had nearly 54 percent of the assigned regional space; Mexico 10 percent; Argentina 10 percent; Chile nearly six percent; and Colombia nearly four percent, according to the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Addresses Registry (LACNIC).

In the IPv6 protocol, Brazil leads the list, with 70 percent, followed by Argentina with nine percent; Colombia three percent; Chile 2.5 percent; and Mexico 2.3 percent.

“With IPv6 all Internet users can be covered, with third generation mobile networks. As of this year, Brazil is only buying technological equipment that supports IPv6,” said Dias of Brazil.

“Everyone is looking to IPv6; it’s the natural Internet upgrade. With more IXPs comes the step to IPv6. Broadband drives adoption of IPv6 and allows an increase in users,” said Campos of Paraguay.

ECLAC indicates that in 2013, fixed broadband penetration stood at nine percent in the region, and mobile at 30 percent. In 16 of the 18 countries studied there is more mobile broadband penetration than fixed.

The Union of South American Nations, which brings together 12 countries, is building a ring of more than 10,000 km of fiber optic to link the members of the bloc.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Stephanie Wildes

New technologies can transform society, and the role of women in using these tools to promote change was clearly seen at the first ICT Congress for Peace in this city in northern Spain.

The Oct. 23-24 conference, whose theme was “Women, Technology and Democracy for Social Change”, emphasised women’s leading role in social change, based on the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs).

The premise of the meeting was that ICTs are tools particularly suited to promoting human rights, especially women’s rights. It was organised by the Foundation for a Culture of Peace, headed by Federico Mayor Zaragoza, and the Cyber Volunteers Foundation.

The organisers of the congress also argued that women have been largely absent from decision-making, democratic processes, and the construction and consolidation of peace, and that ICTs can help overcome this discrimination.

Manal Hassan, a cyberactivist who participated in the Egyptian revolution that overthrew former president Hosni Mubarak (1981-2011), and Jolly Okot, a former girl soldier in Uganda who founded the NGO Invisible Children, were among those taking part in the meeting in this city in the Basque country, one of Spain’s autonomous communities or regions.

The participants also included Judith Torrea, a journalist and blogger who comments on daily life in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, known as the femicide (gender-based murder) capital of the world.

The three women were part of a group of 14 activists from four continents who came to the congress, where they shared their specific experiences with IPS, including their achievements and pending challenges, in which ICTs have been particular allies.

Hassan and her husband worked on the development of new technologies applied to social change, so she was not new to the issues when hundreds of thousands of Egyptians took over Tahrir Square in Cairo on Jan. 25, 2011 to force Mubarak to step down.

She had collaborated with NGOs to create databases and documentation centres, and had contributed to building a blogging platform for different political groups to post their contents, far before the Arab Spring arrived in North Africa.

“At first, there were only a few of us,” she said. “But then there was a wave of response and the revolution arrived.”

Social networks like Facebook and Twitter became symbols of the uprising, especially when the regime decided to block access to the internet. Hassan and thousands of other Egyptians used their wits to break through the censorship.

For instance, Hassan was then in South Africa, so she gathered the information she received over her phone and uploaded what was happening in Tahrir on to the blogs.

Servers were connected to one another to get around the blockade, or voicemail would be converted into tweets in order for the demonstrators in the square to report what was happening there in real time.

Now that Mubarak has fallen, there is still much to be done, Hassan said. The military have behaved worse than the dictator, she complained, so activists remain extremely necessary.

She herself was in South Africa when the revolution broke out, and would be given information on what was happening in Tahrir Square by telephone and write it up on blogs.

Hassan highlighted a key element: Women don’t only work on gender issues, but are involved in every political and labour issue.

Jolly Okot’s childhood came to an end in 1986, when she was abducted by a member of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda.

She said she was fortunate to get away. In 2005 she began to make documentaries and founded the organisation Invisible Children, which has documented the horrors suffered by boys and girls forced to fight in different wars. It also promotes education as the way forward for these victims.

One of the campaigns run by the organisation features “Kony 2012”, a short film about the outrages committed by LRA leader Joseph Kony, which went viral on the internet. The aim is to arrest Kony and take him before the International Criminal Court.

The great achievement of the new technologies is that, with one click, thousands of people can receive information, said Okot, who has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. You can reach leaders and persuade them to take decisions, she said.

But she said that ICTs are a complementary tool for change, and the real tool that will change things in Africa is a different one: education.

“Unfortunately, journalists don’t have so much power to change things; our duty is to report and let others assume their responsibility,” said Torrea, who for the last 14 years has been reporting on the killings of hundreds of young women in Ciudad Juárez, on the border with the United States.

Torrea stressed “the importance of alternative voices who will tell the truth about what is happening on the ground,” even though these voices may be “a nuisance” for those in power, as in her case.

The journalist acknowledged that bloggers are under a great deal of pressure from those in power, because they are special agents of change at the global level.

“When women bloggers – I say women because they tend to be the best-known – manage to get their voices heard, that is when they start receiving the most pressure, threats and smear campaigns,” she said.

“This happens to all of us, whether we are in Tunisia, Ciudad Juárez or Saudi Arabia,” said Torrea, who published her book Juárez, en la sombra del narcotráfico” (Ciudad Juárez, in the Shadow of Drug Trafficking) a year ago, and has received many awards for her work.

She said it was “a global phenomenon” because “when power feels it is under attack, it reacts against the voices that provoke debate.”

The Mexican activist concluded with a concept repeated by many women at the congress in San Sebastián: “If we don’t know what is going on in the world, we will have fewer opportunities for change.”

The success of cooperatives, values-based associations owned and managed by their own clients and hailed as an alternative business model, is highly dependent on their use of information and communications technologies (ICTs), experts say.

Boasting more than one billion global members, cooperatives have progressed significantly in the past decade, triggered by the wider availability of ICTs, such as telecommunications, computers or radio.

“Cooperatives are a reminder to the international community that it is possible to pursue both economic viability and social responsibility,” Ban Ki-moon stated at the launch of 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives (IYC), which seeks to highlight the strengths of the cooperative business model as an alternative to other models.

Cooperatives can be used to further socioeconomic development throughout the world, and ICTs can play a major role in helping them achieve that goal.

“When people understand what co-ops are, they want to do business with them,” said Carolyn Hoover, chief executive officer of DotCooperation LLC, a new top-level Internet domain designed exclusively for cooperatives.

On Jun. 6, the United Nations (U.N.) headquarters in New York hosted a panel discussion, “Cooperatives and the Role of Information and Communication Technologies”, led by Lila Hanitra Ratsifandrihamanana, director of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) liaison office, Gary Fowlie, head of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) liaison office to the U.N., and Carolyn Hoover from DotCoop.

An alternative model

The three speakers emphasised the potential of cooperatives in achieving internationally agreed-upon goals such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which fight against poverty, hunger and disease.

This business model can be efficient across a broad range of sectors, according to the panelists, ranging from food security to electricity coverage, particularly in cases the private sector does not consider sufficiently profitable.

“I grew up in a rural area in the United States,” Hoover told IPS. “There was no electricity until co-ops came in, because the private companies just thought they couldn’t make enough money.”

“A co-op-based solution is sometimes the only way to break that mold,” Hoover said.

The speakers also stressed the need for the even wider availability and affordability of ICTs in order to help unleash the potential of cooperatives. In Kenya, for example, farmers can receive funds through mobile phone-based money transfer services that they can later invest in agricultural financial transactions.

According to Ratsifandrihamanana, ICTs can enhance accountability in cooperatives, thus giving them a valuable quality that the private sector often lacks. “Co-ops serve their members better and with more transparency,” she added.

ICTs have indeed become a must for cooperatives in the recent years. “If co-ops want to participate in the future, they have to be part of the way that people are communicating,” Hoover told IPS. “No choice.”

Promoting cooperatives

The panel addressed the main challenge currently faced by cooperatives: the lack of availability and affordability of new technologies in remote areas. They called on governments to help cooperatives overcome this infrastructure challenge by extending the scope of the ICT network.

“I don’t think that the governments do enough to promote co-ops,” Hoover told IPS.

“The share of governments is important. I think that if they don’t help with the infrastructure, it cannot work,” Ratsifandrihamanana explained. “Co-ops need to be recognised on the international agenda.”

But cooperatives also have to deal with the affordability of ICTs, such as the initial cost of computerisation or the cost of website hosting.

DotCoop, which has hosted numerous cooperatives around the world since 2002, is a key player in reducing these obstacles by helping co-ops increase their Internet exposure and web site traffic in an affordable way.

The company, whose motto is “One member. One vote. One domain”, offers a First Year Free Program through which co-ops can establish their web presence at no cost before they start making profits.

“They (the co-ops) just have to hear about it,” Hoover told IPS. “DotCoop was and is an innovation.”

Increasing access to technology

Cooperatives are also benefiting from the improvement in renewable energy, which has increased the accessibility of communication technologies, such as the recently launched solar-powered mobile phone, invented by the Kenyan Habiba Rage to overcome her village’s lack of access to electricity.

“It is very difficult to own a mobile phone because of the energy it needs to keep working,” Rage told journalists. With the solar-powered phone, the problem was solved, both for her and for many cooperatives worldwide.

“Co-ops are leaders in using the Internet to promote their ethical local regional business,” Hoover told IPS.

Global attention is now focused on the upcoming 2012 International Summit of Cooperatives in Quebec in October, where more than 130 speakers will discuss the future of the world’s 750,000 cooperatives.

Kathy Bardswick, chief executive officer of The Co-operators, a Canadian insurance cooperative, called the summit “a once in a lifetime opportunity…to ensure a healthy and dynamic future for the cooperative form of business”.

At Rio+20, the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) taking place in Rio de Janeiro Jun. 20-22, cooperatives will be discussed as part of the talks on achieving a more sustainable economic model in the world.

“I think that co-ops can provide an answer to almost any particular problem that the economy has,” Hoover concluded. “They are good solutions to tough challenges.”

In Latin America, the distribution of laptops in public schools, an effort that has enjoyed success in countries like Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela, is being studied by the governments of other nations interested in learning from their experience about the challenges that can be expected.

In 2009, Uruguay became the first country in the world to distribute a laptop to every primary school child in public education.

Government officials, technical experts and teachers from nine Latin American countries took part in the third congress on public policies on educational technologies, held Tuesday Jun. 5 at the Education Ministry in Buenos Aires. The meeting was organised by the Consorcio Educativo Tecnológico(CEDUTEC), which groups public and private organisations involved in training in new information and communication technologies (ICTs).

The XO laptop distributed to schoolchildren in Uruguay. Credit:Geoff Parsons - CC BY-SA 2.0

The Education Ministry’s chief advisor, Pablo Urquiza, said the Conectar Igualdad (Connect Equality) programme, which has distributed 1.8 million laptops to students and teachers around the country since 2009, is the ministry’s “flagship project”.

Laptops have been distributed to secondary school students and teachers, special education schools, and teacher training institutes across the country. The goal is to reach a total of 3.7 million computers.

The programme has faced a number of challenges, the authorities who worked on Conectar Igualdad said at the congress. These include achieving sustained financing, local production of inputs, connectivity in schools in remote areas, teacher training, creation of contents, laptop security, and recycling.

Argentina’s programme was inspired by Plan Ceibal, launched five years ago in neighbouring Uruguay, which has already delivered 570,000 computers to primary school students and teachers, covering all public schools to date.

The Uruguayan and Argentine programmes follow the “one laptop per child” model – a departure from the computer labs that are the norm in private schools in the two countries, where students visit a room equipped with computers for a few hours per week.

Teachers in Argentina and Uruguay are also given their own computers.

Venezuela, meanwhile, launched the Canaima Educativo “Va a mi Casa” project in 2010, distributing 525,0000 laptops to primary school students. As in Uruguay and Argentina, the children can take them home, to help their families enter the digital age.

Venezuela announced that it would expand the programme to include secondary schools this year, and that the 500,000 “canaimas” – as the children’s laptops are called – which are needed every year in the country will begin to be produced locally.

Representatives from Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela took part in the meeting hosted by Argentina.

Graciela Rabajoli, head of the Plan Ceibal’s contents area, told IPS that the programme had received so many requests for advice from abroad that they had to organise a unit that offers services and consulting to other countries.

“We were recently in Armenia and Ecuador,” she said. “We designed training courses for Ecuador and went there to teach them. In other cases, we have transferred technology on logistics, purchasing, and the recycling of used computers.”

Emiliano La Rocca, who coordinates the Aula Modelo or model classroom at Argentina’s Education Ministry, said Uruguay’s experience served as a guide.

“Without the help of Uruguay, which opened its doors to us, it would not have been possible to implement the programme here,” he told IPS.

The representatives of Argentina and Uruguay generated enthusiasm over the prospect of not only narrowing the digital gap but bolstering economic development within each country while doing so.

But they also discussed the difficulties. “The big bottleneck is teacher training,” said Rabajoli. “There is no single formula for this, but what we do know is that if the teachers haven’t been trained, there’s no way to implement the programme.”

While the effort is now expanding in primary schools in Argentina, where one laptop is distributed for every four students, Uruguay’s Plan Ceibal has stretched to the secondary education level.

These policies make it necessary to produce more inputs and services, which not only generates value and jobs, but contributes to both domestic sales and exports to other countries in the region.

The undersecretary of management technologies in the eastern province of Buenos Aires, Eduardo Thill, told IPS that since the Conectar Igualdad plan got underway in 2009, the production of electronic goods had sharply increased.

“In 2009, some 300,000 ‘netbooks’ were assembled here, and now we are fully manufacturing four million,” he said. “An industry that should become sustainable is emerging.”

According to Thill, the Ministry of Industry projects that more than eight million laptops will be produced in 2013, some of which will be exported to other countries in the region that are developing their own educational digital inclusion plans.

One of the speakers at the meeting, Lilia Peña, general director of science and educational innovation in Paraguay’s Education Ministry, said 90 percent of schools in her country are public and 92 percent of the ministry’s budget goes towards salaries – a situation that makes it difficult to implement the one laptop per child model.

But she said they are working on training teachers and reducing the digital divide through the use of interactive whiteboards, mobile computer labs, and special classrooms for the incorporation of ICTs.

The process of distributing computers has also begun, with a call for bids for the provision of laptops for 40,000 teachers.

By Kristin Palitza and - -
CAPE TOWN, South Africa , May 8 2012 (IPS)

On a continent of over one billion people, where half the population have mobile phones, the use of mobile communication and internet technologies is crucial to boost development in Africa.

In Mauritania mobile phones are used in rural areas. Credit: Kristin Palitza/IPS

“We did not anticipate how rapid mobile broadband would be appropriated in Africa. There will be a computer in every pocket sooner than we think,” Gauthey told IPS. She added that Kenya has made rapid progress, having already rolled out 3rd generation mobile communications.

There are only two and a half years to go until African countries are expected to reach the MDGs, and information and communication technologies (ICTs) will help the continent achieve this. Through the eight MDGs, countries around the world have committed themselves to significantly curb poverty and hunger, improve education and health, and create environmental sustainability by 2015.

Gauthey, who is based at Alcatel’s Paris headquarters and involved in the firm’s expansion into Africa, argues that ICT will help the continent to achieve the economic growth it needs to end poverty.

Excerpts of the interview follow.

Q: How can ICT help Africa reach the MDGs?

A: I think ICT will be absolutely key, especially for countries that lag behind with other infrastructure development…In 2000, you had about five million mobile phones in Africa. Today, we have about 500 million. In 2015, we expect it to be 800 million. Already, 20 to 30 percent of these phones are internet enabled. In 2015, it will be 80 percent.

It’s proven that a 10 percent increase in broadband triggers a 1.5 percent GDP increase in a country. In developed countries, small and medium-sized enterprises are shown to have doubled their business once they are linked to the internet. In Africa, we will see a similar development, but largely through mobile broadband rather than fixed lines.

Q: Infrastructure remains a bottleneck to development throughout Africa. Can ICT circumvent that?

A: There is a false impression that ICT doesn’t need infrastructure. It does, unfortunately. It’s less capital intensive than transportation, such as roads and railways, but it does need investments, like cables, towers and so on.

There are ways to speed up ICT development, for example by governments obliging operators to share expensive infrastructure and thereby ensuring that they don’t duplicate investments. For instance, you can reduce costs by incentivising infrastructure-sharing models without preventing competition.

Q: Where on the continent do you see a strong push towards ICT?

A: Some countries, like Kenya, have leapfrogged. They have just rolled out 3G and already are thinking of rolling out 4th generation broadband, especially to rural areas, because they know it’s the only way for them to progress.

In the slums of Kenya’s capital Nairobi, 80 percent of people prefer to skip a lunch so that they can afford having a mobile phone. They are willing to make that trade-off because a mobile phone helps them to optimise their lives in the long term through better access to information and resources, including food. Access to information has become as vital as water and electricity.

We have also seen how cashew nut farmers in Ivory Coast access international market information and prices through their mobile phones to optimise their sales. It works, even if it’s just via text messages.

Q: Would you describe Kenya as the African leader in ICT?

A: Kenya is doing great things. Its government has a strong awareness of the importance of ICT and has started to foster public private partnerships with clear goals in the sector. Kenya is an innovative country that might even bring “reverse innovation”, which means innovation coming from a developing country that will later be taken up by the developed world. Such innovation could even come from the users of mobile technology, especially from the young generation.

Q: Is Africa ready for the mobile revolution you expect?

A: African countries need to build the infrastructure for those mobile services, because people will demand them. For that you need investment, first in submarine cables, then in terrestrial fibre cables, especially to reach out to the less densely populated areas.

Then you will get sufficient broadband spectrum to install next-generation wireless internet access. The submarine cables are largely in place. What is now most crucial in Africa is investment in terrestrial cables for distribution of spectrum countrywide. The World Bank, for instance, has funds to help reach out to those less developed areas.

Q: In what way should governments get involved?

A: You need good regulation for the allocation of spectrum, to encourage competition and to decrease prices. Then you need public-private partnership models, for example a public investment in partnership with private service providers that have expertise in building telecommunication networks, either to subsidise them in remote, less population-dense areas or to attract long-term funding for these networks.

Q: What should governments do to attract competition?

A: Governments need to have a broadband plan, with clear targets and ways to achieve these targets. For this, governments need a stable regulatory framework with rules that don’t change all the time, as well as an independent regulatory authority that doesn’t change with every government. A lot of African countries have set those targets already. Now they must implement them.

Q: Connectivity is one issue. Affordability is another. When will all Africans, not only the middle class, be able to afford mobile broadband?

A: Prices will drop once you have enough connectivity and enough competition, and once broadband services are less scarce. Scarcity makes it expensive. That will take some time. But a lot of measures of using ICT to help reach the MDGs don’t necessarily need mobile broadband. Sometimes simple text messaging can go a long way towards development.

Q: Can you give examples for where this has already worked?

A: Text messaging can, for instance, be used in the health sector to track an epidemic like malaria. There is also the possibility to have free “call me” services or free call numbers. Those are mobile experiences with reduced costs.

There are also examples of training community health workers through text messages in Kenya. You can have simple educational quizzes on mobile phones or exchange advice and help with diagnosis between doctors in health centres and community health workers in remote, rural areas. Mobile broadband access will of course bring many more possibilities, such as training of nurses and community health workers on mobile devices, like tablets.

Excerpt:

Young people learning computer skills at Campus Tec. Credit: Danilo Valladares/IPS

By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Apr 26 2012 (IPS)

“We’re making a three-dimensional educational video game. The idea is to create virtual worlds where children can explore and interact with other people and objects,” said Carlos Villagrán, seated at a computer in the Campus Tecnológico in the Guatemalan capital.

The Tec, as it is better known, was conceived as “a physical space where innovation and technology can find a place to flourish at world-class levels of competitiveness,” according to its web site.

The campus is inspired by Silicon Valley, the technology park in California that is home to hi-tech giants like Adobe Systems, Cisco Systems, Intel, Apple Inc. and Hewlett-Packard.

So far, the Guatemalan campus is thriving. The Tec’s seven-storey building, inaugurated in June 2010, is fully occupied by 100 companies in the information technology (IT) sector, most of whose personnel are young people.

They specialise in producing special effects for movies, video games, and software for mobile telephones and the internet.

The Tec building, located in Cuatro Grados Norte, a cultural district with pedestrian areas, parks and restaurants, also houses the technology institute of the private Universidad del Valle de Guatemala, all of which has generated great anticipation and enthusiasm.

“We were about to throw in the towel because of lack of support, but then we came here and found plenty of people developing their own projects and companies,” Villagrán told IPS.

“There are three dimensional designers and modellers here who are collaborating with us,” he said.

“We have found a place to work, and we are more enthusiastic now,” said this 26-year-old computer science engineer, who wants to see his project “expand all over the world.”

Villagrán participates in the Tec’s “business incubator”, a sort of technological seedbed for entrepreneurial startup companies that is also part of the campus.

The incubator programme “accelerates the process of creation, growth and consolidation of innovative projects and businesses,” María Mercedes Zagui, in charge of business development at the Campus Tecnológico, told IPS.

“We have over 200 enterprise projects that are constantly buzzing around us. These are people who are allied to and interested in us, but we do not have enough space in the building for all of them,” she said.

To cope with the demand, a new 14-storey building is under construction to house more companies, including international firms, while strategies to attract the attention of potential clients abroad are growing.

Zagui said plans are in motion to open a Campus Tec office in the U.S. Silicon Valley technology complex in August.

“That will give us a global presence, because having an address here is not the same as having one in the United States, in the world’s largest business incubator. In addition, there are opportunities for making contacts and securing financial resources there that we do not have here,” she said.

According to the Ibero-American and Inter-American Network of Science and Technology Indicators (RICYT), this impoverished Central American country of 14 million people invests 12 million dollars a year on research and development, equivalent to 0.04 percent of GDP.

Direct government investment in science and technology represents only 27.9 percent of the country’s total investment in this area, while 21.7 percent is contributed by higher education, and the remaining 50.4 percent comes from abroad, the network says.

Meanwhile, the businesses at the Tec continue their struggle to innovate and open up a niche for themselves in the field of technology.

One of them is BigoMo, which does video postproduction and visual effects and is renowned for its work in “The Chronicles of Narnia” film series. Source Tour, meanwhile, has launched a virtual shopfront for tours and tourist activities in Guatemala.

“Being here has been good for our growth. I have met lots of people who work in the same field, but I see them as collaborators, not competitors,” said Mauricio Macal, the head of CG Armada, a multimedia production unit.

But the challenges are great. For one thing, the local market tends to undervalue these technological products, to the point that clients often do not want to pay the real value of their work.

Macal blames this on the fact that many people sell their work at far below market prices.

“There’s a lot of undercutting in the business. Some young people are making logos for 150 quetzals (20 dollars), and they are competing with companies that have fixed overheads, like office rent, and that use brand-name computers and legal software,” he complained to IPS.

In spite of the hurdles, the IT industry seems to be taking off at the Tec, for instance at Milk ‘n Cookies, another Guatemalan company devoted to multimedia production, web platforms and applications for cellphones.

“We have just tripled our office space,” Nelson Melville, the company’s project developer, told IPS.

The firm created the Minimundi site, an educational tool on the internet that teaches children about recycling and respect for the environment.

The site is sponsored by Ecoembes, a Spanish nonprofit association that works in the management and processing of recycled materials. Other companies like MTV and Discovery Mobile have also contracted services from the Guatemalan firm.

“The creative artists working here are expert at what they do, and their work is a labour of love. We have no reason to envy designers anywhere else in the world,” Melville said.

La Casa de Internet de Latinoamérica y el Caribe on the seaside avenue in Montevideo. Credit: LACNIC

By Álvaro Queiruga
MONTEVIDEO, Apr 18 2012 (IPS)

The capital of Uruguay has become the headquarters of Latin America’s six leading Internet organisations, brought together in the same building.

The Tuesday Apr. 17 inauguration of the Casa de Internet de Latinoamérica y el Caribe, the regional Internet centre, on the seaside avenue along the Río de la Plata (River Plate) estuary in the upscale neighbourhood of Carrasco, makes Montevideo the foremost hub of organisations of this kind in the world.

“There is no other city in the world, or building, where so many organisations involved in this issue come together,” Raúl Echeberría, chairman of the Internet Society (ISOC) and executive director of the Internet Address Registry for Latin America and the Caribbean (LACNIC), told IPS.

The first of the six organisations is the regional chapter of ISOC, an international non-profit founded in 1992 dedicated to ensuring the open development, evolution and use of the Internet for the benefit of people throughout the world.

LACNIC, for its part, allocates and administers IP addresses in the region.

The Red de Cooperación Latinoamericana de Redes Avanzadas (Latin American Cooperation of Advanced Networks) develops and operates the only advanced Internet telecommunications network for research, innovation, and education in Latin America.

The LACTLD (Latin American and Caribbean TLD Association) is a non-profit organisation that groups country code top-level domains administrators of Latin America and the Caribbean as well as administrators from other regions that have ties to this continent.

The Latin American and Caribbean Federation for Internet and Electronic Commerce (eCOM-LAC) is devoted to promoting the development of ICTs and e-commerce throughout the region.

Lastly, the Latin American and Caribbean Internet Exchange Point Operators Association was created in 2011 to strengthen regional interconnection.

The initiative of bringing these organisations together “in one place improves coordination and strengthens the institutionality of the sector and its capacity to assist in the process of development of the Internet,” a LACNIC press release says.

Broadband Internet access is key to economic development and social equality in the region, said Uruguay’s minister of industry, energy and mines, Roberto Kreimerman, who took part in the ceremony along with President José Mujica.

At the Sixth Summit of the Americas, held Apr. 14-15 in the Caribbean port city of Cartagena, Colombia, there was a consensus among the 34 participating countries that broadband Internet access is one of the keys to bolstering social equality, along with regional integration, and increasing value-added and technology in regional production.

The minister also referred to the work of the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) to install a fibre-optic broadband ring in the region, to cut costs and improve connectivity.

There is no doubt “about the Internet’s potential for development,” Echeberría told IPS.

Of the approximately 600 million people in Latin America and the Caribbean, 40 percent have access to the Internet. Echeberría estimates that the proportion will climb to 60 percent by late 2015.

The region is in a process of “economic growth that is unique in its history,” the Uruguayan expert added. “This is the decade of Latin America. And to continue growing, we need strong, stable, secure, open Internet, with models of participative governance and the involvement of all actors.”

The average poverty rate in Latin America shrank from 44 percent in 2002 to 31 percent in 2011, according to the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), while unemployment stands at 6.6 percent.

But many challenges remain, because Latin America still has the world’s largest gap between rich and poor.

According to ECLAC Executive Secretary Alicia Bárcena, “Broadband should become a regional or global public good, which is not for free but has to be for everybody.”

In Bolivia, for example, “if you are a farmer who is living away from urban areas, you have to come to the city to find out about product prices, for trading and for getting information. All that is key for your small and medium-sized businesses. Then you save a lot of money in terms of travelling, communication and paper work,” she told IPS in an interview in New York.

In that impoverished Andean nation, “if you want to have access to broadband of two megabytes you have to pay 300 dollars a month, which is 17 percent of the per capita income. That is the level of the gap. Internet access in Bolivia is thereby probably 40 times more expensive then in France and 100 times more expensive than in (South) Korea.”

In this respect, Echeberría said “we are facing the challenge of increasing the number of users, but also of reducing the internal gaps in the region. If we manage to do that, we will achieve an open, participative Internet that serves as a platform for the development of our population and as a catalyst for exercising human rights.”

Uruguay, where Internet penetration is 60 percent of the population – one of the highest rates in Latin America – was chosen to host the Casa de Internet de Latinoamérica y el Caribe because of a legal framework conducive to the installation of non-governmental international bodies, which are given tax breaks, the expert said.

The quality of telecommunications and the stability of the financial system also influenced the choice of Montevideo as a headquarters, he added.

* With reporting by Rousbeh Legatis in New York.

The rapid currents moving the centre of economic influence towards an emerging global order headquartered in Asia were evident at the PanIIT’s 2012 annual conference of alumni of the highly prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which took place in Singapore over the Easter weekend.

The three-day conference hosted a diverse range of top-notch speakers representing global business, academia and the financial sector, expressing their views on developing strategies to navigate the challenging global economic environment and to create sustainable long-term growth.

Except for one Westerner, all the speakers were Asian, mainly Indian, including heads of formidable global businesses, such as Arjun Malhotra, co-founder of Hindustan Computers Limited and chairman of Headstrong USA; Shekhar Mitra, senior vice president of Procter and Gamble USA; R. Gopalakrishnan, director of Tata Sons Limited; and Ho Kwong Ping, executive chairman of Banyan Tree Holdings, Singapore.

Hosting the meeting in Singapore was a first for a group that, since 2002, has convened alternatively in India and the United States. But there are over 1000 IIT graduates who now work in Singapore, many in high profile jobs such as the provost of the new Singapore Management University, Rajendra Kumar Srivastava.

“Most IITians coming here have had significant work experience and they have filled a gap in Singapore’s existing skills,” S.N Venkat, secretary of Strategic Partnerships at the IIT Alumni Association of Singapore, told IPS.

The high regard in which IIT is held in Singapore was reflected in the fact that the country’s former president S.R Nathan is the patron of the alumni association here, and the current president, Tony Tan, was the chief guest at the gala dinner on Saturday night.

In his keynote speech to the conference, S. Iswaran, minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, said the high number of IIT graduates working in Singapore and across Asia “reflects more generally a fundamental shift in the global centre of gravity from the West to the East.”

Iswaran warned that as manpower costs and energy prices rise, and Western currencies weaken, Asia’s advantage as a low-cost manufacturing base will wane.

“Asian economies need to be able to move on to higher value-added economic activities in order to sustain their economic growth. They will have to leverage on design technology and a skilled labour force to create products and services for their own domestic markets, as much as for the rest of the world,” he noted.

This is where Asian institutions like IIT are expected to play a leading role.

A roundtable involving visiting directors of IITs from around India and four local universities discussed possible collaboration efforts, including the long-standing invitation from the Singapore government to set up an IIT campus here.

“As Singapore becomes an educational hub for Asia, especially for Southeast Asia, (our) emphasis is on having institutes of higher learning of global repute to be based here to attract students from the region,” explained Venkat.

Many speakers pointed out that with economic crises in Europe and the U.S. still unresolved, following the western capitalist model blindly is not the right development path for Asia, which should instead develop its own model, utilising traditional practices.

This was a theme reflected in a keynote speech given by Ho Kwong Ping, whose Banyan Tree Holdings has developed a chain of luxury hotels across the world based on Asian tastes and standards.

Still, he warned that Asia’s rise is not predetermined and argued that the continent must produce a basket of intellectual solutions to address Asia’s chronic social inequality.

“China has a deficit of democracy (while) Indian leaders have realised that democracy is not reducing inequality” and both are unable to “move beyond capital reforms,” he noted.

“As Asia continues its dynamic growth we need to delve into our own history and culture for inspiration to develop Asian values of capitalism. One resource could be the webs of mutual obligations which are present in virtually all civilisations of Asia,” argued Ping. “It is possible for Asia to develop this communitarian capitalism, if properly nurtured and developed, as an alternative to the highly individualistic model of American capitalism.”

Ping singled out India’s Tata model of capitalism, which benefits from being “stakeholder driven and not shareholder driven.”

Tata’s Gopalakrishnan told IPS that most Asian businesspeople have been reading books written by Westerners and adopting their ideas only because there are hardly any books written about good practices by Asians.

“The West is…saying we must become conscious capitalists (though) many people in Asia are saying we have always been doing that,” he said.

He said that Tata used its one billion dollar profits to set up a trust to help the poor, “so part of our profits go back to the community.” The Tata group consists of over 100 companies in seven business sectors operating in more than 80 countries around the world.

In the past two decades IIT graduates have been some of the most successful innovators and entrepreneurs in the U.S.’s Silicon Valley. If they turn their attention to the rest of Asia now, experts believe they could make a big difference.

Jignesh Shah, founder chairman and group CEO of Financial Technologies India, a world leader in creating and operating technology-centric financial exchanges, argues that new business models in Asia are opening up.

“It will create huge opportunities for the best brains from Asia like you (graduates of IITs),” he told the conference. “India and China have huge savings rates and if it gets into share markets rather than remaining in banks … Asia will generate the next Goldman Sachs.”

The lack of adequate management of electronic waste in Guatemala is posing a serious threat to the environment and health, as demand for electronic devices has soared to the point that there are more cell phones than people.

E-waste goes untreated in Guatemala. Credit: Alex E. Proimos/CC BY 2.0

Chrome, mercury, lead, selenium and arsenic are some of the most toxic substances in e-waste, which can cause serious damages to health, Mayron España, director of E-Waste de Guatemala, an NGO that collects such products for recycling, told IPS.

Brain damage, cancer, miscarriages, reduced male fertility and genetic malformations in foetuses are some of the health effects caused by exposure to these heavy metals, studies have found.

“And all of these metals end up in the water sooner or later,” because they seep into groundwater or because e-waste is dumped into surface water bodies like rivers, said España, whose organisation collects e-waste to be recycled abroad.

“Water is the big environmental buffer. It is also a finite resource on a global level, which means it will become scarce,” he said.

Guatemala does not even have general guidelines on the handling of solid waste, the expert noted. In the meantime, he said, the use of electronic devices is growing exponentially.

In the case of cell phones, “they are used for just six or nine months, because new models are constantly coming out,” he said. “Fashion, tastes, attitudes and habits are driving people to consume more and more things, even when they don’t need them.”

According to Guatemala’s telecoms regulator, the Superintendencia de Telecomunicaciones, the number of mobile phones in use in 2011 reached 20.7 million in this country of 14 million people – up from just 3.1 million in 2004.

And a similar increase has been seen in the case of computers, digital cameras and TV sets, and other products.

But these devices are highly polluting. A single nickel cadmium battery cell phone can pollute 50,000 litres of water, according to environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

A study on e-waste by the Guatemalan Centre for Cleaner Production, “Diagnóstico sobre la generación de desechos electrónicos en Guatemala”, concluded that by 2015, at least 13,000 tons of cell phones and 18,600 tons of computers and accessories will have been thrown out in this Central American country.

The report proposes the “three R’s”- reduce, reuse, recycle – to curb the negative impact of e-waste on the environment.

The study, carried out by two engineers, Sonia Solís and Andrés Chicol, calls for the formulation of e-waste management plans as part of a national strategy that should include activities aimed at raising public awareness about the problem.

Adriana Grimaldi, a chemistry professor at the private Mariano Gálvez University, stressed the urgent need to address the question of e-waste because of the serious risks posed to the environment and human health.

Grimaldi said PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), whose production is banned by the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, are among the “most powerful and carcinogenic” substances used in electrical devices like transformers and capacitors.

She told IPS that people “should not fight with chemical elements, which can also be very useful, but must learn to manage them property, because otherwise they can pose serious dangers.”

Julio Urías, an adviser to the Red Giresol – the Guatemalan network of environmental promoters for prevention and integrated management of solid waste – says there is much to be done in the area of waste management in Guatemala, although he also mentioned important efforts by social organisations and private companies.

He said that an essential step is to draft and enforce “viable legislation.” He also called for “education and information for the population about consumption habits.”

In addition, the expert said “incentives and clear rules are needed in order to take advantage of the profits that e-waste management and recycling can generate. But just because a law is passed doesn’t mean things are going to work,” he added.

The government’s National Commission on Solid Waste Management estimates that just five percent of the 7,000 tons of solid waste produced daily in this country is recycled.

However, there are positive experiences with recycling, which show that it can generate opportunities for people who have none.

That is the case of Edulibre, a non-profit that donates old computers to public schools in poor areas.

“Companies donate their old computers to us,” Javier Hernández, a computer technician who works with Edulibre, told IPS. “We check them and install our own operating system that we have adapted for Guatemala, from free software.”

Since 2007, the organisation has also set up five computer labs in the capital and other parts of the country, which serve more than 1,000 children, while protecting the environment by reusing old equipment.

The last broadcast antenna installed in Kingston in the 1990s by Power 106 FM, a subsidiary of the Jamaica Gleaner newspaper. Credit: Zadie Neufville/IPS

By Zadie Neufville
KINGSTON, Mar 3 2012 (IPS)

In the last 25 years, there has been an explosion of commercial radio stations in what Jamaican broadcast professionals describe as “a revolution” that has extended the “mobility of radio”.

Radio remains the island’s most effective and fastest growing communications medium. From four stations in the late 1990s, Jamaicans today are able to access more than 70 stations – 30 of them are owned and operated on the island.

Radio Jamaica‘s (RJR) Yvonne Wilks told IPS that the rapid growth in the number of radio stations is due primarily to two events: the deregulation of the local tele-communications sector in 1999 and the simultaneous but lengthy divestment of the state-owned Jamaica Broadcasting Corporation (JBC) and its three satellite stations.

The former opened the telecoms sector to competition and the rapid expansion of the mobile telecommunications and Internet sectors; and the latter gave birth in the 1980s and 1990s to new programming formats.

The more flexible licensing regime allowed programme producers to start their own radio stations and diversify their offerings. In the modern radio landscape, the stations offer a diet of music, religious broadcast, talk shows, news and information.

JBC’s original satellite stations have now evolved into KLAS FM Sports; Hot 102 FM – primarily a talk show format – and IRIE FM, a 24-hour reggae music station.

Divestment continued to stimulate the growth of radio stations in the 1990s as the original investors supplemented operational costs by “‘renting space” on their broadcast towers. This among other things, created a dynamic competitive market place by removing the costly investment needed for start-up.

Alongside the divestment, deregulation had fuelled a rapid increase in the use of cell phones in Jamaica. From 90,000 users in 1999 at the end of Cable and Wireless’s monopoly on telephone service, the number of cell phone subscribers had grown to an estimated 3.1 million active users in 2010.

After its April 2001 launch, the Irish mobile phone company Digicel grew its customer base by 100,000 in its first 100 days. Wooed by Digicel’s offerings of low-cost mobile telephones and instant connection, Jamaicans took to the new technology.

Today, the company reportedly has a customer base of more than two million active subscribers. The introduction of feature and smart phones have also revolutionised the way radio and TV are delivered.

The state-of-the-art outside broadcast (OB) units, once owned by only the richest station owners, have been replaced by a variety of tools including cell phones, laptops, wireless broadband modems, and wireless transmitters.

Obsolete too are the dedicated phone lines that were absolutely necessary if broadcasts were to be carried from locations outside the studio, and the costs associated with them, radio engineer Melvin Cummings told IPS.

“Set-up has been reduced to hours and in some cases minutes, instead of days,” the 16-year veteran of radio broadcasts noted, adding that beginning with the introduction of transistor radios, innovation has been rapid and non-stop.

Cummings agreed that the speedy pace of development in a climate created by the combination of communication technologies and equipment related to mobile phones, radio and computing often sees broadcast professionals playing catch-up.

It was RJR that first introduced mobile phones to live broadcasting. The technology helped the station to retain its number one status – usually the first to file breaking news – until the late 1990s when it was toppled by some of the very stations it enabled.

According to former broadcaster Michael Bryce, the introduction of mobile phones to live reports revolutionised broadcast radio. It enabled journalists to file reports faster and from places previously inaccessible to traditional transmission means.

Bryce, a member of the reporting team covering Nelson Mandela’s visit to Jamaica in 1991, explained that the team was able to transmit live along the entire route from the Norman Manley International Airport to the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies via a mobile phone that had been “rigged into the mobile unit”.

The now head of Consumer and Public Affairs in the Office of Utilities Regulations further explained, “We had to say on air that we were speaking from places we wouldn’t have been able to transmit from before we got the phone.”

When RJR shut down Jamaica’s last functioning AM transmitter on Mar. 30, 2009, it completed almost two decades of transition which saw a move from the AM band to FM and digital broadcast.

RJR’s leadership in the development of local radio goes back to 1939 and the half-hour weekly wartime broadcasts made by John Grinan, via his ham radio from his home in Kingston. Radio VP5PZ – Grinan’s call sign- was renamed ZQI in 1940 and later Radio Jamaica.

Fast forward to 2001 when veteran radio talk show host Barbara Gloudon visited and beamed her show from New York, a month after the 9/11 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Centre.

Radio Jamaica’s Yvonne Wilks noted that the entire talk show was broadcast from Ground Zero via cell phone. It was, she said, an indication of how far the technologies had come and a demonstration of the continued interdependence between radio and telecommunication technologies.

“There has been a convergence of technologies that has helped to keep radio alive at a time when TV has become a dominant medium,” she noted.

Since its early beginnings, developments in tele-communications and radio broadcast have been inextricably linked. These days, it is not unusual to see live broadcasts being transmitted via a wireless broadband modem affixed to a laptop.

“Radio is no longer a box on the table,” Wilks added, pointing to the newest trends of listening to radio via cell phone, television, or Internet. Radio currently operates four (three on cable) and TV three radio stations under the banner RJR Communications Group.

But inspite of its reach and flexibility, local researchers note, that there has been a fragmentation of the markets, accompanied by a falloff in ownership of radio units and listenership.

Media specialist Marcia Forbes noted in an April 2010 article that radio has been losing its audience for years, falling from 1,763,000 in 1996 to 1,204,000 in 2000 – “almost a 30 per cent falloff over approximately 10 years”, she said.

Whilst the fragmentation of radio markets has been in attributed in part to the growth of alternative stations, Bryce notes that the alternative listening devices like mp3 players has resulted in a more selective audience.

Some believe that in certain respects, technology has pushed Jamaica backward, to a time when “nighttime radio was a playlist on a reel- to-reel”. As stations cut costs to stay competitive, the all-night disc jockey has virtually disappeared, to be replaced by a computerised play list; stations now depend on centralised news production teams and salaries are very low.

But in the words of one veteran, mobile technology has enabled broadcasters to be more responsive to their audiences and made coverage more immediate.

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

Imported television shows watched by millions will be canned during the country’s prime “golden time” hours, the government announced last week. Last month, popular prime time entertainment programmes were slashed by two-thirds. This was after programmes featuring time travel were all but banned last year.

In the latest signs of an escalating clampdown on entertainment in China, the television broadcast regulator has declared that “vulgar” foreign television shows – which mostly hail from Asia – will be barred 7-10pm.

The newest rules aim to boost China’s domestic television industry, forcing audiences away from Asian competition towards local shows. Many feel that the move is also an attempt to protect state-run China Central Television (CCTV), known for its stiff evening news and stale dramas.

The incapacitating series of regulations were felt most keenly in October when the industry watchdog, the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT), announced a cap on mass-watched “entertainment” shows, which were declared pure “poison” by one official.

By the end of last year, China’s 34 satellite channels had cut the number of entertainment shows – largely spin-offs of Western hits such as American Idol and Top Gear – from 126 to just 38 during the prime-time hours, marking a 69 percent decrease. The ban came into effect officially on Jan. 1.

In the place of the rags to riches singing competitions and sassy dating shows which have proliferated under China’s enterprising provincial television channels, SARFT stated that each channel must air “morality building” programmes weekly. Talent contents will be limited to just 10 nationwide per year.

“SARFT does not want provincial TV to pose a threat to the national influence of CCTV. So they have stopped many programmes,” says Dr. Grace Leung, a visiting scholar at Beijing’s Tsinghua University who specialises in television regulation.

In the latest rules, announced last Monday, all foreign shows – which are mainly sourced from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Thailand and South Korea – must pass state approval.

“TV series that contain vulgar and violent scenes should not be imported,” stated China Daily, adding that “severe punishments” will be handed out to channels who violate the new rules.

According to the state-run newspaper, the regulations will help create a “favourable environment for TV shows made by companies on the Chinese mainland.”

Propaganda over profit remains a crucial concern for SARFT, which functions under the propaganda arm of the Communist Party. Pushing the Party creed over the competitiveness of the television industry as a whole remains paramount.

“With more than 96 or 97 percent of the total population (tuning in), TV is still the most influential vehicle for propaganda. One of SARFT’s major tasks is ideological control,” says Dr Leung.

“There is concern whether (satellite stations) are doing the correct job to educate their audience rather than provide entertainment alone. So profit making is not a primary concern for them – they would prefer to stick to their original task of educating and propaganda to prevent controversial issues arising,” she adds.

Programmes that have felt the full force of the state truncheon over the past year include the highly marketable “time-travel” genre, in which characters travel back in time to different dynasties.

In September, SARFT suspended Super Girl, a Pop Idol spin-off. At its peak it generated 400 million messages. Further victims include the dating show If You Are The One, which, although still running, has curtailed its more salacious elements in favour of heavy-handed moral messages.

“The cycle of tightening and loosening up is nothing new in China,” says Ying Zhu, author of Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television. “Obviously the tightening up cannot last long when the issue of bread and butter is at stake. The real clash is between the mandate of a Chinese cultural tradition dictated by morality and the demand of a market system dictated by profit.”

The newest regulations, however, might backfire. Internet users in China now number over 500 million and many people are switching off their television sets in favour of finding entertainment on their smart phones and laptops, where censorship is less pervasive and the state has less hold.

“Only people like my mother-in-law would watch (programmes) on TV and now even she has switched to the Internet,” says Raymond Zhou, 49, a Beijing-based newspaper columnist and social critic. “These regulations are going to drive more and more young people away from television, because they are leaving anyway. You are giving them the extra push – now they leave happily.” (END/IPS/AP/IP/AE/CR/HD/CN/CM/SS/12)

“I want my own computer so that I can talk to my cousins who live in Italy,” says eight-year-old Camila Ojeda, sitting in front of a computer monitor on a bus that acts as a mobile cybercafé in the Paraguayan capital.

The Oguatava (“walking” in Guaraní, an official language in Paraguay) Mobile Telecentre visits low-income neighbourhoods (barrios) offering access to the new information and communication technologies (ICT).

Camila Ojeda and friends watch a video on computer monitors in a bus converted into a cybercafé. Credit: Natalia Ruiz Díaz/IPS

Like Ojeda, who attends the Carlos Antonio López school, at least 5,000 children from the barrios of Loma Pytâ, Bañado Norte and Zeballos Cué in Asunción, and settlements further afield like Limpio, in Central department (province) and Villa Hayes in Bajo Chaco, have acquired computer literacy on this bus, the most eye-catching part of the community telecentres project run since 2005 by the cooperative radio station Radio Viva 90.1 FM.

Here, Ojeda has learned to do her school homework on the computer, which makes it easy “to see a lot of information at the same time”. When IPS arrived in the Loma Pytâ neighbourhood, she and her classmates were amusing themselves watching a video on the importance of hand washing, simultaneously displayed on the bus’s 17 monitors.

Her teacher, Nancy Ruiz, says that pupils who learn to use the computers perform much better in communication and mathematics, their work is better presented and they express themselves more fluently.

“Having access to technology opens their minds,” Ruiz told IPS as she watched the schoolchildren’s behaviour in front of the monitors.

According to the 2009-2010 Mercosur Human Development Report, barely five percent of Paraguay’s 6.4 million people have access to the internet, the lowest proportion in the Mercosur bloc, made up of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay.

Only 14.9 percent of young men aged 15-29 have access to ICT, and 13.8 percent of young women in the same age group.

Telecentres have opened a window on ICT not only for children and adolescents, but also for adults.

“In these past six years of work, the project has taken technology to more than 14,000 people of all ages,” social communicator Zunilda Acosta, coordinator of the community telecentres programme for Radio Viva, told IPS.

But why would a radio station be interested in promoting the use of other media?

This “cooperative citizen’s radio station” came up with the idea in order to promote the democratisation of communications, a commitment it assumed as the sole representative of Paraguay at the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, in November 2005.

One of the documents adopted at that summit, the Tunis Commitment, states “ICTs are making it possible for a vastly larger population than at any time in the past to join in sharing and expanding the base of human knowledge.”

Thanks to Radio Viva’s efforts, seven community telecentres have been established in the Asunción barrios of Puerto Botánico, Zeballos Cué, Loma Pytâ and Bañado Norte.

The telecentres were provided with equipment by Radio Viva, but community leaders in each barrio, usually members of the neighbourhood councils, administer them, set their opening hours and regulate the number of users. An estimated 2,000 people a year come to them to use the internet.

Acosta never ceases to be amazed every time she views the telecentres’ web sites on social networks, because, she says, “I find all my neighbours from Puerto Botánico (a barrio on the banks of the Paraguay river) surfing the internet, which never happened six years ago when we started the project.”

Local people served by the telecentres now appreciate that they need technology to improve their quality of life. “Many young people have landed a job through the social networks, and have realised how very useful the internet is in creating better opportunities,” Acosta said.

The project had start-up support from the Swiss and Finnish cooperation agencies. At present it is supported through agreements signed with the state telephone company COPACO and the National Electricity Administration (ANDE).

Radio Viva is an initiative of the independent Asociación Trinidad (Trinity Association for Citizenship, Culture and Development), which proclaims that “radio broadcasting, as the publicly spoken word, is an exercise in freedom of expression.”

In Loma Pytâ the computer class is over, and the pupils get off the mobile telecentre. Camila Ojeda realises she didn’t manage to search for certain information and she crosses her arms and bows her head in dejection. But she is all smiles again as soon as she is told that the computer bus will be back next week.

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

Community radio stations in Brazil are finding the internet and user-friendly information technologies to be valuable allies for their broadcasts, which focus on citizenship, social equity and human rights.

Community web-radios are making great strides in this Latin American country where procedures for obtaining a federal government license to use a radio waveband are becoming ever lengthier and more bogged down in red tape, which blocks the emergence of new not-for-profit broadcasters.

At present there are around 4,500 legal community radio stations in Brazil, and an estimated further 10,000 operating without a government license.

Many unlicensed community broadcasters, having applied to the Communications Ministry for a concession which awaits approval, are forced to operate underground without authorisation.

The license application process tends to drag on for between three and 10 years, and there have been cases of delays of up to 17 years, according to the Centro de Imprensa, Assessoria e Rádio (CRIAR, Centre for Press and Radio), which aims to democratise communications in Brazil and support social movements and organisations by providing training, advice and research for community radio production.

“The Brazilian community radio movement is very strong, and has been going for some 20 years now. There is a serious shortage of technical know-how and of training on how to address human rights issues,” João Paulo Malerba, the executive coordinator for Brazil of the World Association of Community Radio Broadcasters (AMARC), told IPS.

“Community radios have great potential to broadcast this kind of social and human rights content, because they are the simplest media,” said Malerba, who is also a researcher with the Laboratory for Community Communication Studies at the state Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (LECC/UFRJ).

The Community Broadcasting Services Law of 1998 regulates community radio and television broadcasters. Back in 1998, there were 2,000 community radios in this country of nearly 200 million people.

Now, 14 years later, the number of legal community radio stations has more than doubled, far surpassing the 2,600 commercial radios in the country.

However, because of the red tape imposed by officialdom, many community radios take their chances and broadcast without a license, only to end up being closed down by the federal police. In September and October 2011 alone, the police took 160 not-for-profit broadcasters off the air.

Political patronage can greatly speed the licensing process. A recent study found that projects with a well-connected “political godfather” in Brasilia were four times more likely to obtain a license from the ministry quickly, Malerba complained.

“We are very concerned about this because it can result in loss of identity, since many broadcasters associate themselves with politicians or religious groups (in order to get a license), and so the pluralism that is the essence of community radio broadcasting is lost,” he said.

The law requires not-for-profit broadcasters to have a coverage radius of no more than one kilometre and a maximum transmitter power of 25 watts. Malerba complained that the range is inadequate in many cases because the radio broadcasts serve communities that are spread out over areas greater than a kilometre in radius.

He mentioned for example the radios set up in the “favelas” (shanty towns) in Rio, which stretch out over several kilometres and have an average population of 100,000. He also mentioned the Amazon region, where people live sparsely scattered over large areas.

In order to overcome these hurdles, Brazilian community broadcasters are turning to the internet, as they have found that the web enables them to operate with the range and freedom they desire and that has been denied them in the world of radio waves.

“Anyone can create a web-radio. But access to the internet in the communities they want their broadcasts to reach is still very limited, especially in the north and northeast regions, where very few people can use internet,” said Malerba.

Web-radios first appeared in Brazil in 2005, and a year later there were already close to 100 community broadcasters transmitting their programmes online.

Malerba emphasised that web-radios are different from traditional radios stations and connect with a wider universe, because their audiences – individuals, communities and social movements – are found throughout the country rather than confined to a specific locality.

There is no register of the current number of community web-radios in Brazil, but there are known to be several hundred.

Web-radios are expected to spread and multiply with the progress of the National Broadband Plan, which aims to provide low-cost broadband internet services to some 40 million Brazilian homes by 2015, and to over 90 percent of the country’s cities by 2017.

The pioneering Radiotube project was started in 2007 to bring together a network of social communicators with a focus on citizenship and human rights, from communities all over the country. It is coordinated by Andre Lobão, an expert on digital media.

“Radiotube is a platform for accessing a wide range of contents, and it is an innovative project that, with its concept of citizenship, can take advantage of the advent of the Web 2.0 environment to promote interaction between social networks and sharing of their contents,” he told IPS.

The platform adheres to the principles of Creative Commons (an NGO that has developed “some rights reserved” licenses aiming to maximise digital creativity, sharing and innovation), and of democratisation of information via shared, authorised circulation of contents and computer programmes.

For instance, a community radio in the northwestern state of Amazonas can use the internet to download a computer programme produced by a community radio station in the southern state of São Paulo, Lobão explained.

“Radiotube facilitates access to content produced by community web- radios all over the country. They can diversify their content, produce programmes incorporating their own particular perspective, and create content in a more horizontal, participative way on an equal footing,” he said.

The Radiotube project was initiated by CRIAR, which is in contact with a network of 1,400 community radios in the country, of which one-third are already operating on the internet as online radios.

Currently the Radiotube network comprises some 400 community web- radios, most of them located in the southeast of Brazil.

In the southeastern state of Rio de Janeiro, for example, about 40 web-radios are associated with Radiotube, and there are another 30 in São Paulo state.

Meanwhile in the northeast the platform has contact with 12 community web-radios in the states of Bahia and Pará. Further north, there are only 6 participating online radio stations.

Lobão forecasts that the number of web-radios in the north of the country will expand in parallel with the provision of broadband services covering the length and breadth of the country.

This will open up a wealth of new opportunities for community radio stations, which continue to strive for recognition and a place in the sun within Brazilian broadcasting.

*This story was produced with the support of UNESCO.

A headshot to focus on AIDS awareness. Credit: Niccolo Cosme/Project Headshot.

By Kara Santos and - -
MANILA, Dec 2 2011 (IPS)

A unique campaign in the Philippines is using stylised online photos to raise awareness on HIV/AIDS. Fashion and conceptual photographer Niccolo Cosme first initiated Project Headshot Clinic in 2007 as a way of merging profile photos online and advertising.

A headshot to focus on AIDS awareness. Credit: Niccolo Cosme/Project Headshot.

Project Headshot has partnered with various groups and sponsors to create a unique look that is used for message branding for campaigns and advertisements. After a friend in the industry came out in the open and declared himself HIV positive, Cosme took up HIV/AIDS awareness as a personal advocacy.

According to a Global AIDS Report recently released by the UNAIDS, the Philippines is one of seven nations which reported a surge in new HIV infections amid decreases in most countries worldwide. As of March 2011, six new cases of HIV were reported each day in the country, an exponential leap from the ‘low and slow’ character of the epidemic before 2007.

Department of Health figures show that in September alone, there were 253 new HIV cases confirmed and reported to the HIV and AIDS Registry, which was 65 percent higher compared to the same period in 2010.

A majority of the cases are transmitted through unprotected sex, with males within the age range 20-29 the most vulnerable. Some other cases detected have been cause by needle-sharing among injecting drug users, through mother-to-child transmission and through blood transfusion.

While Project Headshot has tied up with corporate clients in the past, they focus their campaign on the youth to raise awareness on the state of HIV/AIDS also with the support of UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS.

After the mass shooting activity, the photos are uploaded online for participants to use on their profile pages and social networking sites to commemorate World AIDS Day. Project Headshot makes use of a unifying symbolic design such as red paint on participant’s faces, a floating red ribbon or red frame to distinguish each year’s campaign.

This year, participants wore a whistle around their neck provided by project co-presenter The Red Whistle, a campaign that aims to “sound the alarm” on the HIV/AIDS situation though online social media effort and visual arts.

When Project Headshot Clinic for HIV/AIDS first started in 2008, participants included key trendsetters, popular celebrities, musicians, and members of the fashion industry, who were part of photographer Cosme’s network. All the photos were uploaded the same time, and everyone who participated grabbed the shots and made it their profile photo, creating immediate buzz and curiosity among those not aware of the campaign.

“You know how when you open your Facebook account and you get a notification that says ‘this many friends have changed their profile photos’ – and you see all the photos are the same. The impact is viral,” said Cosme.

In the succeeding years, Project Headshot Clinic eventually opened up slots to the public, for netizens to join the roster of pre-selected celebrities and advocates.

Previous year’s themes included “Aware” (2008) to raise awareness on the issue, “Move” (2009) to get people to do something concrete, and “Act” (2010) a call to action to get voluntary HIV screening. Currently in its fourth year, the Project’s theme for the year is “Commit.”

The highly exclusive campaign asked participants online to submit their “commitments” to help achieve UNAIDS vision: “Zero new HIV infections. Zero discrimination. Zero AIDS-related deaths.” Aside from selecting participants based on their answers, organisers assessed the number of friends potential participants had on Facebook to ensure that the campaign would have a wide reach.

Unlike traditional campaigns in print media, radio, or TV, the campaign directly embraces the youth’s inherent love for the Internet and social networking sites in an innovative way. Taking the campaign online has resulted in increased youth awareness and involvement.

“Social media tools hold huge potential to help the raise of awareness and mobilise the social action needed to turn the tide on the HIV epidemic. UNAIDS has therefore taken the best of the AIDS response – the vibrancy, the dedication, and the passion – online,” states UNAIDS on their website.

But aside from addressing establishing a strong online presence, the programme also helps raise awareness in HIV/AIDS among youth. Before the shoot takes place, peer educators from project partner Take The Test, a non-profit group which raises awareness on HIV/AIDS, gave participants a briefing on HIV in the country and explained facts on HIV prevention.

Despite years of public information campaigns on HIV/AIDS, many myths still surround it. During the pre- shoot activity, one of the participants asked if HIV could be transmitted through ‘French kissing’, which was quickly dispelled by peer educators and other participants.

According to Take the Test’s peer educators, the increase in the number of cases in the country is mostly due to the lack of awareness on the risks of HIV infection due to unprotected sex and the fear and stigma that surround HIV and people living with HIV and AIDS which often hinders people from getting tested.

The project encouraged participants to avail of the free voluntary rapid testing and counseling provided during the shooting dates. Taking the test was confidential and provided results within 30 minutes.

This would not have been possible if participants had not been lured in by the idea of getting their photo taken by a professional photographer for free and being part of a high profile awareness campaign for a good cause.

Many net-savvy participants who get involved in Project Headshot also ended up blogging about the whole experience, tweeting facts about HIV/AIDS, or sharing links on Facebook about where people can avail of free voluntary testing or preventive practices to curb the spread of HIV.

Excerpt:

In pastoralist communities, mobile phones are crucial for alerting communities to droughts and reducing food insecurity. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Isaiah Esipisu and - -
DURBAN, South Africa, Nov 30 2011 (IPS)

Francis Mburu used to keep indigenous cattle in Entasopia village in the semi- arid Kajiado region, 160 kilometres southwest of Nairobi. However, increasing temperatures and frequent droughts in Kenya have made this difficult in recent years.

In pastoralist communities, mobile phones are crucial for alerting communities to droughts and reducing food insecurity. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

The Nguruman community, largely composed of the Maasai ethnic group, now has access to an ICT facility locally known as Maarifa (“knowledge” in Swahili) Centre. Here they are able to access climate adaptation information via the internet, videos and books. The Arid Land Information Network (ALIN), in collaboration with the Kenyan government, founded the project.

According to Samuel Nzioka, the field officer for ALIN, most of the videos shown at the centre are practical lessons in local languages aimed at boosting the understanding of the concepts of climate change and adaptation, and basic dry-land farming knowledge.

“From reading agricultural books, listening to advice from field officers manning the centre, and watching video clips that show what other farmers are doing to adapt to the changing climatic conditions in other arid areas, I have learnt more resilient methods of animal husbandry,” said Mburu, a 56-year-old father of three.

Climate change in East Africa has resulted in higher temperatures and prolonged droughts and has meant that farmers have had to adapt along with these changes.

“We have seen our pastoralists move to higher grounds in Ethiopia in search of greener pastures. We have seen animal species, that we thought could tolerate drought, die as a result of the prolonged drought. It means that it is not business as usual,” said Dr. Miano Mwangi, assistant director for Animal Production at the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute, and the national coordinator at the Kenya Arid and Semi-Arid Land programme.

It is successes like the one in Entasopia that has experts at the ongoing United Nations 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17)in Durban, South Africa urging the international community to consider technology transfer as one of the main methods of adapting to climate change.

“In Ghana, we call it climate education, where information communication technology is used to educate people of how to adapt to the new phenomenon,” Atsu Titiati, the Tree Programme director at the Ghana branch of Rainforest Alliance, an international non-profit organisation dedicated to the conservation of tropical forests, told IPS.

He said that in northern Ghana, communities rely on community-based radio to know what types of seed to plant during a particular season, and for the market value of their crops upon harvest.

“The government also uses community radio to warn people in advance whenever the weather forecast detects floods,” Titiati told IPS in Durban.

In Kenya, pastoralist communities use mobile phones to determine the market value of their animals.

“We have rolled out a project in Isiolo district with an aim of reducing food insecurity among the communities,” Rahab Mburunga, the data officer at ActionAid International – Kenya, told IPS.

Through the project, information about the market value of various crops and livestock is sent as short messages to subscribers’ mobile phones.

The project has also given mobile phones to community members so that they can distribute the information to other villagers who might not have phones.

“We have tried it and it is working,” Mburunga said.

In February, the Kenyan government developed a National Climate Change Technology Action Plan. One of the main objectives of this was to explore technology transfer opportunities and to establish national technology innovation centres.

In Mozambique, the government and non-governmental organisations use mobile phones to warn residents in flood-prone areas about the possibility of floods to ensure the timely evacuation of people.

“We usually send short messages to particular community representatives so that it is broadcasted to the rest of the community regarding floods, delayed rainfall or any other necessary agricultural information,” said Josh Ogada, the communication expert at Oneworld, a regional environmental organisation based in Cape Town, South Africa.

According to a statement released by the International Telecommunication Union at COP 17, these technologies hold the key to adaptation, but they remain underutilised in most African countries.

“Today’s advanced technologies can transform social, industrial and business processes to effect the changes needed to achieve sustainability. But while the potential of ICTs to make a real difference is widely recognised by the technology community and government ICT ministries, it is still far from being understood and embraced by environmental lobby groups and policymakers,” the statement said.

Meanwhile, Africa is calling for more funding to implement climate change adaptation programmes.

“We have enough resources for adaptation in Africa, and all we need is the technology transfer backed with scientific evidence. However, our people cannot fully exploit them if we do not have access to proper channels of financing such technology transfers for adaptation,” Mithika Mwenda, the coordinator for the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance told IPS.

Excerpt:

Workers at Gestión Ambiental, a company devoted to the collection, treatment and final disposal of electric and electronic waste in Buenos Aires. Credit: Juan Moseinco/IPS

By - - and Marcela Valente
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 22 2011 (IPS)

The shop is filled to bursting with buyers. One by one, customers follow a salesperson to one of a row of booths where they are provided with a wealth of information on the mobile phones for sale. But nobody tells them what to do with the old phones they are replacing.

This scene is replayed every day in the two-floor retail store operated by the mobile service provider Personal in the municipality of San Isidro, in the province of Buenos Aires, and in other shops throughout Argentina, which is experiencing a boom in the consumption of electronic goods.

Mobile phones are now being replaced in Argentina after an average of only two years of use.

With a population of 40 million, Argentina has 34.3 million mobile subscribers, a figure that rises to 56 million if you add the mobile numbers that are no longer in use but have not been canceled, according to the Argentine branch of the environmental organisation Greenpeace.

The upsurge in mobile phone sales over the last five years has sparked concern over the volume of toxic substances released when the devices are disposed of alongside household waste.

“What should I do with my old phone?” Tierramérica asked a saleswoman at the shop in San Isidro.

“Keep it as a backup, in case the new one breaks,” she suggested.

“But the old one doesn’t work anymore.”

“I don’t know,” said the saleswoman with a shrug. “We don’t take back old phones.”

Greenpeace Argentina activist Yanina Rullo told Tierramérica that around 40 percent of the public is aware that old mobile phones are a potential source of toxic pollution, and they keep them stored at home. Another 30 percent simply dispose of them with regular trash, which means they end up in landfills or dumps.

Greenpeace is one of the most active promoters of a bill currently being studied by the Argentine Congress on the management of waste electrical and electronic equipment, which has already been passed in the Senate.

The proposed law would place responsibility for the recycling or safe final disposal of electronic devices on the companies that place them on the market. But the passage of the bill has reached a standstill in the lower house of Congress.

According to Greenpeace Argentina, in 2010 alone, around 12 million mobile phones were sold, along with 2.6 million computers, one million television sets and 1.2 million printers.

And as new equipment is purchased, old equipment is tossed aside. In one year, 10 million mobile phones are thrown away, and when they break down, they release highly toxic substances and heavy metals that contaminate the air, soil and water tables.

Argentina generates three kilograms of electronic waste or e-waste per capita annually, which means a total of 120,000 tons of contaminating waste, of which less than two percent is recycled.

In Latin America as a whole, an estimated 800,000 tons of e-waste pile up every year, according to “Los residuos electrónicos: Un desafío para la sociedad del conocimiento en América Latina y el Caribe” (Electronic Waste: A challenge for the knowledge society in Latin American and the Caribbean), a 2010 report published by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) office in Montevideo.

This estimate was reached on the basis of reports from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela, where more than 80 percent of the region’s e-waste is produced.

But despite this huge volume, none of the region’s countries has adopted integrated legislation to respond to the problem. Instead, there are isolated initiatives aimed at the reuse or safe final disposal of these discarded products.

With the economic growth of the last decade and the efforts to reduce the so-called digital divide in countries like Argentina, Colombia and Uruguay, where the widespread use of laptop computers is being actively promoted, there is clearly an urgent need for legislation.

The Argentine bill, modeled on a European Union directive, establishes individual producer responsibility for the final disposal of waste equipment and the reuse and recycling of components.

The draft legislation also establishes incentives for manufactures to design easily recyclable devices that are free of toxic substances and with the longest possible useful life, as well as proposing a national system for the safe disposal of e-waste. It also calls for the creation of e-waste collection centres in all municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants.

Some companies have voluntary programs for the withdrawal of obsolete products from the market, but they are scarcely publicised, and not even their own employees know enough about them to inform customers.

In Argentina, a company called Escrap handles waste electronic equipment from large companies, resulting from production flaws or changes in technology, but does not deal with e-waste generated by individual users.

“We work with a very small percentage which includes products that are damaged during the manufacturing process or that break down while they are still covered by a warranty, but for the bulk of the equipment discarded, a law is needed,” Escrap owner Gustavo Fernández, a biologist and environmental management specialist, told Tierramérica.

Fernández, who collaborated in the drafting of the Argentine bill, explained that there are electronic waste products that have some economic value, such as components made from iron, steel, aluminum, copper, precious metals and plastics, while there are others that do not, like rechargeable batteries.

For some highly contaminating types of e-waste, such as rechargeable batteries or circuit boards, the necessary recovery technology is not available in Argentina, which means they must be exported to specialised treatment plants in other countries.

Almost 30 percent of the weight of a battery is made up of toxic materials like cadmium, nickel and lithium. A personal computer can contain more than 50 harmful components.

But, according to Fernández, of all e-waste products, mobile phones are among the most dangerous, because they release carcinogenic substances and persistent organic pollutants. “They are like an atomic bomb, they can’t be allowed to end up in dumps,” he warned.

*The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By Ignatius Banda and - -
PLUMTREE, Zimbabwe, Nov 14 2011 (IPS)

Collecting the monthly subscriptions for her co-operative has always been a headache for Thelma Nare, 41. This is because Nare lives in Tshitshi, Plumtree in rural Zimbabwe, about 60 kilometres away from the humdrum of the nearest town centre where banks are located.

Rural women find themselves at the centre of efforts by mobile phone service providers to introduce mobile phone money transfers in Zimbabwe. Credit: Ignatius Banda/IPS

In fact, the women in the co-operative do not have a bank account. Until recently, Nare and the other co-operative members had to physically be present to make their monthly contributions.

But now, these “unsophisticated” rural women find themselves at the centre of efforts by mobile phone service providers to introduce mobile phone money transfers in Zimbabwe.

Those without bank accounts, like Nare and her co-operative, can now send and receive cash via their mobile phones.

The system is fairly simple. A user registers for mobile phone banking with their service provider and is given a mobile “e-wallet” – an application on their sim card that is linked to their phone number.

When the user wants to pay for services or transfer money to someone they simply have to go to an agent and pay the desired amount, which is loaded onto the “e-wallet”. The payment is made and the recipient can withdraw the money from an agent. There are various agents affiliated with the mobile service providers across the country, making the service easily accessible to those in rural areas.

It is a convenient system that no longer limits the women’s movements. Nare and the women in her co-operative make regular trips to Bulawayo to sell produce, like Mopani worms. This means that they miss paying their monthly subscriptions.

And as with many co-operatives, or money clubs as they are called here, defaulters are not particularly valued. But these women would have not been able to cope with the country’s failing economy if it had not been for the money club.

For the women in Nare’s money club, belonging to the co-operative is what cushioned them during the tumultuous years of empty shop shelves in Zimbabwe. In the mid-2000s the country experienced hyperinflation and nearly 94 percent of the country was unemployed.

It was on a recent trip to Bulawayo, some 100 kilometres from Tshitshi, that Nare discovered mobile cash transfers.

Mobile network giant Econet Wireless, which has five million subscribers, introduced the service in September and was quickly followed by its competitors, the government-owned NetOne and Telecel.

These service providers have affiliated agents throughout the country, which include the Zimbabwe Post Office, supermarkets and stores where people like Nare can access their funds.

“I was in the city and was told about the use of mobile phones to transfer money. When I told the other women in my money club, it seemed to be the answer to our problems,” she said.

The model is borrowed from Kenya’s pioneering M-Pesa, which has experienced phenomenal growth from 20,000 users at its launch in 2007 to an estimated 14 million this year.

Girlie Moyo, 40, another member of Nare’s money club said that in the past the women had to gather under a tree to make physical contributions. Now, the convenience of the mobile transfers means “we can co-ordinate our contributions without concerns about distance.”

“Sometimes even if you have the money you will have no clue how to get it to the club members because our co-operative does not have a bank account like some in the city,” she said.

While money transfer services sprouted across the country in the aftermath of the mass exodus of Zimbabweans to work across the world, the “bureaux de change” remained in the cities. So those in the rural areas were forced to rely upon undependable and expensive cross-border transporters who demand up to 20 percent of the total amount being sent.

Mobile banking seems to be the best solution for rural Zimbabweans, as a report released on Nov. 9 by the Groupe Speciale Mobile Association (GSMA) found that Africa has the fastest growing mobile phone market in the world and is the world’s second-largest mobile market by connections, after Asia.
The GSMA report predicts that there will be more than 735 million subscribers in Africa by the end of 2012.

In Zimbabwe, it is expected that with the majority of the country’s population living in the rural areas, mobile phone money transfers will likely meet with the same success as seen in Kenya. The GSMA report noted that Kenya was the leader in mobile phone money transfers.

According to Econet Wireless, by 2015 mobile money transfers in Africa will reach 200 billion dollars.

“These are services which people, especially rural women, have always wanted,” said Viola Matongerere, an economist and gender and development specialist.

“Zimbabwe is one of many developing countries where the efforts of rural women to improve their livelihoods has been thwarted by little things which men have ready access to, like bank accounts for example.

“I think for women, these mobile phone-based services provide opportunities for the realisation of financial autonomy as they can now easily move their money without relying on anyone,” Matongerere said.

Money transfer agents affiliated with the country’s service providers are already reporting huge interest in the initiative as the government of Zimbabwe continues its promotion of paperless banking transactions.

“What has been great so far since the introduction of the service is the amount of cash that is moving to rural areas,” said Stewart Manyora, who works with the Zimbabwe Post Office.

“We have not registered much business of our own lately, yet we can already see that the mobile phone money transfers are making a difference,” Manyora said.

However, service providers are yet to release figures on the amount of money that has been transferred since the introduction of the service.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development report titled the Information Economy Report 2011 stated that there remain huge hindrances for women entrepreneurship, and this has been particularly worse for rural-based women.

The report noted that there are an absence of programmes and initiatives that promote the use of ICTs to assist women. Mobile phone banking is being touted by development agencies as a starting point towards empowering rural communities.

“Even when we get money from husbands’ working in Botswana and South Africa, it has been a problem sending this money to our children who are attending school away from the village,” Moyo said.

“The fact that we can organise ourselves as women in our co-operative through our phones is what matters,” she said.

Excerpt:

By Pierre Klochendler and - -
NEAR TEL AVIV, Central Israel, Nov 11 2011 (IPS)

War brings economic development, we’re told at times. Like the cliché or not, in their case, Israelis have become a successful start-up nation by building a powerful start-up military.

A miniature capsule camera transmits images from inside a patient’s oesophagus, intestine or colon that’s seen by physicians around the world. Conceived by Given Imaging engineers, the ‘PillCam’ is a technological transfer from Rafael, the Israeli authority for development of weapons, to the medical sector.

The patient actually swallows something like a video-guided missile head equipped with state-of the-art optics, electronics, wireless data transmission, software, even a GPS (global positioning system). Instead of inflicting havoc, the device replaces say, the uncomfortable colonoscopy.

Another scientific transfer is the disposable pulmonary drug inhaler developed by Aespironics. The drug delivery tool is a hybrid between a credit card, a propeller, a gas turbine and a jet engine.

How does a military become a hi-tech force? “Pure necessity,” says David Lavenda, vice-president of Harmon.ie, a local software company. “A small country in a somewhat unfriendly neighbourhood must come up with pragmatic solutions. The army gives young people opportunities that they wouldn’t have elsewhere.”

Lavenda promotes a business-friendly product that transforms the e-mail into a collaborative workspace. A file sent to multiple recipients is integrated into one edited document with all incoming revisions combined within it. “Everybody’s on the same page” is the start-up motto. Its chief executives are ex-Navy buddies.

“The army is the place for high-tech education and interdisciplinary interaction. We could initiate ideas in an open environment,” recalls Eyal Alaluf. “More esprit de corps incentive than economic benefit,” cautions Yaakov Cohen.

Openness and informality are the last qualities that come to mind when characterising such structured and disciplined system.

Co-author (with Dan Senor) of the best-seller ‘Start-up Nation’, Saul Singer also tracks Israel’s hi-tech footprints in the military. “Every Israeli goes through it. What they get is leadership, teamwork, becoming mission-driven. When you perform a task which life depends on it, you simply get things done. That’s a very important skill for start-ups.”

Getting things done is so embedded in the army that working by the rules often goes against the rule. What matters is working according to… what works.

Set up to cope with chaos in an orderly manner, this army looks somewhat disorderly. Hierarchy is turned on its head; stifled attitudes are non-existent.

A chief-of-staff recently reviewing 18-year old conscripts at the Home Front Command administered resounding slaps on fresh shoulders and engaged in patriotic drivel as if they were his brothers, and sisters, in arms – which they actually are.

Twenty-year old Noam Wordman introduced himself rather unassumingly. “I’m the operation officer for the alert unit, a lieutenant, no more…” Not more than a junior officer, yet, “responsible for alerting the civilian population on time, 24/7, on multiple platforms – sirens, cellphones, the media,” Wordman declared matter-of-factly.

Early on, officers experience managerial positions. As in any top-down organisation faced with life-and- death situations, for the military start-up units, past failures often prove more instructive than accomplishments.

“If things don’t work out, you usually know why, try something else,” notes Lavenda. “When something does work, many times, you just don’t know why.”

Saul Singer delves on failures of others, like the NASA space missions Apollo 13 (1970) and Columbia (2003). The improvisation and audacity demonstrated by the Apollo mission got the crew back to earth. One view is that over preparedness, stubborn attachment to standard routine procedures, led to the Columbia Shuttle disaster.

“Either you predict and train for each eventuality or you train people to think for themselves and deal with the unpredictable,” he explains. “The second approach is more Israeli: get ready for anything; use your head; don’t follow orders blindly; improvise. Risk-taking brings the best solutions to problems.

“Someone tells you, ‘This is the way it’s done’; you say, ‘maybe not so, maybe there’s a better way’,” sums up Lavenda.

Unrelenting questioning replaces submission to authority. “That’s the strange thing about this army. In basic training, obedience is above all. But once you’re even a junior officer, you’re taught to accomplish your mission creatively,” assures Singer.

Then, there’s the constant dissatisfaction, a common trait here. “The Air Force will buy a warplane; they’ll try to improve it, put their own innovations on top of it,” Singer illustrates. “When you’re dissatisfied, you’re more inventive.”

And, there’s the “fear factor”. Last decade only, Israel went through three wars – against the Palestinians in 2000-2005 and 2009 and against Hezbollah in 2006. All involved civilians.

Fear means living as much as possible. It instils urgency and energy. Lavenda believes that “constant vigilance breeds inventiveness.”

Adds Singer: “The whole country is like a start-up. We wouldn’t be here if we couldn’t learn how to deal with adversity. It’s a matter of survival.”

During the latest tit-for-tat escalation across the Israel-Gaza border, the ‘Iron Dome’ anti-missile defence system successfully intercepted rockets fired by Islamic Jihad militants. In March, Israeli tanks foiled an incoming armoured-piercing missile attack with the Active Protection System ‘Windbreaker’.

Both devices could be compared to a bullet hitting another bullet. Developed by Rafael, they rely on the technology of the experimental ‘Arrow’ anti-ballistic missile project undertaken jointly by Israel Aerospace Industries and Boeing.

Where does the knowhow come from? “The elite unit Talpioth,” explains Singer. “They scout for the most scientifically skilled 18-year olds and turn them into mission-oriented engineers by throwing mission after mission at them, exposing them to the best technologies. They come out ready to create start-ups themselves.”

Another crack unit is the C4I Corps which is responsible for all strategic areas of teleprocessing, encrypted communications, information technology and electronic warfare. Last year, the media was allowed brief access to devices such as a SNG (Satellite News Gathering) truck armed with cutting edge military applications.

For C4I’s Brig.-Gen. Ella Hakim, Israel’s hi-tech performance stems precisely from the incessant back-and- forth transferring of knowhow between civilian and military sectors: “We get the most out of our conscripts’ R&D and operating skills. They’re the next leaders of our hi-tech industry.”

Excerpt:

By Marcela Valente and - -
BUENOS AIRES, Nov 9 2011 (IPS)

Every student and teacher has a laptop with Internet connection in half of the public secondary schools in Argentina, even in remote rural villages or on islands.

XO laptop Credit: Geoff Parsons - CC BY-SA 2.0

“We thought we would run up against resistance, but the cooperation has been strong, the training courses have filled up, and we are constantly starting up new ones,” Cynthia Zapata, the coordinator of the programme in the Education Ministry, told IPS.

The first to receive training are the principals and other school authorities. The teachers are trained in other courses, which are either mandatory or optional, and some of which are distance learning courses. There are also specific courses for each subject, Zapata explained.

The teachers, principals and other staff covered by the programme total 220,000. But 470,000 courses have already been offered, said the official, who added that the Organisation of Ibero-American States for Education, Science and Culture also offers on-line training at different levels.

Under the programme, each student is given a laptop – a departure from the private school computer labs, where students receive training one or two hours a week in a room equipped with computers.

The students also take their laptops home. But the laptop’s security software means that if the student drops out of school and is thus away from the premises for a lengthy period of time, or if the laptop is stolen, it won’t boot up until it is reactivated by the school server.

The Programa Conectar Igualdad is similar to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) project of the Miami-based non-profit One Laptop per Child Association. Both programmes aim to digitally empower youth in the global south.

In 2010, Uruguay became the first country in the world to provide one bright green XO laptop to every primary school student – a total of 370,000 – under the government’s Plan Ceibal.

That same year, the programme began to distribute blue XO-1.5 high school edition laptops to public secondary school students.

Argentina started implementing the OLPC project in the teacher training institutes, so the teaching staff can incorporate the technology from the very beginning of their training. In addition, the focus has been on secondary, rather than primary schools, and on schools for children with special needs.

The Federal Planning Ministry is in charge of the technological aspects in the schools and teacher training institutes, including the server and the connectivity, while a technical support worker is on staff at every school to deal with problems.

The XO netbooks are on loan to the students, who keep them if they graduate. Some university students can already be seen using them. Many school principals say this is an extra incentive to complete secondary school, although the actual impact has not been studied.

What is clear is that the programme is causing a revolution in the country’s secondary schools and families. In many cases, the XO is the first computer in the household, and sometimes, in low-income areas, in the entire neighbourhood.

“In the ideal scenario, digital literacy is brought to the family as well, but the kids often find it hard to share their laptops; that is something we have to work on,” Graciela Sommerfeld, principal of the Centro de Educación Polimodal Número 3, or school number 3 in the town of Garupá in the northeastern province of Misiones, told IPS.

The netbooks were distributed a year ago in her school, where around 75 percent of the 350 students are poor. “At first it was like a new toy for them, but now it’s a working tool,” she said.

Sommerfeld said there was tremendous excitement when the laptops were delivered. “You should have seen their faces when we got them. That day the parents also came, because this is a community that has very close ties to the school,” she said.

Garupá is located 1,000 km north of Buenos Aires and 17 km from the provincial capital. There are other public schools in the district, but now many parents want to enrol their children in school number 3, where the programme is already up and running.

In this specific case, the Internet connection hasn’t arrived yet. But the laptop itself contains so much information, material and programmes that teachers say they prefer this for now, in order to avoid distractions caused by surfing the web.

“The teachers tell us that the kids have changed, that now they actually want to have math class. This is an extraordinary tool, because it captures the students’ interest,” Sommerfeld said.

The school has set up a multimedia workshop for the students to be able to film, edit and produce short videos, using their laptops, which have a built-in webcam. They are also starting to use them to study music, “but we’re taking things slowly,” the principal added.

Implementation of the programme is complex, given the size and social diversity of Argentina, a country of 40 million people and 2.8 million square kilometres.

On the island of Apipé, 800 km from Buenos Aires in the eastern province of Corrientes, there was no electricity as recently as 2005, even though it is situated right in front of the huge Argentine-Paraguayan Yacyretá hydropower dam on the Paraná River.

But today the island, a nature reserve that is home to 2,500 people, not only has electricity but also Internet connection and computers for the 400 students attending secondary school there.

The Conectar Igualdad programme has also required major production of contents, in technical as well as educational terms, involving both general academic information and specific course materials, besides the manuals for the principals, teachers and supervisors.

“We are all learning as we go,” Zapata admitted. “Sometimes the laptops arrive before the Internet connection, and sometimes it’s the other way around, and that generates a lot of anxiety. The principals complain to us because they think we are discriminating against them, but the thing is that we have to reach 13,000 schools and 3.7 million people,” the official added.

But despite the setbacks and challenges in carrying out the programme, the personal accounts of people directly impacted by it are inspirational.

IPS spoke with the principal of the Escuela Especial Número 505, a school for children with special needs in General San Martín, a town on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The school is attended by 42 students with hearing impairments and assists 42 others who go to conventional schools.

“By mistake, we received laptops for all levels: kindergarten, primary and secondary school,” said Marcela Silvetti. “But it turned out to be excellent for our school. The netbooks have special education desktop interfaces with specific activities for the children, but we also use all of the other programmes and information in the computers.

“The teachers are highly committed, and also very open to technological innovations, so they received technical training, as well as training in how to teach with computers, in order to make the most of this opportunity,” the principal said.

Excerpt:

By Sujoy Dhar and - -
NEW DELHI, Nov 4 2011 (IPS)

In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer.

A girl at school with a laptop provided by a new scheme. Credit: Sujoy Dahr/IPS

But thanks to the recent efforts of ‘one laptop per child’ – a project of the Miami-based non-profit One Laptop per Child Association Inc., which aims to digitally empower youth in the global south – Zore and 25 other students in his nondescript village school can now vie with their technology-savvy peers in urban India.

“Attendance to the school has gone up since the launch of the laptop scheme. Students are so self- confident now,” Sandip Surve, a teacher in Khairat told IPS.

Sadly, the story of Zore’s school bridging the digital divide remains an exception in India’s rural hinterland.

A recent survey of digital access in the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, India and China – found that India ranked the lowest in digital inclusion.

A study released earlier this year by the risk analysis firm Maplecroft supported this claim, revealing that Asia’s third largest economy, home to 1.2 billion people, is stifled by a lack of access to even the most basic information communication technologies (ICTs) such as computers, internet or even mobile phones.

Maplecroft’s digital inclusion index showed that, among the BRIC nations, India is the only country to be classified as an ‘extreme risk’, meaning that the country’s population currently suffers from a severe lack of digital inclusion.

China, Brazil and Russia were rated as ‘medium risk’ countries.

Despite huge economic growth, the BRIC nations are still significantly outperformed by developed nations in the digital inclusion index.

Sumanjeet Singh, professor at Delhi University’s Ramjas College, who recently authored a paper on India’s digital divide, found that only 1.2 percent of people in rural areas had Internet access, compared to 12 percent access in India’s urban centres.

“Urban users continue to dominate Internet use, comprising 40.34 million of the roughly 49.40 million users,” Singh told IPS.

Inadequate Internet and telephone connectivity in India’s rural areas, where more than 70 percent of the population lives, is a key challenge for all those working to narrow the digital divide, he added.

Attempting to address the issue, India’s human resources minister Kapil Sibal last month unveiled a low- cost computer tablet, which will be deployed to village schools and universities in an effort to lift large segments of India’s rural population out of poverty.

Priced at roughly 35 dollars per unit, the new ‘Aakash’ tablet, developed by the UK-based DataWind in partnership the Indian Institute of Technology in Rajasthan, is being touted as the cheapest new gadget to close the digital gap, and was distributed to 500 children during the month of October.

“Aakash will help in eliminating digital illiteracy,” Sibal told IPS, adding that there is still an urgent need for support and partnership from a broad range of stakeholders in order to further reduce the cost of the device.

To ensure a level playing field, India’s national mission on education through information and communication technology tasked one of the Indian Institutes of Technology – the country’s ivy league engineering and technology training institutions – with the job of procuring and testing these devices.

Sibal said that the government will provide price subsidies to students and distribute the tablet through various academic institutions around the country.

The project is still in its pilot stage, during which 100,000 tablets are being procured, distributed and tested in a range of climatic and usage conditions.

“The feedback obtained from the testing will inform decisions about the design of the device’s updated version,” Sibal said.

The government is not acting alone in its efforts to bridge the digital divide.

Chandrasekhar Panda and Saswat Swain, two young student-innovators from the eastern state of Orissa, recently came up with a scheme to provide laptops for less than 5,000 Indian rupees, which works out to about 100 dollars.

Their ‘iWEBLEAF’ laptop is equipped with a basic 320-gigabyte hard drive and one gigabyte of memory.

The two young innovators have approached various ministries to initiate the process of research and development in Orissa, but are yet to receive a positive response from the authorities.

Blasting the government for its apathy and criticising Aakash as “shockingly inadequate for the student community”, the duo said they are working on “an extraordinary device, now at ultra low cost.”

Other experts, while applauding individuals’ and the government’s efforts to achieve affordability, believe that accessibility still remains a challenge.

“The development of Aakash is a good step forward, it is cheap and affordable, but infrastructure challenges like lack of power and Internet access in villages offsets such efforts,” Singh told IPS.

“Simply providing cheap devices is not enough. The government also has to provide rural students with ‘e- skills’ and work to remove language barriers for users.

“Affordability and accessibility should go hand in hand,” he said, adding that, though India lacks a sound ICT strategy, the digital gap is definitely getting narrower.

Excerpt:

By Pierre Klochendler and - -
RAMALLAH, Oct 30 2011 (IPS)

Israeli entrepreneurs dream of a region without borders. Given their country’s remoteness from its vicinity, that’s a natural need. It’s a dream also nurtured by their Palestinian counterparts, and a national necessity given their own encirclement by Israel. That’s where high-tech comes into play…

At 88, Shimon Peres is Israel’s entrepreneur par excellence. Architect of the Oslo agreement signed with the Palestine Liberation Organisation in 1993, the Israeli President has a political vision, that of a “New Middle East” at peace with itself.

The vision has not materialised, to say the least. Yet today, Peres ‘presides over’ the start-up nation that Israel aspires to be. “Our economy is based on creativity, not on money,” stresses the nation’s elder. “The most careful thing is to dare,” he keeps saying.

That’s good economics, but poor politics, notes a representative of the start-up generation. “We’ve had leaders that were going ahead of their people. Now it’s the other way around,” proclaims Erel Margalit, founder of Jerusalem Venture Capital, a modern hub of investment in innovations that’s home to a plethora of Israeli start-ups in the field of digital media.

“What kind of state do we want?” rhetorically asks the head-hunter of young innovators. “Do we want a state fortress, with big walls around us, or do we want an open state which cooperates with the rest of the region?”

Their country disconnected from the Middle East by its occupation of Palestine, their reputation shadowed by the Separation Wall running partly within the West Bank, Israeli start-uppers are trying to take up the presidential vision of a new Middle East to borderless horizons, those of the virtual world.

Take Yadim Kaufmann from Veritas for instance: partnered with a Palestinian businessman, the Israeli investor provides financing for Palestinian start-ups with a 30 million dollar venture capital fund. He found out that Palestinians and Israelis share much in common: “Very entrepreneurial people, smart, hard- working, ambitious – many of the characteristic of our hi-tech population. The Palestinians see us, they say, ‘No reason why we can’t do something similar.'”

Financial rewards notwithstanding, Kaufmann’s initiative conjures up the sense of mission of Western developers – to help change people’s life for the better: “Indeed, by helping solid, profitable business, we’re acting for the well-being of the Palestinians,” although, he notes, “that’s not the fund’s goal, not our charter.

“Still, it’s definitely in our interest as Israelis that the Palestinian economy be viable and fast-growing.” And, would this particular endeavour foster cooperation between the two peoples? “Obviously, that would be very nice. High-tech can be part of the answer,” is Kaufmann’s hope.

A subsidiary of the U.S. giant in Information and Communication Technology, Cisco-Systems Israel is a worldwide leader in networking for the Internet. Its design centre was established in the Israeli coastal town of Netanya 13 years ago with 25 employees.

Nowadays, the centre employs over 700 Israelis, including 500 R&D engineers, making it the multinational’s second-largest design site (after India) outside the U.S.

Corporate Social Responsibility manager Zika Abzuk likes to believe that the reason for such exponential success stems from the fact that Israeli engineers “excel in innovation, teamwork and management. We have the ability to actually manage people globally,” she boasts.

Last year, overcoming the exact same fear that global corporations have had with regard to investing into a conflict zone like Israel, Cisco established a 10 million dollar social investment fund managed by Abzuk, and aimed at helping develop the budding Palestinian high-tech industry.

Today, Cisco-Israel outsources R&D services for their business applications directly to three Palestinian start-ups established in Ramallah. The initiative turned out to be a profitable investment. Palestinian entrepreneurs couldn’t agree more.

“Having a client like Cisco is certainly a milestone in our track record history,” marvels Murad Tahboub, director general of Asal Technologies, at his company’s business accomplishment. “We can pitch the international market and say, ‘Look, we’re a success story – not with, a medium-size company – with one of the top ten ICT multinationals.'”

Exalt Technologies CEO Taareq Maayah thinks highly of “the good level of direct teamwork with Cisco- Israel”. Abzuk chimes in, somehow idealistically: “Working together for a common cause creates a new culture. Israelis and Palestinians can stop playing the zero-sum game.”

The Israeli executive is in Ramallah to supervise a workshop. In April, Cisco joined forces with the Palestinian Authority to open a Cisco-funded Entrepreneur Institute Training Centre in the West Bank town managed by its Israeli branch.

This unusual collaboration brings training to aspiring Palestinian ICT entrepreneurs, enabling them to start and grow businesses in Palestine and beyond. “The opportunity of working in tandem with Israelis opens up markets other than in Israel. To us, it’s an added value,” explains Hassan Qassem, Chairman of the Palestine IT Association (PITA).

Gai Hetzroni is the Israeli manager of this joint project. “Once computers and communication lines are available, everything’s borderless. That’s why occupied nations, or closed nations, can produce software and send it out there to the world. No gates,” he emphasises.

To believe PITA’s executive director Abir Hazboun, ironically, Palestinian entrepreneurs have learned from Israelis how to turn a problem (imposed on them by Israel) into an asset: “Given the restrictions of movement – the Wall, the checkpoints, the closures, the lack of territorial continuity – our start-ups are usually stable. People simply can’t leave their jobs and seek opportunities elsewhere.”

So, can Israeli and Palestinian start-uppers start up a new beginning between Israelis and Palestinians in general? Cooperation under one multinational roof is one thing. Yet, the chance of these ICT innovators breaking borders of enmity and, literally, connecting their peoples is small. “The shame is that the politicians are good at stopping us.” mutters Margalit. “We lack neither vision nor sense of mission, yet we painfully lack peace initiatives.”

Excerpt:

By Apostolis Fotiadis
ATHENS, Sep 16 2011 (IPS)

An unflattering report on Greece’s media by a former United States envoy to this country, revealed by Wikileaks, evoked little public reaction because it was taken as a faithful portrayal.

Charles P. Ries’s secret dispatch to Washington said Greek media was run by a “small group of people who have made, or inherited, fortunes in shipping, banking, telecommunications, sports, oil, insurance etc. and who are or have been related by blood, marriage, or adultery, to political and government officials and/or other media and business magnates.”

It is hard to dispute the Wikileaks revelations two weeks ago because it is a fact that Greek media, lacking in objectivity and mired in nepotism, has lost the confidence of the public. Traditional media hit rock bottom two years ago in a survey on trust in public institutions.

Strikingly, there has been a drop in sales of the Sunday editions of national newspapers, once esteemed for their sharp political analyses.

One newspaper with a high average circulation and officially selling 300,000 copies in 2005, saw sales dipping well below 100,000 by May 2010. Even during the height of the Greek debt crisis its sales never crossed 75,000.

A turning point in public confidence came during the December 2008 riots when a private channel was caught adding sound effects to scenes of an aggressive crowd attacking policemen, following the cold- blooded shooting of 16-year-old Alexis Grigoropoulos by a police officer.

An undoctored version, leaked on the popular video-sharing site YouTube immediately afterwards, had only the sound of a gun being fired.

“It is a proven fact that mainstream media are rapidly losing their audiences,” says Aggeliki Boubouka, a journalist specialising on the new media. “It is also a fact that a critical mass of a couple of tens of thousands of people use the Internet and new technologies to access reality in the country.”

Boubouka says the growing impact of social networking media in Greece can be seen by how “major newspapers, radio stations and channels struggle to understand this new environment.

“For the first time mainstream media were forced to alter their discourse after people using social media took up specific issues like the 2008 riots and the first ‘Freedom Flotilla’, last year,” she told IPS.

Boubouka is herself associated with ‘Eleftherotupia’, a major progressive publication that has dominated journalism for more than three decades in Greece, but has not paid wages for three months now and is facing closure.

“Shortly, the media reality here will be very different and new forces will come into the picture. No one can say how this will change things, but the transformation is already causing concern to established powers,” she said.

Since the beginning of the year, major TV channels like ‘SKAI TV’ and ‘MEGA’ have been experimenting with live Twitter interaction in news programmes.

SKAI Radio, the biggest station in the country, is now preparing a major blog. Many well-established journalists are also attempting to create their own online news and analysis websites.

‘TVXS’, that appeared a few years ago, has been one of the more successful ones attracting thousands of readers, while ‘Protagon’ has promoted a site for commentaries by celebrities. Both are run by successful TV journalists, but find themselves challenged by anonymous bloggers.

Younger journalists, denied opportunities by poor employment conditions, are also attempting to reach audiences online. ‘Parallilografos’, a site that first appeared some months ago, now accepts more than 3,000 visits daily.

Smartphone owners who cover demonstrations and other events and report live on Twitter have multiplied during the last four years and have challenged big media players that dared ignore public opinion.

“Now thousands of people will check on alternative sources as well as established media before they form their perspective on things,” says Spyros Papadopoulos, popularly known as ‘To Vytio’ among bloggers and Twitter fans.

He still remembers when the first Twit of the murder of Grigoropoulos went online three minutes after the shots that killed him were fired.

“Lately one can observe a kind of decentralisation taking place. There are informal talks on Twitter before demos and people decide on a common tag on which to report during the demo,” Papadopoulos said.

Earlier this year, Papadopoulos joined a group of bloggers and amateur journalists involved with the ‘Radiobubble’ online radio station to cover major events by providing alternative breaking news coverage in which citizens contribute live from the field.

An audience of more than 3,000 people has followed Radiobubble coverage during big strikes or days marked by riots this year in Athens.

An information watershed was the circulation of a current affairs documentary named ‘Debtocracy’ that criticised the government’s austerity policy. The film was produced by Katerina Kitidi and Aris Xatzistefanou on a 16,000 euro (21,927 dollars) budget raised from the public.

“We uploaded the film online and asked people to get involved in distribution; on some days we register 500,000 non-unique views on our page,” said Xatzistefanou who lost his job with a major radio station soon after the documentary was released.

“When its impact became obvious Greek TV channels ignored it while newspapers reported about it negatively. I believe they despised it for political reasons and for being something they couldn’t control. Greek media are traditionally very authoritarian,” Xatzistefanou told IPS.

‘Debtocracy’ now has 1.5 million views on its website. It has been subtitled in many languages and screened in Britain, Spain, Portugal and Belgium and there are plans to show it in Latin America.

“The role of social media in Greece is somewhat different from that in the Arab Spring,” says Xatzistefanou. “Here we are not fighting for plain freedom of speech but against the domination of mainstream media on analysis and interpretation of reality. We are getting there.”

Excerpt:

If there’s one thing that net-savvy activists from Tunisia to Bahrain are aware of, it’s that the Internet isn’t always safe. From the constant threat of surveillance to the knowledge that posting the wrong picture on Facebook can get you arrested – or worse – activists have for a long time taken measures to mitigate risks, censoring themselves, using special tools like Tor, or staying off certain networks altogether.

Unfortunately, not only do some activists lack the necessary savvy, but even the best can fall victim to savvier regimes. Back in December, for example, just as the Tunisian uprising began to take root, activists within the country noticed that their Facebook accounts had been compromised. Some reported information missing from their accounts, leading Facebook to investigate and, in the end, re-route users to a secure HTTPS version of the site.

The incident may have prompted Facebook to make the decision to roll out HTTPS to all of its users. By the end of February, users of the site could opt in for increased security; but as two incidents from this week illustrate, their sense of security may have been premature. The latest in a series of events to take advantage of Facebooking dissidents, the two exploits demonstrate a seemingly perpetual cat-and-mouse game between users of social media living under authoritarian regimes and the regimes themselves.

Syrian Facebookers targeted

For months, the Syrian regime and its supporters have been devising and implementing new ways of targeting social media users who express favour toward the opposition, from flooding Twitter hashtags with unrelated links to hacking and defacing opposition sites. While various incidents of Facebook manipulation have been reported, none have been confirmed.

Today, the Information Warfare Monitor reports on a new attempt to mount an attack on pro-opposition Syrians. Though the perpetrators remain unknown, the attacks were launched on Twitter, targeting users of Facebook.

According to the report, the culprits tweeted a link in an attempt to lure followers to a video posted to Facebook, whereupon those clicking on the link would be redirected to a fake Facebook page. Then, if the user then logged in, their credentials would be captured and their account information compromised.

This type of attack, whether launched by the regime or third-party actors, is basic in scope but can be devastating to a user who hasn’t backed up his or her Facebook data (a feature made available in the Account Settings), and outright dangerous to an activist whose account contains private information or sensitive contacts. Still, this type of attack pales in comparison to one discovered this week in neighbouring Iran.

Iranian connection

In the wake of the Arab Spring and the development of tools like Firesheep, escalating risks have led to increased pressure on social media platforms to offer encrypted HTTPS connections to their sites, providing users with a safer, less vulnerable way of accessing their platforms.

In the wake of the aforementioned Tunisian attack, Facebook rolled out opt-in encryption services to its users, while Twitter is in the early stages of offering it by default (it’s already available as an opt-in service). Most webmail programmes offer secure browsing as well.

When a user visits such sites, they are relying upon Certificate Authorities (CAs), hundreds of companies that sign the certificates that supposedly guarantee secure browsing. But what happens if just one of these CAs is tricked into issuing a fraudulent certificate? That certificate can be used to compromise sites that people believe they are browsing securely.

On Monday, an Iranian Gmail user reported a warning from the Google Chrome browser that indicated the presence of a fake certificate. A statement from Google acknowledges that primarily Iranian users were affected, and that the fraudulent certificate was issued by a CA called DigiNotar nearly two months ago, on Jul. 10. While critics of the CA system have long feared that such an attack could be possible, this is the first time such an attack has been seen “in the wild”.

For the last two months, Iranians who tried to access encrypted Google websites, including Gmail, may have been vulnerable to surveillance, their user data (including passwords and any activity conducted while logged into a site) available to the attacker.

For its part, Google has released a statement reminding users to be vigilant about keeping software up-to-date and pay attention to browser warnings. Mozilla, which produces the Firefox browser, and Microsoft have communicated the situation to users as well.

Different methods, same purpose

Although the Iranian attack was significantly more sophisticated than that perpetrated against Syrian Facebook users, both serve the same ends: to grab hold of user data in an attempt by malicious actors to silence or endanger those with whom they disagree.

Syrian authorities have used the Facebook accounts of detainees, for example, to track down other activists. The same has occurred in Bahrain, while in Iran, deep packet inspection – used to snoop on email, VoIP calls, and other online activity – has been reported. Activists in all three countries have been arrested, jailed, and in some cases, tortured.

Critics of the encryption and CA systems have long focused on the threats to average users. The Electronic Frontier Foundation (where I am employed) has voiced concerns that such incidents may be widespread, noting that the CA system was created decades ago, “in an era when the biggest online security concern was thought to be protecting users from having their credit card numbers intercepted”.

These latest attacks shed light on just how serious the ramifications can be for users in countries like Iran and Syria, where authorities regularly use social media to silence dissenters. When a regime gains the capability to conduct surveillance on large swaths of users, it need not rely on traditional, cost-heavy methods of identifying and spying on individuals.

It is therefore imperative that the security community, and the Certificate Authorities in particular, become aware of the global implications of their technologies: there are lives at stake.

* Jillian York is director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco. She writes a regular column for Al Jazeera focusing on free expression and Internet freedom. She also writes for and is on the Board of Directors of Global Voices Online.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect IPS or Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

This column was published under an agreement with Al Jazeera.

By José Domingo Guariglia
NEW YORK, Aug 30 2011 (IPS)

The fight against corruption has taken centre stage in the government of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, and has led to the resignation or dismissal of several ministers over just a few months.

There are enough digital tools for citizens to participate in political decision-making, says Raquel Diniz. Credit: Bernardo Gutiérrez/Courtesy Raquel Diniz

Civil society groups in Brazil are using digital media to protest against corruption, which is so deeply rooted in politics and economics that it is costing this South American country 43 billion dollars a year, according to the latest report by the Federation of Industries of the State of São Paulo (FIESP), published in May 2010.

Over a few short days, a post on the Facebook social networking site convening a rally in Rio de Janeiro Sept. 20, under the slogan “Todos unidos contra a corrupção” (Everyone United against Corruption) has attracted positive responses from 13,130 people.

But merely protesting is not enough. Citizens also have a role to play in watching over public resources and denouncing cases of misappropriation of funds, said Raquel Diniz, a journalist, filmmaker, and creator of the Mapa Colaborativo da Corrupção do Brasil, an online collaborative map of corruption in Brazil, in this interview with IPS.

“My idea was for people to take some sort of action, that would lead them to realise the seriousness of the problem, and to fight for a country free of corruption,” she said in response to questions by email.

Her corruption map, which has been on-line since May, was inspired by maps designed in Spain by the NOLESVOTES (Don’t Vote For Them) movement, the map of People’s Party (PP) corruption, and the map used by the “Indignant” movement to plan protest camps at the Puerta del Sol in Madrid and in other Spanish cities, which led to the formation of the May 15 (15M) Movement.

Supporters of Diniz’s map site are determined to use it to deliver a message of rebuke to the ruling elite.

“Politicians haven’t really caught on to the idea; they are too far away, isolated in their shiny office blocks,” Diniz said. “Sooner or later they will have to understand that everything has changed. Those who govern must hand over some of their power so that society can be truly democratic.”

Map users can pinpoint the geographic location of cases of corruption that have been documented in the press, building up a collective memory that, in theory, will help citizens to access more information about politicians before voting for them in future elections.

Q: Why is it important to have a map of corruption in Brazil? A: It’s an opportunity for people to be informed about corruption cases, to participate in producing the map, in order to stimulate interest in the issue. It’s very important that people should get angry when they see the map. I think when people are mad, they begin to want to change things and to fight back against corruption.

Corruption in Brazil is extremely serious, but people are so accustomed to corruption scandals that they seldom take action to change the practice, which is so common among politicians, the police, and therefore society as a whole.

Q: There are similar tools in the region to report and map crime and violence. Where did you get the idea from? A: I went to live in Spain just as the 2008 economic crisis broke out. I saw the rise of many movements against the government, and the immense growth of communication via social networks. Then I found out about the NOLESVOTES Movement’s corruption map, and the map on corruption perpetrated by the PP, the most conservative party in Spain, posted by Leo Bassi (a well-known Spanish leftwing journalist) on his PPLeaks web page.

I came back to Brazil and kept in touch with the growth of the 15M Movement. When I came across a Google map people could use to set up a virtual encampment at the Puerta del Sol (in Madrid), I realised that the Arab world and Europe were living through a time of profound social transformation, whereas here in Brazil it was the reverse. The vast majority of Brazilians are happy with the country’s macroeconomic growth and turn their backs on social problems.

The same morning, an environmentalist couple who lived in the (northern) Amazon region were murdered, and that afternoon the lower chamber of Congress approved an amendment to the Forest Code, legalising the use of illegally deforested land which formerly had been protected reserves.

I was extremely angry that day. I felt I had to do something, and I created the map.

Q: What are the main results? A: The main result was coverage in the principal Brazilian newspapers, and people hearing about the map and helping to construct it. My idea was to prompt people to take some sort of action that would lead them to understand the seriousness of the problem and to fight for a country free from corruption.

As it is an open access site, I always recommend that every post should carry references to articles published in the press, so that the posted data have credibility.

Brazil has a great record of investigating corruption cases, but corrupt people hardly ever go to prison. Any who are convicted just pay a fine and are released, and then they stand as candidates in the next elections. Many of them are voted into office again and exercise power!

Q: In your view, is the internet an effective tool for citizens and government to communicate with each other? A: It could be very effective, because it’s a channel for mutual interaction and the sharing of information. There are enough digital tools in the web 2.0 world, many of them with open access, for citizens to be able to participate in political decision-making.

It would be very easy to institute participative democracy systems for making political decisions, but we are all only just getting to know this new way of interacting.

Politicians haven’t really caught on to the idea; they are too far away, isolated in their shiny office blocks. Sooner or later they will have to understand that everything has changed. Those who govern must hand over some of their power so that society can be truly democratic.

Q: Several studies have reported that Latin America is a leader in the use of social networks like Facebook or Twitter. Why do you think this is so? A: People in Latin America are more sociable than those on other continents; they like to get to know people. Also, society here is very hierarchical, so there are few mechanisms for the social base to participate in building and running the country. The mass media are controlled by the elite, and are dependent on political advertising. The social networks, in a way, are a substitute for traditional mass media.

Excerpt:

“I was walking down the street, talking on my cell phone, when a guy on a motorbike came by and grabbed the phone out of my hand. I ran after him but I couldn’t catch him. He had probably been following me.”

Crime map of Brazil. Red dots indicate most dangerous places. Credit: WikiCrimes

This message, from a person who had his cell phone stolen in the southern Brazilian city of São Paulo, was posted on WikiCrimes, a web site where citizens who have lost confidence in the effectiveness of police action can report crimes directly.

WikiCrimes in Brazil, and similar initiatives in Venezuela, Panama, Mexico, Argentina and Chile, provide interactive maps that people can use to anonymously report crimes, describe what happened and pinpoint the location. In this way, crime mapping identifies danger zones – crime hotspots – within a region with generally high crime rates, to enhance people’s awareness, preparedness and safety.

According to a report on Citizen Security and Human Rights, by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, in early 2010 Latin America was the region with the highest average murder rate in the world, 25.6 per 100,000 population. Young people aged 15-29 were the most frequent victims, with a murder rate of 68.9 per 100,000 people in this age group.

The crime maps seek to supplement the paucity of official crime reports at police stations, and to guide implementation of policies to fight crime, Vasco Furtado, a systems engineer who created WikiCrimes, told IPS.

“It’s very common nowadays to hear about someone who has been mugged, but who is not going to report it to the police because they are convinced nothing would be done. Surveys of victims of crime in Brazilian cities show that under-reporting in the most densely populated areas may be as high as 60 percent for some offences,” he said.

WikiCrimes receives crime reports from around the world, although most originate in Brazil.

In Venezuela, crime data maps can be accessed at the VicTEAMS and QuieroPaz sites.

VicTEAMS was created in 2009 in reaction to the thousands of hold-ups, kidnappings and murders committed in Venezuela, and especially in the capital, Caracas, considered the second most dangerous city in Latin America after Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, according to a study by the Mexican Citizens’ Council for Public Security and Criminal Justice (CCSP-JP).

An online Crime Map of Mexico City was created by the newspaper El Universal, and a Buenos Aires province “map of insecurity” was funded by Argentine businessman and centre-right lawmaker Francisco de Narváez.

Crime map sites have also been set up in Chile and Panama. The Chilean crime map distinguishes between official crime reports and online reports from citizens, and Mi Panamá Transparente (My Transparent Panama), created by a group of journalists and non-governmental organisations, widens the focus to include swindles and corruption.

The crime problem in Venezuela is exacerbated by the lack of official statistics, said Ángel Méndez, a consultant at Tendencias Digitales, a firm that carries out market research in the field of information technology.

“Venezuela is one of the most violent countries in Latin America, and unfortunately there are no official statistics to monitor the violence. Body counts from the morgues are published in the media every Monday, but there is no crime database available,” Méndez told IPS.

Citizens as agents of change

According to VicTEAMS, online maps are a useful tool towards reaching the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), a series of targets adopted in 2000 by the international community to drastically reduce poverty, hunger, inequality, illness, mortality and environmental degradation across the globe by 2015.

The team responsible for crafting the web site attended an international workshop on “Engaging Citizens in Development Management and Public Governance for the Achievement of the MDGs”, organised by the U.N. Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the government of the Spanish region of Catalonia in the regional capital, Barcelona, in June 2010.

The meeting produced the Barcelona Declaration on “The Critical Role of Public Service in Achieving the Millennium Development Goals“, stating that “citizens’ engagement has to be considered to accelerate the progress towards reaching the MDGs,” and governments should work alongside citizens to address social problems proactively.

Wider access to the internet in Latin American countries has been crucial to the rise of online tools like crime maps. Governments and NGOs in the region are promoting free or low-cost access to information and communication technologies for low-income sectors of the population.

A Brazilian government programme called Computers for Inclusion, and the Infocentres that provide access and computer literacy courses in Venezuela, are typical of such initiatives.

Crime maps and the problem of data accuracy

The interactive capability of crime maps and other online tools can hinder their effectiveness, due to incomplete or inaccurate crime reporting.

“At WikiCrimes we are concerned about false reporting. It is up to users to provide the system with information that boosts its credibility. Links can be added to videos, newspapers, photos or any other document that supports the informant’s credibility,” Furtado said.

On interactive crime maps, the incidents reported depend on the goodwill of citizens, but cooperation with government agencies can be decisive.

“The authorities do not view WikiCrimes as their ally, because it challenges the status quo. They are afraid of being pressured by society,” said Furtado.

Academics like Iria Puyosa, an expert on social networking and social capital, say “the problem of violent crime in Latin America will not be solved by online maps,” which are useful to a limited extent, for fighting invisibility and the absence of information, she told IPS.

The impact of social networks

The connections between the worldwide web and other innovative technology, like cell phones, favour online crime reporting. According to information from Tendencias Digitales, 27 percent of internet access is dialled up by mobile phone in countries like Venezuela, and a large proportion of citizens use smart phones to report crimes or traffic conditions, via Twitter.

In fact, Latin America is the world’s second region for users of social networks like Facebook and Twitter as a proportion of the population, after North America, according to SocialTimes, an information source on social media.

The July 2011 Web 2.0 Ranking produced by Tendencias Digitales named Chile, Brazil and Venezuela as the top three Latin American countries for social media use.

“We are more inclined to sharing and paying attention to what people are saying. For instance, Facebook penetration, measured as a percentage of the population, is 26 percent in Latin America compared to 20 percent worldwide. Performing the same calculation for Twitter, we find its penetration in Venezuela is eight percent, compared to three percent for Latin America and the rest of the world,” said Méndez, quoting figures from the study.

Twitter accounts like @SINviolenciaMX (violence-free Mexico) foster the development of a user network where people can both post and receive information about crime zones or traffic jams.

However, Puyosa stressed that messages from smart phones or social networks cannot be regarded as “real” crime reports.

“Effective denunciation of a crime, with the aim of evoking a law enforcement response, must be made formally to the police. Victims may vent their feelings of frustration via Twitter or Facebook, but these are not effective channels for reporting crime,” she said.

* Follow José Domingo on Twitter @jdguariglia.

By Milagros Salazar
TURRIALBA, Costa Rica, Aug 17 2011 (IPS)

In Central America the temperature is rising and forests are taking longer to grow, while farther south, the Amazon rainforests have yet to feel the effects of global warming. This is just one example of how climate change is manifested differently in different parts of the region.

Colorful fall foliage of lenga trees (Nothofagus pumilio) in Cerro Catedral, Argentina. Credit: Fernando López-Anido - Creative Commons License

The network was founded at a meeting held Aug. 5 in the headquarters of the Tropical Agricultural Research and Higher Education Centre (CATIE) in Turrialba, Costa Rica, two hours by bus from the capital, San José.

Not all forest ecosystems in Latin America and the Caribbean are feeling or will feel the effects of global warming in the same way, according to the first findings of studies conducted by the participating scientists, before founding the network, as part of the Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Sustainable Forestry Management in Ibero-America (MIA) Project.

These studies, conducted between 2008 and 2011, were supported by the Spanish National Institute for Agricultural and Food Research and Technology (INIA), the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), and CATIE. The findings were presented a few days before the first meeting of the new Network on Climate Change Adaption and Ecosystems as Adaptation Strategies (RACC).

A group of researchers from Chile and Argentina determined that due to the effects of climate change, forests of lenga trees (Nothofagus pumilio) in the southern Patagonian regions of both countries will grow and expand, while forests of other species of the Nothofagus genus, located further north, will decrease in size.

“In a climate change scenario, there are also forests that will benefit,” University of Chile researcher Sergio Donoso, president of the Association of Forestry Engineers for Native Forests, told Tierramérica.

Communities living near these forests, particularly in the northern part of the area studied, drink water provided by the forest ecosystem and also benefit from tourism. As a result, the decrease in forests will affect their lives.

In the meantime, in the Patagonian regions where forests of lenga – also known as lenga beech and South American beech – predominate, local communities harvest the trees, which represent an important source of income. These are two sides of the same coin which should be shared among the scientific community, the researchers believe.

The scientists who currently form part of the network are from governmental, academic and non-governmental institutions in six countries of Latin America and the Caribbean: Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama.

“We want to contribute to the development of strategies for forest ecosystem management so that even under climate change conditions, they can continue to play their role in regulation of the water cycle and help reduce the risk of extreme climate events like droughts, floods and high winds,” Dutch forestry engineer Bastiaan Louman, coordinator of the CATIE climate change programme, told Tierramérica.

Louman is also coordinating RACC, and hopes that other scientists in the region will join in the network’s efforts.

As an initial step, researchers from Ecuador, Nicaragua and Peru were invited to attend the network’s founding meeting in Turrialba.

“This is the first time that a scientific network on climate change adaptation has been formed in the region. It is very important because it addresses an urgent problem that can have an impact on people’s means of survival,” stressed Louman.

The network will promote training of its members and facilitate the exchange of experiences and information among the different countries involved to foster joint actions and deepen understanding of the differentiated impacts of climate change in the region.

“We need to create synergy in the quality and quantity of research on adaptation, but also effectively disseminate and communicate the findings to society in general and decision makers,” added Donoso.

Through another MIA research project, Costa Rican researcher Carlos Navarro of CATIE reached the conclusion that mahogany trees (of the Meliaceae family) still have the capacity to adapt to global warming in some areas of Colombia, Panama and Costa Rica, despite the fact that they are currently endangered and their coveted wood sells for 1,700 dollars a cubic meter.

Navarro, who has devoted 25 years of his life to studying the mahogany tree, maintains that some species are more adaptable than others, which points to the need to collect and preserve their seeds, as well as to transplant specimens in areas where they are growing scarce.

This is why, he told Tierramérica, the second phase of the project will focus on researching how mahogany trees can adapt to new climate conditions when they are planted in areas far from where they originated.

The network’s research can contribute to the implementation of new adaptation policies by the region’s authorities, said Louman, who also coordinated the MIA projects.

One way of raising the awareness of the authorities in order to spur them to take action is by highlighting the potential threats. This was the approach taken by researchers Efraín Leguía, of the Peruvian branch of the World Agroforestry Centre, and Jorge Grijalva, who heads up the agroforestry programme at the National Agricultural Research Institute of Ecuador.

Using MaxEnt (short for Maximum Entropy) habitat modeling software to predict the future distribution of species of flora and fauna, the researchers determined that between 2020 and 2050, climate change effects will impact on tree species and agricultural crops that play an important role in terms of both consumption and trade for communities in the Aguaytía river basin, located in the Amazon region of Ucayali in central-eastern Peru, and the Chimborazo river basin, an Andean region in central Ecuador.

In the case of Peru, by 2050, areas suited to the growth of the bolaina (Guazuma crinita), a softwood tree used in house construction, will have diminished by eight percent, according to climate change projections. The researchers based their estimates on measurements of the areas covered by this tree species between 1950 and 2000.

In Ecuador, the research focused on potatoes, the main source of calories in the diets of peasant families. According to Grijalva’s findings, within 25 to 50 years, potato crop yields will drastically decrease and their contribution to the caloric intake of local populations will fall by 50 percent.

The network’s goal is to underscore the importance of these scientific findings by linking them with the potential social impacts, explained Louman.

* The writer is an IPS correspondent. This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

By IPS Correspondents
BEIJING, Aug 4 2011 (IPS)

China’s rapidly growing legion of microbloggers is proving a worthy foe against ongoing government efforts to monitor, influence and censor information on the country’s vast Internet. Government efforts have failed to curb an outpouring of anger and grief in the wake of the recent Wenzhou train disaster.

Microblogs, called “weibos” in China, are increasingly popular sources of information here and a vital forum for public debate. Like Twitter and Facebook – both of which are blocked in China – the services limit the length of messages, and fellow users can re-send and comment on postings. Messages can range from the mundane to the humourous and, increasingly, to the political.

China has more than half a billion Internet users, and more than half of them have microblog accounts. Two companies dominate the field: Sina Holdings Ltd., with its Sina Weibo service, has 140 million users; and Tencent Inc., which counts more than 200 million members. Sina’s users tend to be a higher-income, better-educated group, while Tencent’s are generally younger.

Several government bodies and state-owned corporations have microblog accounts – even the Communist Party organ People’s Daily maintains a weibo. The vast majority of users, however, are ordinary Chinese looking for a forum to socialise and exchange information – even on what are often considered sensitive topics in China.

“An increasing number of people express their opinions about people’s well-being, justice and corruption (on microblogs),” Jiang Shenghong, a researcher at the Tianjin Academy of Social Sciences tells IPS. “Social networking services, especially weibos, have become a very important method for people to adopt and express their opinions. They can pass on information quickly, timely and relatively freely.”

Microblogs influence on the government is becoming increasingly clear, especially since the Wenzhou accident. Sensitive topics often discussed on China’s microblogs include land expropriation, housing demolition, and government corruption. But it was the Wenzhou disaster that has demonstrated just how powerful microblogs – and by extension the netizens who use them – have become.

On Jul. 23, two high-speed trains collided near Wenzhou city, in Zhejiang province, killing 40 people and injuring nearly 200. The accident, and the government’s handling of it, sparked an outpouring of grief and rage among many ordinary Chinese. Particularly galling to netizens were images of part of the wreck being buried before a full investigation could be carried out.

Within five days, 26 million messages about the tragedy had been posted on China’s major microblog services, many questioning the government’s response. Some posted messages wondering whether the government was sacrificing peoples’ lives for economic growth.

Initially, state-owned media focused on stories of rescued babies and only later reported on the public’s outage. This week the government ordered media outlets to drop all coverage of the train disaster that didn’t come from Xinhua News Agency, the government newswire. Some newspapers, influenced by weibo activity, have refused the directive.

The government still closely monitors discussions on weibos and has covertly deployed a small army of web commentators to trumpet the party line. These web commentators operate anonymously and promote politically correct arguments. Many of them do it for money, according to recent international media reports, infiltrating blogs, news sites and chat rooms.

According to media reports, these spin doctors are mostly students looking for extra cash or better chances for obtaining party membership. Others are civil servants, state employees or retirees doing what they see as their patriotic duty. They number in the tens of thousands, according to recent news stories. Last year, Global Times, a government-run newspaper, reported that Gansu province was trying to recruit 650 full-time web commentators to “guide public opinion on controversial issues.” The government sometimes overtly censors information, deleting sensitive comments or barring controversial commentators.

The battle over the flow of information has not deterred netizens, however. In the wake of the Wenzhou accident, the flood of messages overwhelmed censors, which allowed most of the messages to flow freely onto the Internet. The messages spread too fast for effective monitoring, and the government risked an even larger backlash by deleting messages en-masse. Many posts that were deleted have lived on thanks to screenshots.

Pressure from microbloggers forced Wenzhou officials to withdraw and apologise for a directive that local lawyers not accept cases from families and victims without government permission. And after weibo users accused the local government of covering up the accident, the buried train car was unearthed for analysis.

Hu Yong, an associate professor at Peking University’s School of Journalism and Communications, say weibos can serve as an effective tool for ordinary people to communicate with the government.

“The increasing popularity of social media services, like weibos, is a very good thing in China, because there are few chances for common people to talk to officials directly,” Hu tells IPS. “Weibos give them the opportunity to criticise the government’s lack of action, and they can pass on information the moment something happens, all of which will force the government to handle the situation.”

But, Hu adds, “the central government controls China’s Internet. You should know that. The public cannot say whatever they want.”

Excerpt:

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jul 27 2011 (IPS)

The use of information technology in energy planning can contribute not only to developing renewable energy sources but also to moving towards a green economy.

Wind farm in Oaxaca, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

“It’s a sophisticated tool but at the same time user-friendly and functional,” Charles Heaps, LEAP developer and director of the U.S. branch of SEI, told Tierramérica. For example, he explained, if a government wants the answer to a specific question, such as the carbon footprint of a generator, the software gives rapid responses concerning a series of related questions, such as the location, capacity, and potential options for the resources to be used.

Distributed free of charge to government agencies, academics and non-governmental organisations in the developing world, LEAP has been adopted by hundreds of users, including consulting companies and energy utilities, in more than 150 countries worldwide.

LEAP is becoming the de facto standard for countries undertaking integrated energy resource planning and greenhouse gas mitigation assessments. More than 85 countries have chosen to use the software as part of their commitment to report to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

The RETScreen Clean Energy Project Analysis Software was created in 1996 by Natural Resources Canada – a Canadian government agency – and can be used to evaluate the energy production and savings, costs, emission reductions, financial viability and risk for various types of renewable-energy and energy-efficient technologies (known as RETs).

The software “can be used to eliminate the barriers frequently associated with clean energy projects,” RETScreen engineer Kevin Bourque told Tierramérica.

“The programme enables a rapid assessment of the feasibility of these projects, given the decision-making tools for evaluating various options and focusing on the most viable,” he said.

The 2009 World Bank-sponsored report “México: Estudio sobre la disminución de emisiones de carbono” (Mexico: Carbon Emissions Reduction Study) was based on LEAP, as was “Energy Consumption, Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Mitigation Options for Chile, 2007-2030”, a study published in 2009 by the University of Chile’s Environmental Management and Economics Programme.

The Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment of Honduras designed an energy policy extending to 2030 which was modeled using LEAP.

RETScreen includes product, project, hydrology and climate databases, and has been adopted by more than 300,000 users in 222 countries and territories, with 1,000 new users a week. It is used in 300 universities, including 19 in Latin America, and has been translated into 36 languages.

In 2010, the software had 2,661 users in Mexico, which ranked 19th among countries where RETScreen is most frequently employed. For instance, four students from Humboldt State University in the United States used it to assess the viability of building a mini hydroelectric dam in a community near the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

For long-term planning, the Federal Electricity Commission of Mexico uses the MARKAL (Market Allocation) model, an analytical tool developed by the International Energy Agency.

But Mexico has a long way to go when it comes to clean energy: 93 percent of the country’s energy is still generated from fossil fuels, with wind, solar, steam, hydro and nuclear power accounting for the remainder.

According to the Environment Ministry, Mexico’s emissions of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, total 709 million tons a year. Most of these emissions are produced by the generation and consumption of energy. Tools like LEAP and RETScreen can help jump-start the green economy, based on income-generating activities that contribute to the well-being of humans without harming the environment, which could create 500,000 jobs in Mexico, according to the global environmental watchdog Greenpeace.

“Modeling can help build the credibility of alternative energy strategies,” while answering questions about how much these options cost and how they can be financed, noted Heaps.

LEAP, for example, can be used to measure energy consumption and production as well as resource extraction in all sectors of the economy.

RETScreen International is developing an energy management programme with the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership (REEEP) and the Langley Research Center, run by the U.S. space agency NASA.

Meanwhile, the SEI is preparing a global energy and climate model of 15 regions around the world in order to explore the implications of moving towards a green economy and potential mitigation measures, which will be presented at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Río+20) taking place June 2012 in Brazil.

*This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Excerpt:

Following a major rally involving tens of thousands of protesters calling for electoral reforms in Malaysia, someone set up a Facebook page calling for Prime Minister Najib Razak to step down. Within ten days, the number of people who said they “like” the page crossed 200,000.

The rally and the subsequent backlash on social media are a sign of the anger that has been building up among a segment of the population that Najib may have overlooked at his peril: the urban middle class.

And crucially, the response has come from across Malaysia’s ethnic spectrum.

Malaysia is a multiracial country with a relatively young population. Around 70 percent of Malaysians live in urban centres, with rapidly improving Internet connections.

Malays represent around 60 percent of the population, with Chinese and Indians comprising most of the rest. The main political parties have been divided along racial lines since independence. But many see such a system as being unsustainable.

Najib’s handling of the Bersih (meaning ‘clean’ in Malay language) rally appeared to have been driven by groups which have sought a hard-line approach in defending the rights of the Malay majority. And if the online backlash against the government is anything to go by, some political pundits say it could erode the gains Najib made since coming to power in 2009.

“‘Middle’ Malaysia is where the votes are. It’s very mixed and multi-racial,” says Karim Raslan, a regional political analyst. “As a consequence (the government) needs to be more inclusive and engaging. At the moment they are merely shrill and exclusive.”

Many observers say that the government overreacted to the Jul. 9 rally, organised by a loose coalition of NGOs under the Bersih umbrella. Police arrested nearly 1,700 protesters on the day, though most were soon released.

TV footage on Al Jazeera English showed officers beating and kicking several demonstrators as they tried to stage a peaceful sit-down in the street, even after they were hit by tear gas and sprayed with irritant-laced water.

“It showed the insecurities of the government, how defensive they were,” says Tricia Yeoh, a policy analyst. “But more people now see the cracks within the system.”

In the aftermath of the rally, the crackdown has continued. The government still maintains that the yellow “Bersih” t-shirts are illegal; and police arrested some associates of an opposition member of parliament for wearing the t-shirts in their hotel rooms. In addition, the police continue to hold six members of the Malaysian socialist party for promoting the march.

Many Malaysians saw the government’s attempts to demonise Bersih’s organisers as unnecessary and regressive. The government says the police were “greatly restrained” in controlling what it saw as a threat to public order.

The hounding of Bersih organisers has broadened the variety of voices unhappy with the government’s handling of the event. And it has even made those who might have described themselves as “apolitical” speak out.

Najib must hold the next general election by April 2013. Many political pundits had been speculating they could be called as early as this year. In the wake of the Bersih rally, most of those analysts now say plans to hold early elections will likely be shelved.

The last elections in 2008 were held four months after the first Bersih rally. The result saw the ruling National Front coalition losing its two-thirds parliamentary majority for the first time since independence in 1957, and opposition parties winning control of four states.

The timing of the next election will be crucial for Najib and the governing party. Memories of Jul. 9 are likely to be kept alive among a newly-invigorated segment of online chattering classes. If Najib calls for polls too soon he risks the wrath of many who say they are disgusted with the government’s handling of the rally. Leave it too late and the economy could take a turn for the worse.

Najib had been doing reasonably well before the latest crackdown happened. Due to a raft of ambitious economic reforms his approval ratings rose from 45 percent to 69 percent in February, according to independent outfit Merdeka Centre. .

But in concentrating on the economy, Najib took his gaze off long-simmering political and social problems, such as Perkasa, a far-right lobby group which has played on the insecurities of some Malays who feel they still need the help of decades-old affirmative action programmes.

Social media has played a big role in slowly eroding racial barriers. It has allowed Malaysians to express themselves – often vociferously – for the first time. And it has become an important, alternative news source to government-controlled mainstream media.

Political analysts say Najib’s handling of the demonstration showed he is out of step with the sentiment of many Malaysians, in particular, a growing population of young, internet-savvy people who are less afraid to express themselves than their forebears.

“In the 21st century everybody has a mind and wants to express themselves. People were saying we are the boss, we elected you. But this was lost on the government,” says Jahabar Sadiq, chief executive officer of the news portal ‘Malaysian Insider’.

“Peter”, who doesn’t want to be identified by his full name, says he was inspired by video and photos of a frail, elderly lady at the rally who was defiant in the face of tear gas and water cannon. So he set up the Facebook page called Aunty Bersih.

“I’m just an ordinary guy,” he says. “I hadn’t registered as a voter. But I will now,” says Peter in a posting.

By Claudia Ciobanu
PRAGUE, Jul 23 2011 (IPS)

For the past nine weeks, Belarusians have been getting out in the hundreds into the main squares of big and small cities across the country on Wednesdays at seven in the evening. They clap, or let their mobiles ring all at once. The ‘Revolution through Social Networks- movement’ started by five students, and growing on the Russian equivalent of Facebook, Vkontakte, is posing a new threat to the Lukashenko regime.

“This is not a movement of the traditional Belarusian opposition: the participants are people who were never involved in opposition actions and never protested before,” Mikita Krasnou, one of the five founders of the movement, told IPS. “People in Belarus were looking for new organisers, for new representatives.

“The traditional opposition is also interested in playing a role in this movement, and this has caused them to become more united,” adds Krasnou.

The tactics of the group have confused the authorities. On Independence Day parade Jul. 3, the police announced strict restrictions on clapping: you could only applaud the parade if you were a veteran or an ex-serviceman. Otherwise, you would risk being arrested.

The authorities have also been placing limitations on the Internet: more than 40 percent of Belarusians have access to the Internet, but those using it from work, if this is for a state company, cannot access independent sites.

Since last year, those wanting to use Internet cafes need to present their passports. And, from this June, all Belarusian websites are forced to use the national domain, ‘.by’, making them easier to control. All Internet services are from the state provider, and the connection is both expensive and of low quality. More recently, access to Vkontakte has been blocked on Wednesdays.

But the KGB (security services) has employed more brutal repression tactics against the online activists: on Jul. 3, many were arrested on the spot; others, whose mobile phones were tracked down to have been used in the main squares at the time of the actions, have been brought in for interrogation.

Getting arrested in Belarus is no longer unusual. Many opponents of President Alexander Lukashenko have been arrested at least once; since the clapping protests began, around 1,500 people have been detained. Some are arrested for a few days, others receive year-long sentences.

“Fifteen years ago, if you belonged to the opposition, you were either a politician or a fighter, but now you just have to be a fighter,” Aliaksey Shydlovski, one of the first political prisoners of post- independence Belarus and co-founder of Young Front and Bizon movements, tells IPS.

Shydlovki is a revolutionary from the previous wave. In exile in Prague for the past two years he says, “people getting out on the streets today in Belarus are braver than us, especially the women. The regime has gotten more insecure and hence tougher.”

The insecurity of the regime stems largely from the economic crisis gripping the country since last year, after Russia spiked gas prices at the end of 2009-2010. This year, the Belarusian currency has been devalued by over 50 percent; prices for basic goods and gas have increased, and people are hoarding staples and other products. Having been shunned by the International Monetary Fund, Belarus has instead taken a 3 billion dollar stabilisation loan from the Russian-controlled Eurasian Economic Community.

The conditions for this loan involve privatisation of state assets. Beltransgaz, the national natural gas and infrastructure company, already half owned by Russian state monopoly Gazprom, could be sold entirely to the Russians, who want to save transit fees for their exports to the West currently cashed in by Belarus. About a fifth of Russian gas used in Europe comes through Belarus.

“What Russia is now doing is using economic sanctions to weaken Lukashenko and get control of the Belarusian economy for Russian oligarchs,” says Raman Kavalchuk, another opposition leader from the Young Front generation.

“Lukashenko will fall over the next years,” Kavalchuk tells IPS. “It will definitely take more than online mobilisation, it will take trade unions, independent initiatives, seeing tens of thousands in the streets. But this can slowly happen – most Belarusians are not going to accept not being able to eat meat any more because of prohibitive price increases.”

The mood among opposition leaders seems to be one of preparation for the post-Lukashenko era. Ales Michalevic, a politician currently in exile in the Czech Republic after a two-month stunt in jail following his participating in the December presidential elections, is honest about his current campaigning. A pragmatic type, Michalevic says he is now reaching out to lawyers, bureaucrats and even military and police in Belarus: garnering their trust in the opposition is strategic.

According to Michalevic, while the West could help by clearly calling for the end to politically motivated prison sentences, the promise of an IMF loan, no matter its size, can make little difference in Belarus, as the whole economy is shattered. “Only massive sale of state assets to Russia can make a difference, and the crucial issue for the opposition is how much will be sold by Lukashenko and how much will still be left in the hands of the Belarusian people,” he tells IPS.

Selling state assets to Russia will weaken Lukashenko’s grip on power. But, without it, he has no way out of the economic crisis that is turning the most sympathetic sectors of the population – those appreciating the economic stability offered in the past by the regime – against him. There seems to be little room for manoeuvre for the dictator, and this is showing.

“The three most important political events this year have been the revelation of KGB torture of political prisoners, the Stop Petrol protests of motorists against gas price hikes (which are nominally a protest against higher gas prices but really an anti-Lukashenko action), and the Revolution through Social Networks,” says Michalevic. “All three events were made by the opposition, with the government merely taking a reactive stance, and committing many mistakes while at it.”

“We have different means to bring Lukashenko down,” says Krasnou. “First, we tried to do these actions by the law, not giving any excuse to the regime to arrest and beat us. Now that we have many supporters and active people who are communicating to us via social networks that they are ready to get together and solve problems, we will try to move from mass support to organised groups that are ready to work all the time.”

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By Mitch Moxley
BEIJING, Jul 21 2011 (IPS)

Despite new government regulations, China, for decades the dumping ground for the world’s electronic waste, still struggles to treat and process millions of tonnes of e-waste, prompting health and environmental concerns.

China, where sales of electronic devices are surging, generates as much as 2.3 million tonnes of electronic waste domestically each year, according to a report last year by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP). That’s second only to the United States, which produces three million tonnes annually. Much of that waste ends up in China, where imports of e-waste are banned but largely tolerated.

Despite improvements to treatment facilities in recent years, China still lacks large numbers of high- tech recycling facilities and relies instead on environmentally damaging methods of disposal. Some e- waste is burned and large amounts of hazardous material are abandoned without treatment, according to a report by China Environment News.

“China still hasn’t established a proper e-waste management and recycling system,” Peng Ping’an, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences’ Guangzhou Institute of Geochemistry tells IPS. “Large quantities of e-waste are buried directly or dismantled by small, unlicensed plants with bare hands.”

The waste keeps piling up. Roughly 3.5 million tons of electronic waste is expected to be produced in 2011, according to a report by China Construction News, under the Ministry of Housing and Urban- Rural Development.

The UN report said that by 2020, e-waste from old computers is expected jump by 400 percent from 2007 levels in China, while discarded mobile phones will be seven times higher.

The government has begun to tackle the issue. On Jan. 1, 2011, the State Council issued new regulations to deal with the recovery and disposal of electronic waste. Under the new regulations the government agreed to establish a treatment fund for e-waste, which will be used to grant subsidies for the recovery and disposal of electronic products.

But legislation covering the treatment, disposal and recycling of e-waste is still in its infancy, and the current laws remain inadequate, Peng tells IPS. As a result, e-waste treatment remains profit-driven, scattered and disorganised.

There are about 100 companies and institutes engaged in e-waste recovery and disposal in China. They suffer from a lack of policy support and inefficient treatment facilities, Peng says.

Last year’s UN report called on developing countries to improve recycling facilities. Boosting developing countries’ e-waste recycling programmes can have the added benefit of creating jobs, cutting greenhouse gas emissions and recovering a wide range of valuable metals, including silver, gold, palladium, copper and indium, the report said.

There have been some successes. In Tianjin, a coastal city near Beijing, the municipal environmental bureau estimated that around four million television sets, refrigerators, computers, washing machines and air conditioners were scrapped in 2010, making up 38,000 tons of electronic waste, according to People’s Daily.

About 90 percent of that waste reached private businesses for recycling. And there is room for much more. Green Angel, a recycling centre under the auspices of the Tianjin government recycled 70,000 household appliances last year, well short of its treatment capacity of 200,000 units a year.

Improper handling of e-waste can impact human health and the environment. Heavy metals, including lead, tin and barium, can contaminate underground and surface water, and electrical wires are sometimes burnt in open air in order to get to the copper inside, spreading carcinogens into the air.

Foreign countries began dumping e-waste on China in the 1990s, creating both opportunities and problems. While profits were to be made from handling e-waste, China lacked regulations and adequate treatment facilities. Toxic substances were discharged directly into the soil and water without proper treatment.

One town, Guiyu, in southern China’s Guangdong province, is home to the world’s highest recorded levels of dioxin – environmental pollutants that threaten human health – which are released into the air by burning plastics and circuit boards to extract metals, according to a 2007 report by the China Academy of Sciences.

The government has tried to bolster the e-waste recycling industry by offering incentives to people to trade in old appliances for new ones. People can sell old products to home appliance stores such as Gome and Dazhong, which go on to sell them to treatment centres at a discount.

Some people take advantage of this system, however, buying cheap appliances from unlicensed plants that have already “treated” them by removing important components such as copper, glass and gold. Once these appliances reach legitimate treatment centres, they are worthless.

“In meetings we’ve had with our competitors, we’ve found they all have the same problem,” Lou Yi, who operates Taiding (Tianjin) Environmentally Friendly Science and Technology Corp., an e-waste recycling company, tells IPS.

Still, the trade-in scheme is essential to the survival of companies like Lou’s. “We will go bankrupt if the central government abolishes the policy.”

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By Danilo Valladares
GUATEMALA CITY, Jul 20 2011 (IPS)

If you use the internet, you will have come across CAPTCHA, a test to determine whether the computer user is human or a machine. What you may not know is that one of its inventors, mathematician Luis von Ahn, comes from one of the poorest countries in Latin America, Guatemala.

'Crowdsourcing' expert Luis von Ahn. Credit: Susan028 - Creative Commons licence

The ideas of Von Ahn, who was 21 when CAPTCHA was invented and is now 31, are aimed at making the internet a tool that everyone can contribute to building, and that is accessible to everyone.

One example is reCAPTCHA, a project he sold to Google in 2009. It is an extension of the CAPTCHA test that, at the same time, helps digitise books for use online. This method is being used to digitise 2.5 million printed books a year. Every time you decipher a reCAPTCHA, a word or phrase of a printed work is digitised.

Along the same principles, Duolingo is a system that will allow internet users to learn languages for free while helping to translate the web’s contents. This will overcome the language barrier that prevents sharing knowledge on the internet, and the limits of computers, which are unable to translate languages accurately.

Von Ahn has been shaping mass collaboration on the web since before the term “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006. That year, he won the MacArthur Fellowhip, nicknamed the “genius grant”, which is awarded to U.S. citizens or residents who “show exceptional merit and promise.” In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine in Spanish named him the most influential intellectual in Ibero-America (Latin America, Spain and Portugal).

After Duolingo, Von Ahn, who is now a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, would like to “fight crime in Guatemala,” a problem that stands in the way of a focus on education, he told IPS in an email interview.

Q: Apart from producing tools that are useful for humankind, you are concerned about not wasting time. A: The time we spend doing things on the internet is enormous, and often we can make more use of it. This is what I have devoted myself to doing: finding ways of re-using, or making the most of, that time. In the United States, I believe people spend an average of three hours a day on social networks or YouTube.

Q: Your latest project, Duolingo, like reCAPTCHA also maximises time use, basically killing two birds with one stone. A: In Duolingo we first thought about how to get people to translate the internet into every language. Then the question was: How can we get people to translate the whole of the internet for free?

That was when we hit upon the idea that we could kill two birds with one stone, by transforming the translation into something people want to do, like learning other languages. Nowadays, one billion people are learning other languages.

What we are doing is providing a free language learning service, but at the same time people are translating part of the internet. So they are translating as they learn.

Hundreds of millions of people are excluded from enormous parts of the internet’s contents. Wikipedia in Spanish has only 20 percent of the contents in English. So we are excluding 500 million (Spanish-speaking) people from 80 percent of Wikipedia’s content.

The Duolingo project is nearly complete. We are just months away from launching it, and we will begin with translations into English, French, German and Spanish.

Q: You have used crowdsourcing as the basis of your initiatives. What potential does this method have to conceive solutions to technological or educational problems in poor regions? A: I would like to use it to help places like Latin America, and that is the reason I am working on Duolingo. With it, we will make all the contents of the internet accessible to everyone, anywhere in the world.

Q: Central America has very serious problems with poverty. Are you interested in making a contribution in this respect? A: I would love to. The main problem is that many of the things we do are based on the internet, and almost by definition, very poor people do not have access to the web. I think the first problem we will tackle will be crime. I don’t know how we will do it, but that is the kind of thing I would like to do after Duolingo.

Q: But why crime? Were you a victim of crime in Guatemala? A: No, fortunately I wasn’t. But I think I am the only person I know in Guatemala who has never been mugged or assaulted. And this happens not just in Guatemala, but in many parts of Latin America. It is something that is hampering our growth.

If we weren’t so worried about crime, perhaps we could be concerned about our education or something like that, but there is so much concern about crime that it simply has to be resolved.

Q: How do you see yourself contributing? A: The use of social networks and cell phones really helped the revolutions in the Arab world. And I believe that in the same way, it is possible for them to help address things like crime in Latin America, although I don’t know exactly how.

The number of criminals in Guatemala cannot possibly be greater than 50,000. But that number of people is terrorising 13 million people, and it would be good to find a way for those 13 million people to prevail.

Q: Returning to the issue of poverty, do you think technology has advanced so much that the gap for the most dispossessed is insurmountable? A: I hope not. My dream is that technology will help poor populations to improve their lot.

Q: Is there any way of making technology more accessible to the poor? A: Some day it will be possible. Technology is growing cheaper by the day. The number of people using the internet is growing, and there are a number of initiatives to make it accessible to the poor, although none of them has worked very well.

One of the ways it might be achieved is through mobile phones, which are used by many more people than the internet. A lot of people have these phones, and eventually we are going to be able to connect them to the internet practically for free, I hope within the next five years.

At that point we will be able to reach more of the poor population. That could have an incredible impact on education. The proportion of the world population using the internet is still less than 30 percent, and the other 70 percent is made up of the poor.

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By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jul 6 2011 (IPS)

“I want to meet @salvatore300 and @elainediaz2003” was a comment overheard at #TwittHab, the first meeting in Cuba of social network users. After years of being connected only via the web, the internet is now being used to facilitate real-world contact between citizens of this socialist island nation.

“Social encounters and meetings can be organised spontaneously, without the tutelage of the Cuban institutions. They just take place, and nothing bad happens: there is no need to fear,” Rogelio M. Díaz, the author of the blog Bubusopia and one of the participants at an unusual “Twitterfest” in Cuba that kicked off Jul. 1, told IPS.

Political tensions between the Cuban government and its historic enemy, the United States, and continuing frictions with groups of political dissidents, who also use blogs and social networks to express their views, create a complex climate for initiatives of this kind.

However, on the afternoon of Jul. 1, on the corner of 23rd and 12th Streets in downtown Havana, some 35 faces, mostly young but some not so young, came out “from behind the @,” as one of the slogans for the meeting invited Cuban Twitterers to do.

Convened by Leunam Rodríguez, the administrator of the Radio Cubana portal, the meeting was one of three that took place the same afternoon in the Cuban capital. It inspired reactions in the eastern province of Holguín, and gave rise to several more meetings in cultural centres and nightspots in Havana, “to carry on talking and getting to know each other,” over the whole weekend, as one participant told IPS.

The original idea for #TwitterHab arose in mid-June and spread swiftly through blogs and social networks like Twitter and Facebook. The goal of the “real life, friendly” get-together was to have an opportunity to get to know the faces, people and thoughts behind on-line identities such as @alondraM (“larkM”) and @cuba1erplano (“Cuba Foreground”).

Without a specific agenda and just for the sake of sharing, the creativity of university students, journalists, bloggers and professionals in the computing world gave rise to posters and name tags combining Twitter visualisations with Cuban symbols such as the trogon (tocororo), the national bird.

“Come out from behind the @ now!” and “I want to get to know you” were the invitations that circulated in cyberspace. But some people unconnected with the organisation, as well as some mass media outside Cuba, put a political interpretation on the friendly social meeting’s aims, according to observers.

“It was actually only a group of young people who wanted to meet and get to know each other. It was not even close to being political,” blogger and psychologist Sandra Álvarez, whose Twitter name is @negracubana” (“Afro-Cuban woman”) and who attended the meeting at 23rd and 12th Streets, told IPS.

According to Elaine Díaz, author of the blog La Polémica Digital (Digital Controversy), needless politicisation “distorts the original goals of the initiative.” The day before #TwittHab, Leunam Rodríguez announced a change of venue, to the Cuba Pavilion in the central Havana neighbourhood of Vedado.

The Asociación Hermanos Saíz, a non-governmental cultural organisation for young artists, which has its headquarters in the pavilion, offered computers with internet access for the event. The main organiser, Rodríguez, with members of the blog La Joven Cuba (Young Cuba) and representatives of the self-styled alternative Cuban blogosphere, showed up there.

Hours later, some of the people who had been at either of the two locations went to a Havana park by the Amadeo Roldán theatre, and together addressed the issue of communication and the aspirations for better connectivity on a mass scale in the country, which could be possible thanks to a fibre optic cable that has been laid with Venezuelan support.

A 2010 nationwide survey of 38,000 households by the National Statistics Office (ONE) found that only 2.9 percent of respondents said they had surfed the internet in 2009. Of those, 59.9 percent used the internet from their educational centre, 7.4 percent from their workplace, and 5.9 percent at home.

At the park, nearly 100 people who had earlier gone either to the Cuba Pavilion or to the corner of 23rd and 12th streets fulfilled their common dream of “getting to know one another and sharing experiences.” A homemade video, to be posted on YouTube, was made of everyone introducing themselves, along with their online name tags.

This spontaneously agreed third venue was a place where dialogue and debate flowed freely about several concerns, including how to achieve inclusion for people in Cuba, whatever their political convictions, who want to offer their personal views through social networks and blogs.

“I don’t need an introduction: I am the father of Twitter in Cuba,” said Roger Trabas, @roger213tm, when it was his turn to face the camera.

Trabas was the second Cuban, in early 2008, to open a Twitter account, a social network that contains a mixture of “people who live in the world, and other people who want to change it,” the group of participants agreed.

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By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Jul 4 2011 (IPS)

Despite the many limitations on access to digital-age technology in Cuba, a taste for computer games is spreading in this country, giving rise to a youthful movement that is beginning to conquer new public spaces.

Starting in the 1990s, a small group of mainly young people in this socialist island nation began to enter the world of video games. Over time, the number of people involved grew, and they became keen on face-to-face competitions and meetings, instead of just virtual interaction.

This gave rise to the nongovernmental Cuban Electronic Sports Group (ADEC), created in November 2007, which works to “spread the culture and wholesome entertainment” of these types of games, Ian Pedro Carbonell, the group’s president, told IPS.

StarCraft, a strategy game created in 1998 by the U.S. company Blizzard, is the best promoted and most popular among the young people who belong to ADEC. Since its launch on the market, it has gained followers worldwide, and in some countries, such as South Korea, it is considered a “sport”.

It can be played on computers with minimal technical requirements, although they need to be able to connect to a network for playing in groups, a more engaging option than a single person playing against the computer.

“In Cuba, not everybody has access to this technology,” Jessica Sori, one of the few women who have participated in the StarCraft tournaments, told IPS. “As a serious sport, it can only be played by those who don’t have heavy work or study commitments, because it requires a lot of time,” explained the young University of Havana sociology major.

Very few young women compete in the tournaments, more popular among men, which are organised by ADEC at least five times a year for both individuals and teams. Sori said young women are not attracted to this type of game because of a sexist upbringing from an early age.

The Blizzard game, which has spread to all parts of the world in either paid or pirated form, recreates an imaginary universe inhabited by the Terran, Protoss and Zerg civilisations. Each has its own weaknesses and strengths, allowing players to chart their strategies.

To win, players must be familiar with the potential of each civilisation, develop mental agility and know the keyboard commands to execute each action as fast as possible. In addition to StarCraft, the Cuban group of about 300 members sponsors games that it considers electronic sports, such as Warcraft.

With no profit motive, young people, especially university students, organise get-togethers to play in cities like Holguín, Sancti Spíritus, Camagüey and Matanzas. “In other provinces, the electronic sports movement is practically null,” Osmani Grau, a computer programmer in the central province of Sancti Spíritus, told IPS.

The scant access to communications via telephone or cell-phone hinders the enjoyment of this hobby in teams, Grau commented. According to a National Office of Statistics survey of about 38,000 homes conducted in early 2010, only 2.9 percent of Cubans had direct access to the Internet in 2009.

Nevertheless, the tournaments began a few years ago in private homes. In fact, the first Havana StarCraft League existed before ADEC was established. Later, the Havana Teams League formed, and the idea of going public gradually gained force.

In Havana, the first gathering in an institutional space took place in 2009, in the University Student Centre, run by the federation to which all university students belong. For the past year, the Maxim Rock auditorium in the capital, home to the Cuban Rock Agency, has accommodated ADEC events.

At the Maxim, as this Cuban temple to rock music is popularly known, the group adds other expressions of electronic culture to its programme. Cuban DJs and VJs (music video jockeys) provide the music for the tournaments, which have become more and more frequent.

The main aim of this youthful initiative, however, is to be recognised as an organisation by the National Institute of Sport and Recreation (INDER), the state entity that regulates this area in Cuba. But “INDER has a complicated financing situation; it is impossible for it to take us on right now,” Padrón said.

Talks with INDER led only to an agreement of possible support for locales and infrastructure, said Padrón, a cybernetics student at the University of Havana. “We asked them to at least recognise this new form of wholesome recreation, and in the future, to validate it as a sport.”

If these games are classified as a sport, ADEC could aspire to its own venue, better technology for other games, and even sending talented Cubans to international tournaments, Padrón commented. For now, they finance their activities with the support of companies and producers like singer-songwriter Pablo Milanes’s PM Records.

Informal networks using thick cables running from window to window, or wireless connections with telecommunications devices such as AP (wireless access points), liven up the underground, almost clandestine, world of electronic games in Cuba.

This form of entertainment, which tends to become an addiction, explodes when played over the web. Cubans have devised creative alternatives, according to a 29-year-old Havana man who asked for anonymity. He told IPS he knows of five wireless networks near his neighbourhood, each of them comprising about 20 people, set up for that purpose.

The technology for these connections is not sold in authorised stores. On the underground market, however, accessible on websites like Revolico, buyers can find everything from video cards to APs for connecting some 30 computers within the radius covered by the antenna’s signal.

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