Women's access to digital technologies and the development of their abilities to use and take advantage of such technology for empowerment and exercise of rights is a way to reduce the deepening of the digital gender gap in Latin America. The photo shows a training course carried out with this aim by the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) with women in the region. CREDIT: APC

By Mariela Jara
LIMA, Mar 7 2023 (IPS)

The digital gender gap is multifactorial in Latin America and as long as countries fail to address discrimination against women, inequality will be reflected in the digital space, excluding them from access to opportunities and enjoyment of their rights.

This is what Karla Velazco, political advocacy coordinator for the women’s rights program of the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an international network of civil society organizations that promotes the strategic use of information and communications technologies in Latin America, Asia and Africa, told IPS:

Poverty in the region affects 32 percent of the population, but with a clear gender and ethnic bias, with higher rates among women and indigenous people and blacks, according to a study by the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).

This disadvantage, the study underlines, impacts them by reducing their access to, use, management and control of new technologies, to the detriment of their development.

Velazco is also part of the Inter-American Telecommunications Commission’s (CITEL) Permanent Consultative Committee, where she promotes women’s right to access the internet and new technologies in general, she explained by videoconference from her office in Mexico City.

On the occasion of the commemoration of International Women’s Day, whose theme this year is “For an inclusive digital world: Innovation and technology for gender equality”, the expert drew attention to the lack of centralized and updated data on this topic that would enable governments to move forward with well-defined policies.

The ECLAC study, entitled “Digitalization of Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Urgent action for a transformative recovery, with equality” and published in 2022, reports that four out of 10 women in the region do not have access to the internet, based on data provided by 11 countries.

But Velazco said this figure does not provide qualitative information nor does it address the gap between urban and rural environments.

“There is no measurement of how women are using technology and how it affects their lives. For example, we see a lot of online gender-based violence (OGBV) but there are almost no reports on this,” she said.

Karla Velazco, from the Association for Progressive Communications (APC), an international network of civil society organizations, says it is important to have up-to-date data on the different aspects of the digital gender gap in Latin America, so that countries can design appropriate public policies and take action. CREDIT: Courtesy Karla Velazco

In any case, the figure served as a reference point to assume a commitment to reduce the digital gender gap, during a regional consultation held in February to reach a position on the issue to be presented at the 67th meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) taking place Mar. 6-17 at United Nations headquarters in New York.

The 11 countries that provided data for the study were Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Mexico, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay.

Velazco argued that women do not completely adopt the new technologies because as long as structural gender inequalities persist in labor, educational, economic and social areas, intertwined with discrimination based on ethnicity, economic status, sexual orientation or age, these will be replicated in the digital space.

“As it is made up of different factors, the digital gender gap is very difficult to measure, but it is a responsibility that States have to assume so that women are not excluded from technological advances and innovations and, on the contrary, benefit from it for their empowerment and exercise of rights,” she said.

Elizabeth Mendoza, a Peruvian lawyer from the non-governmental organization Hiperderecho, said that in Peru it is very difficult to report online gender-based violence. In an interview at the NGO’s office in Lima, she showed IPS the Tecnoresistencias digital space created to promote safe browsing for girls and women and prevent violations of their rights. CREDIT: Mariela Jara/IPS

The difficulties of reporting online gender-based violence

Elizabeth Mendoza is a lawyer and legal coordinator of the non-governmental Hiperderecho, a Peruvian institution that has worked for 10 years on rights and freedoms in technology.

“There are disadvantages in the use and enjoyment of the internet. When browsing we come across situations or people who try to violate our rights by taking advantage of technology and this is what we know as digital gender violence,” she told IPS in an interview at the NGO’s headquarters in Lima.

In 2018 Legislative Decree 1410 was passed in Peru, which recognizes four types of criminal online gender-based violence: harassment, sexual harassment, sexual blackmail and dissemination of audiovisual content and images through technological means.

Hiperderecho analyzed the efficiency of the law and found that people do not know how to report such crimes and that the authorities have fallen far short in enforcing the legislation.

“Many people experience OGBV and don’t know it’s a reportable crime; in cases in which the complaint has been made, it is not received by the police and the prosecutor’s office does not have the authority to adequately investigate and prosecute the case,” said the lawyer.

This situation is due to lack of training for the authorities in understanding OGBV and how to handle cases from a gender perspective, and with respect to using technology to investigate and put together a case.

“What generally happens is that they tell you: if he’s bothering you, block him; if you have a problem, close your account. In this type of crime, the idea is to act diligently and quickly because the aggressors delete the content, the message, the account and we can be left without evidence,” Mendoza said.

In the cases assisted by Hiperderecho, the common denominator is the re-victimization of the complainant. “In the middle of a hearing we met a defense lawyer who said: why are you making so much trouble if my defendant has a future ahead of him, this is just a case of harassment and he is sorry. It is difficult to report online gender-based violence in Peru,” she commented.

To help protect the rights of girls and women in the use of the digital space, Hiperderecho has created the Tecnoresistencias self-care center that provides guidance and information on how to identify online gender-based violence, how to fight it and how to proceed and report it.

The center provides self-care guides, explanations of the different kinds of OGBV, and methods available for reporting it. It also answers queries.

“At first they only used the cell phone to talk; now it’s a means to face the poverty that worsened in the pandemic,” said Rosy Santiz, a Mayan woman from the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, talking about women embroiderers and weavers who, through the use of technology, have been able to weather the economic and social crisis they have been facing. CREDIT: Courtesy of Rosy Santiz

Using mobile applications to weather the crisis

On the other side of the coin, the use of the internet and access to new technologies made it possible to weather the serious economic and social crisis that COVID-19 accentuated among a group of Mayan indigenous women in the city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

“The pandemic made it very difficult for us, we were not making progress in access to communication because there is little internet here in San Cristóbal de las Casas and we needed to learn,” said Rosy Santiz, a Mayan woman who is a trainer and promotes rights.

She is a member of the K’inal Antsetik (“land of women” in the Tzeltal indigenous language) Training and Skills Center for Women. Created in 2014, the center supports collectives and a network of cooperatives of women embroiderers and weavers.

“We knew how to use the cell phone, but to keep our jobs we had to learn other programs like Zoom. It was difficult, but it was the only way to be able to communicate and work from home. We learned how to continue holding our meetings and how to coordinate to continue disseminating information and training, because in the pandemic we also continued to share our experiences,” Santiz said.

In the communities where the women who make up the collectives and the cooperative live, there is little internet signal, so they decided to train them in the use of the WhatsApp application. The members of the board of directors who live in San Cristóbal de las Casas receive the orders from clients and channel them to the women embroiderers and weavers, sending the specifications and photographs over WhatsApp.

“At first they only used the cell phone to talk; now it’s a means to face the poverty that worsened in the pandemic, it is one of the aspects that we take advantage of with respect to technology,” she said.

Excerpt:

Experts and adolescents during a workshop about the risks of internet for children and young people, as part of the 2016 Internet Governance Forum (IGF2016), held in Zapopan, in eastern Mexico. Credit: Franz Chávez /IPS

By Franz Chávez
ZAPOPAN, Mexico, Dec 27 2016 (IPS)

Email surveillance, blocking of websites with content that is awkward for governments, or the interruption of services such as WhatsApp are symptoms of the threat to freedom of expression online, according to Latin American activists.

Representatives of organisations in the region participated this month in Zapopan, on the outskirts of the Mexican city of Guadalajara, in the Internet Governance Forum (IGF 2016), an initiative formally established by the United Nations Organisation in 2006. They discussed the problems facing freedom of speech on the social networks.

A total of 12 Mexican civil society organisation highlighted the situation in their country, which is similar to that of other countries in the region.“There are no hegemonic standards or models of legislation for the information society. Every region, country, government and key actor makes decisions in accordance with their own financial and technical possibilities, political will and digital culture, which it is necessary to work on.” -- J. Eduardo Rojas

In a statement they denounced the interception of communications and the use of malware “to silence journalists and political opponents”.

“Mexican authorities intercept private communications” and 99 percent of the geolocalisation and obtaining of people’s digital identity (metadata) ”are done without a judicial order,” they stated in the document, issued by the Mexican branch of Article 19, a Paris-based international organisation for the defence of freedom of expression.

“Civil society actors are very worried” with regard to the surveillance that the new technologies allow “and the possibility of intercepting our computers and telephones, where we leave a digital fingerprint when we look for news or use our email,” Edison Lanza, special rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter American Commission on Human Rights, told IPS.

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in force since 1948, states that “Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

“Three years ago, someone hacked into my email account and made my list of contacts public,” Martha Roldos complained to IPS. She is executive director of the Ecuadorian Foundation 1000 Pages, which researches and promotes accountability of civil servants towards the community.

She described challenges faced by activists, including espionage or interception of email messages, and mentioned government actions such as employing facial and voice recognition equipment for people involved in journalism or environmental activism.

In Brazil, the mobile text messaging app WhatsApp was interrupted on four occasions over the last two years by judges who demanded that conversations be revealed as part of investigations – a measure that was condemned by Artigo 19, Articulo 19’s local branch.

“The court ruling is disproportionate and is a direct attack on freedom of expression. The measure represents a blatant violation of principles and of the proportionality that judicial rulings should have,” said Artigo 19 in defense of millions of Brazilian citizens who use the popular app.

Ana Ortega, the head of the Freedom of Expression Committee (C-Libre) in Honduras, told IPS that among the many incidents against freedom of expression was the arrest of and prosecution against Elvin Francisco Molina for allegedly spreading false information on his Facebook page about the country’s banking system.

Accused of causing “financial panic in the social networks,” Molina was investigated by order of the National Council of Defence and Security. C-Libre expressed concern over the “criminalisation” of the use of social networks in the draft of a new Criminal Code which is being debated by the National Congress.

In Honduras, “there is no law to protect internet users and we take refuge under the right to freedom of expression and the 2006 law on access to information,” explained Ortega.

The report “Surf Freely”, carried out by the Venezuelan Press and Society Institute in several of that country’s states before and after the December 2015 parliamentary elections, concluded that web pages that were blocked belonged to companies that had provided information about the exchange rate of the dollar.

It was also established that other blocked websites were media outlets and blogs critical of the governing United Socialist Party of Venezuela and the administration of President Nicolás Maduro.

Yvana Novoa, a lawyer for the Peruvian organisation Anti corruption and Freedom of Information (Liber), documented cases in which users were blocked from accessing the Facebook account of the city of Lima. Also, “some public officials such as ministers have blocked users who criticise them on Twitter,” she told IPS.

Article 2 of Peru’s constitution recognises the right to freedom of information, opinion, expression and dissemination of thought through written or oral means, or images, through any social means of communication, without previous authorisation or censure.

But “there is no criminal penalty when a user is blocked by official social networks accounts,” said Novoa.

The blocking of sites as a form of censorship on the Internet is not very effective because the message will just be multiplied over the social networks, said Javier Pallero, an Argentine analyst for the international digital rights defence organisation, Accessnow.

Beyond that, it represents an action that stifles the debate needed to strengthen democracy, he told IPS.

Censorship on the internet “is a deplorable act by people who fear the power of information,” said David Alonso Santivañez, a Peruvian expert on digital legislation.

In any case, in his opinion, the capacity of social networks to multiply a message some 60 million times in a minute calls into question the possibility of true censorship of people’s communication.

What is needed, the expert told IPS, is to create laws that guarantee the use of the service, offer security and are the result of teamwork between civil society, legal experts and governments.

“Judges and prosecutors are the ones that have to investigate these kinds of abuses and interference in the private lives of journalists, activists and political leaders. If they detect illegal interference with no judicial order, without any legitimate objective, they must sanction this kind of offence,” urged IACHR rapporteur Lanza.

In a world dominated by the information society, the paradigm of self-regulation makes it necessary for “multi sectoral stakeholders to establish an informed and intelligent dialogue in order to define approaches, methods and techniques to face the challenges of an increasingly digitalised society,” J. Eduardo Rojas, a Bolivian expert who heads the Networks Foundation, told IPS.

“There are no hegemonic standards or models of legislation for the information society. Every region, country, government and key actor makes decisions in accordance with their own financial and technical possibilities, political will and digital culture, which it is necessary to work on,” he said.

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

Italy has finally joined the restricted club of states in the world that have chosen the constitutional path for regulating the Internet – or at least has taken a significant step in that direction – by adopting a Declaration of Internet Rights.

It is now looking to present the Declaration at the Internet Governance Forum scheduled for November in João Pessoa, Brazil.

The drafting process lasted more than one year, which is quick by normal Italian bureaucratic standards, and observers were surprised that it had seen the light of the day given what they says is the backwardness of the country’s digital infrastructures.Many questions related to access and use of the Internet go well beyond national borders because of the very nature of the Internet and therefore call for a coordinated effort at the international level

A number of progressive Italian media hailed the Declaration as of “historical significance” in view of the visibility and prestige that it will give Italy on internet governance issues within the global community.

Unlike other countries, where proposals for Internet Bills of Rights or Declarations have been promoted mainly by scholars, associations, dynamic coalitions, enterprises, or groups of stakeholders, the Declaration’s promoters have stressed that the drafting process was characterised by “peer-to-peer relations between institutions and citizens, so that the whole construction has become horizontal.”

In fact, the Declaration is the outcome of a complex and open multi-stakeholder process, which ended with the direct involvement of Italian citizens through a four-month public consultation on the Internet.

Nevertheless, momentum for the Declaration is closely associated with the figures of Laura Boldrini, President of the Italian Chamber of Deputies and former spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and Stefano Rodotà, an Italian jurist and politician and long-time advocate of a “Magna Carta” for the networked society who headed the committee of experts which drafted the document.

Explaining the contents of the Declaration, Rodotà said that unlike almost other similar initiatives,  the Italian Declaration : “does not contain specific and detailed wording of the different principles and rights already stated by international documents and national constitutions” but attempts to “identify the specific principles and rights of the digital world, by underlining not only their peculiarities but also the way in which they generally contribute to redefining the entire sphere of rights.”

The Declaration covers a wide range of issues, from the “fundamental right to Internet access” and net neutrality to the notion of “informational self-determination”. It also includes provisions on the security, integrity and inviolability of IT systems and domains, mass surveillance, the right to anonymity and the development of digital identity. It also deals with the highly-debated idea of granting online citizens the “right to be forgotten”.

The Declaration is critical of the opacity of the terms of service devised by digital platform operators, who are “required to behave honestly and fairly” and, most of all, give “clear and simple information on how the platform operates.”

Rodotà pointed out that the set of rights recognised in the Declaration “does not guarantee general freedom on the Internet, but specifically aims at preventing the dependency of people from the outside” through, for example, “expropriation of the right to freely develop one’s personality and identity as may happen with the wide and increasing use of algorithms and probabilistic techniques.”

The importance of needs linked to security and the market are taken into consideration but, according to the promoters of the initiative, there cannot be a balance on equal terms between these interests and fundamental rights and freedoms. In particular, “security needs shall not determine the establishment of a society of surveillance, control and social sorting.”

Renata Avila of Guatemala, who heads the “Web We Want” campaign launched by the World Wide Web Foundation, expressed her satisfaction with the section of the Declaration dedicated to net neutrality and free software, but said that it should have had more explicit and stronger recognition of “the right of people to communicate in private and the right to anonymity.”

The next step for the Italian Declaration concerns it status. It is currently simply a political document with no legal value, although Boldrini has said that it will be the subject of a parliamentary “motion” in the coming months.

As the basis for a legally-binding document, it has much in common with national legislation concerning the Internet in Brazil and the Philippines. However, it promoters note that the Italian declaration was created with an international framework in mind.

Its rationale, they say, is that “the many questions related to access and use of the Internet go well beyond national borders because of the very nature of the Internet and therefore call for a coordinated effort at the international level.”

According to the promoters, the main aim of the Declaration is not limited to being a text for the creation of new national legislation, but aims at being a contribution to public debate that points to possible legislative developments at all levels, “from national legislation to international treaties.”

For his part, Rodotà hoped that the Italian Declaration of Internet Rights would serve as an instrument for the “consolidation of a common international debate and of a culture highlighting common dynamics in different legal systems”.

Edited by Phil Harris   

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

During re:publica 2015, Juliet Wanyiri (centre), illustrates a practical workshop organised by Foondi*, of which she is founder and CEO. Credit: re:publica/Jan Zappner

By Francesca Dziadek
BERLIN, Jun 26 2015 (IPS)

In a major paradigm shift, the German government is now placing its bets on digitalisation for its development cooperation policy with Africa, under what it calls a Strategic Partnership for a ’Digital Africa’.

According to the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), “through a new strategic partnership in the field of information and communication technology (ICT), German development cooperation will be joining forces with the private sector to support the development and sustainable management of Digital Africa’s potential.”

“Digitalisation offers a vast potential for making headway on Africa’s sustainable development,” said Dr Friedrich Kitschelt, a State Secretary in BMZ, noting however that this “benefits all sides, including German and European enterprises.”

Broad consensus about the overlap between public and private interests in attaining sustainable development goals was apparent at two high-profile events earlier this year – the annual re:publica conference on internet and society, and BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference, both held in Berlin."Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships” – Muhammad Radwan of icecairo

In Berlin for re:publica 2015 in May, Mugethi Gitau, a young Kenyan tech manager from Nairobi’s iHub, an incubator for “technology, innovation and community”, delivered a sharp presentation titled ‘10 Things Europe Can Learn From Africa’.  “We are pushing ahead with creative digital solutions,” said Gitau, delivering sharp know-how and hard facts.

The Kenyan start-up iHub is a member of the m:lab East Africa consortium, the region’s centre for mobile entrepreneurship, which was established through a seed grant from the World Bank’s InfoDev programme for “creating sustainable businesses in the knowledge economy”.

In turn, m:lab East Africa is part of the Global Information Gathering (GIG) initiative, which was founded in Berlin in 2003 as a partnership of BMZ, the German Federal Enterprise for International Cooperation (GIZ), the Centre for International Peace Operations (ZIF) and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU).

The m:lab East Africa consortium has spawned 10 tech businesses which have gone regional, and boasts a portfolio of 150 start-ups, including Kopo Kopo, an add on to the M-Pesa money transfer application which has scaled into Africa, the PesaPal application for mobile credits, the Eneza ‘one laptop per child’ project, and locally relevant rural applications such as iCow and M-Farm which help farmers keep track of their yields and cut out the middleman to reach buyers directly.

“We are by nature a people who love to give, crowdsourcing is in our genes, our local villages have a tradition of coming together to help each other out, so it’s no wonder we have taken to sharing and social media like naturals,” Gitau told IPS, mentioning the popular chamas or “merry-go-rounds” whereby people bank with each other, avoiding banking interest costs.

Referring to the exponential tide of 700 million mobile phone users in Africa, which has already surpassed Europe, Thomas Silberhorn, a State Secretary in BMZ, told a re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information projects in developing countries: “This is a time of huge potential, like all historical transformations.”

The pace and range of innovative mobile solutions from Africa has been formidable. The creative use of SMS has enabled a range of services which enable urban and, significantly, rural populations to access anything from banking to health services, job listings and microcredits, not to mention mobilising “shit storms” against public authority inefficiencies.

However, the formidable pace of digital penetration has raised concerns about the “digital divide” – the widening socio-economic inequalities between those who have access to technology and those who have not.

Increasingly a North-South consensus is growing concerning three core aspects of digital economic development – the regulation of broadband internet as a public utility; the sustainable potential of mobile technology and low price smart devices to bring effective solutions to a whole gamut of local needs; and the need for good infrastructure as a precondition for environmental protection and as the leverage people need to lift themselves out of poverty.

New models of development cooperation, technology transfer and e-participation governance are emerging in response to the impact of digitalisation on all sectors of society and service provision in areas as disparate as they are increasingly connected including health, food and agriculture – access to education, communication, media, information and data and democratic participation.

“Tackling the digital divide is crucial,” said Philibert Nsengimana, Rwandan Minister of Youth and ICT, addressing BMZ’s ‘Africa: Continent of Opportunities – Bridging the Digital Divide’ conference. “It encompasses a package of vision, implementation and much needed coordination among stakeholders.”

Rwanda, which now boasts a number of e-participation projects such as Sobanukirwa, the country’s first freedom of information project, is committed to universally accessible broadband and is rising to the forefront of Africa’s power-sharing technical revolution. 

The most active proponents of the e-revolution argue that digitalisation also offers the possibility to place governments under scrutiny and have leaders judged from the vantage point of e-participation, open data, freedom of expression and information – all elements of the power-sharing models that have seen the light  in the internet age.

“Governments will put up walls, but young people will always find ways of circumventing barriers – the key issue is how to bring services locally and work together in democratic internet governance, promoting civil society engagement and private sector partnerships,” said Muhammad Radwan of icecairo.

The icecairo initiative is part of the international icehubs network, which started with iceaddis in Ethiopia and icebauhaus in Germany.

The icehubs network (where ‘ice’ stands for Innovation-Collaboration-Enterprise) is an emerging open network of ‘hubs’, or community-driven technology innovation spaces, that promote the invention and development of home-grown, affordable technological products and services for meeting local challenges.

The network is enabled by GIZ, a company specialising in international development, which is owned by the German government and mainly operates on behalf of BMZ, which is now intent on using a “digital agenda” to guide German development cooperation with Africa.

“Let us take digitalisation seriously,” said Kitschelt. “Let us use the potential of ICT for development, address the digital and educational divide and build on that resourcefulness in our partnerships by advocating for digital rights and engaging in dialogue with the tech community, software developers, social entrepreneurs, makers, hackers, bloggers, programmers and internet activists worldwide.”

Kitschelt’s words certainly found their echo among African e-revolutionaries whose rallying cry has moved forward significantly from “fight the power“ to “share the power”.

However, while this may be well be what the future looks like, there were also those at the re:publica meeting on e-information and freedom of information who wondered about priorities when Silberhorn of BMZ told participants: “”The fact that in many development countries we are witnessing better access to mobile phones than toilets is a clear catalyser for changing development priorities.”

Edited by Phil Harris   

*  Foondi is an African design and training start-up that focuses on creating access to open source, low-cost appropriate technology-related sources to leverage local technologies for bottom-up innovation. It provides a platform for problem setting, designing and prototyping entrepreneurial-based ventures. Its larger vision is to nurture a group of young innovators in Africa working on building solutions that target emerging markets and under-served communities in Africa.

By Hazel Henderson
ST. AUGUSTINE, Florida, Jun 20 2015 (IPS)

Challenges to advertisers and marketers arose in the past century. Critics deplored the role of cigarette marketers who exploited the aspirations of women by associating smoking with liberation. 

Such manipulations were explored by Vance Packard in The Hidden Persuaders (1957), along with Marshal McLuhan’s The Medium is the Message (1967) and Stuart Ewen’s Captains of Consciousness (1974).  The use of subliminal advertising (rapid flashing of product images faster than human cognition) was challenged and the public discussion led to its disuse.

Hazel Henderson

By the 1980s, Ian Mitroff and Warren Bennis described the “deliberate manufacturing of falsehood” in The Unreality Industry (1989), followed by William Schrader’s Media Blight and the Dehumanizing of America (1992), Naomi Klein’s No Logo (1999) and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death (2005).

Fast forward to today’s ethical challenges.

Political advertising of candidates was likened to selling toothpaste as it emerged in the 1970s and summarized by Charles Lewis in The Buying of the President (1996) and James Fallows in Breaking the News (1996). Today, the gutting of restrictions on money in U.S. elections has led to the well-financed blizzard of attack ads that lead millions of voters to turn off their TV sets in disgust. Media corporations and their TV channels have come to rely on such financial bonanzas during elections.

What this confirms is that advertising influences media owners and the content of programmes and often distorts news coverage, leading to subtle commercial censorship rarely recognised as a threat to free speech in the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment.

Civic groups’ limited funding precludes challenging false and misleading advertising and the “greenwashing” of many companies’ poor environmental records. “Civic groups’ limited funding precludes challenging false and misleading advertising and the “greenwashing” of many companies’ poor environmental records”

I summarised these issues a few years ago in an interview in Forbes magazine on why I founded the EthicMark Awards for “advertising that uplifts the human spirit and society”.

These Awards recognise that advertising, a global 500 billion dollars a year  industry, can be a powerful force for good beyond consumerism, in educating, inspiring and showcasing the best innovations for growing more inclusive, greener, knowledge-rich and sustainable societies.

The newest challenge to advertisers comes from Silicon Valley with the many apps that allow users to skip and block ads, including AdBlockPlus (downloaded 400 million times), as well as add-ons to Chrome and Firefox browsers.  Ad block users have grown to 200 million a month, according to PageFair and The Economist.

Advertisers could redeem their reputations and business models via Truth in Advertising Assurance Set Aside (TIAASA) which would disallow their tax exempt funds on false advertising and then award these funds to civic challengers to hire ad agencies to prepare counter-advertising campaigns.

All this highlights the growing vulnerability of media business models in the United States, other industrial societies and worldwide.

Many new media business models which no longer rely on advertising are debated in The Death and Life of American Journalism (2010) by Robert McChesney and John Nichols who compare media access policies in many countries which subsidise investigative journalism, such as Britain’s BBC.

In the United States, foundations support news organisations such as the National Geographic, the Center for Public Integrity and ProPublica, and media outlets such as the Columbia Journalism Review. The American Prospect and The Nation are largely funded by subscribers as well as PBS and NPR in broadcasting, along with many internet-based media such as The Real News Network.

Google banned ad-blocking apps in 2013, yet alternative web-browsers such as UC Browser already claims 500 million users, mostly in China and India, and Eyeo launched its ad-blocking browser available for mobile devices running Google’s Android.  These battles will rage on until legal systems – always lagging behind technology – catch up.

Two reports from the Aspen Institute’s Communications and Society Program led by Charles Firestone – “Navigating Continual Disruption” and “The Atomic Age of Data” – discuss the digitisation of ever more sectors of industrial societies and the internet of things (IOT).

In the United States, the monopolising of internet access by Comcast, AT&T and Verizon has restricted broadband access to millions in less affluent, rural communities and prevented small towns from competing with public broadband systems, as reported by the Center for Public Integrity and Susan Crawford in Captive Audience (2013).

The good news follows the analysis and proposals of Kunda Dixit in DatelineEarth: Journalism as if the Planet Mattered (IPS, 1997) and includes Dan Gillmore’s We the Media (2004) on grassroots journalism; David Bollier’s In Search of the Public Interest in the New Media (2002); Democratizing Global Media (2005); Making the Net Work: Sustainable Development in a Digital Society (2003) from Britain’s Forum for the Future; and Jaron Lanier’s Who Owns the Future? (2013). (END/COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

There has been robust growth in Internet access and usage over the past few years and Africa is now primed to take advantage of the social and economic opportunities that Internet can bring to people across the continent, according to Kathy Brown, President and CEO of the Internet Society.

Speaking at the Africa Internet Summit (AIS) being held in the Tunisian capital from Jun. 2 to 5, Brown highlighted the progress made in recent years to bring improved Internet access and availability to more people in Africa, noting how this growth has provided a strong foundation for stimulating opportunity through an enabling environment defined by inclusion, innovation and entrepreneurship.

“Africa’s recent economic growth rates and growing entrepreneurial spirit are combining to create a climate of opportunity,” said Brown.

“Advances in Internet infrastructure and the meteoric rise of the mobile Internet have already transformed the African technology landscape. I believe that Africa’s Internet is now at a tipping point, poised for further positive change and expansion as the continent looks forward with confidence to the future.”

However, she noted that there are still barriers which must be overcome in order to capture the full economic and social promise of the Internet. While connectivity is on the rise and available bandwidth in Africa has increased significantly, challenges for the African Internet business ecosystem still include factors such as the cost of broadband, online fraud, lack of local content and fragmented markets.

“Africa is now the frontier for the next wave of Internet progress,” said Brown. “While there is huge potential for Africa to continue building an Internet that will best serve its needs and its people, it is critical that true collaboration across Africa’s technical community, a culture of innovation and a spirit of entrepreneurship form part of this process.

The Internet Society stands with Africa to continue the great momentum under way to overcome challenges and enable the economic and social possibilities that only a truly open, trusted Internet can deliver.”

The Internet Society is an international, non-profit organisation founded in 1992 to provide leadership in Internet-related standards, education and policy.

Edited by Phil Harris   

Two young girls look on as a veiled woman passes by in Aleppo, August 2014. Syrian magazine Saiedet Souria wants to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard. Credit: Shelly Kittleson/IPS

By Shelly Kittleson
GAZIANTEP, Turkey, Nov 15 2014 (IPS)

For most Syrian women, the war has been a disaster. For some, it has also been liberating.

For Yasmine Merei, managing editor of the Syrian women’s magazine Saiedet Souria, the upset of traditional family roles and the shaking off of a culture of fear have wrought positive effects.

Many Syrian women have unfortunately been forced to become the breadwinners of their families, with their husbands missing, in jail, injured or killed, she told IPS, but while fending for themselves can be a terrifying experience, it can also free women from the traditional bonds placed on them.

Although it [Syrian women’s magazine Saiedet Souria] does not shy away from stories of women who have suffered greatly … [it] wants mainly to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard
‘’If he [the husband] isn’t the one who pays for everything and has that specific role in society, he no longer has the right to tell you what to do’’, added Mohammad Mallak, the founder and editor-in-chief of the magazine, which translates as ‘Syrian Women’, and was founded early this year.

Mallak also runs a partner magazine, Dawda (‘Noise’), from the same office in the southern Turkish city of Gaziantep.

Few of the women in the magazine’s photos have their heads covered, and Merei took off her headscarf earlier this year, after wearing it ‘’for about twenty years’’ as part of her upbringing in a poor, conservative Sunni family.

Merei said that she started taking part in the 2011 protests due to the unjustness of Syrian law, especially as concerns women. As examples, she noted a longstanding law against Syrian women giving citizenship to their children and widespread, unpunished honour killings.

A former Master’s student in linguistics, Merei – like many Syrian women – has become responsible for providing for her immediate family, sending money to her mother and her brothers, both of whom were jailed for protesting and released only after large bribes were paid.

Her elderly father died shortly after he, too, had been imprisoned and the family forced to flee their home.

Telling women’s stories does not simply mean female victims recounting the horrors and hardships of their lives, however.

Although it does not shy away from stories of women who have suffered greatly, Merei wants mainly to provide women with the information they need to have a wider view on the world and a voice in a revolution that has largely left their views unheard.

A first-hand account from a woman who was tortured in Syrian regime prisons sits alongside a review of Germaine Greer’s ‘The Female Eunuch’ and an interview with a female police officer in opposition-held areas in the pages of the magazine and on its Facebook page.

Articles on how forced economic dependence negatively affects both women and national economies overall, others discussing potential health problems found in refugee camps such as tuberculosis, a regular column by a female lawyer still in regime areas who previously spent 13 years in prison for political reasons and two translated articles from international media give breadth to the magazine’s roughly 50 pages per issue.

Saiedet Souria publishes sections of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) – the ‘’international bill of rights for women’’ adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in 1979 – in every issue, and will publish it in its entirety in the next, she said.

The magazine itself only has a print run of between 4,500 and 5,000 copies per issue (with roughly 3,500 distributed inside Syria through one of its four offices), bit its Facebook page where the articles are regularly posted is followed by over 40,000.

For a country where Facebook and Youtube were banned from 2007 until early February 2011, and where internet and electricity are scarce, this is a significant number. Syria has been on Reporters Without Borders’ Internet enemies list since the list was established in 2006.

In addition to offices in Daraa, Damascus, Suweida and Qamishli, another will soon be opened in Aleppo, Merei said.

‘’All of the ten women who work for us inside get a regular salary of 200 dollars,’’ she explained, ‘’and are responsible for distributing the copies as well as bringing women together for meetings and similar initiatives.’’

The copies are given out at markets and local councils, and in at least one location, noted Merei, the women have a system to recirculate the limited copies once they have finished with them.

Reporters Without Borders has held two workshops for the magazine, in April and September of this year, and offered to donate equipment to the magazine, but ‘’ we had basic equipment – regular printers, computers’’ from an initial investment made by Mallak,  she said.

‘’But what we really needed was paper and ink, to get the magazine to as many women as possible. And so RSF made an exception and offered us that, instead.’’

The goal, she said, is to ‘’help Syrian women regain confidence in themselves.’’

A confidence undermined by the war and by the use of ‘religion’ to control women in Islamist areas which, when she last went to them earlier this year, ‘’seemed like the country had gone back to the Stone Ages.”

‘’I am a Sunni Muslim but the Islam there is not like any I know.’’

‘’One of the major problems is that Syria’s intelligentsia are all either in jail, abroad or dead,’’ one Syrian, who has lived most of his life abroad but came back recently to help try to set up university classes in opposition-held Aleppo, told IPS. ‘’There is almost no one to structure anything, no one to put forward ideas.’’

This is what the magazine and it correlated activities are trying to address, as well, Merei said. ‘’We are trying to give Syrians the knowledge they are going to need in the future,’’ she said.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

A satellite promotion in Cochabamba, Bolivia, that reads, "Space is Ours". Credit: Gustav Cappaert/IPS

By Gustav Cappaert and Chris Lewis
EL PALOMAR, Bolivia, Jun 23 2014 (IPS)

Maria Eugenia Calle, a local official in this Andean agricultural community, recently saw the Internet for the first time.

Her hometown of El Palomar will host one of about 1,500 telecommunications centres that the Bolivian government plans to open this year in rural areas. They will be served by Tupac Katari 1, a Bolivian satellite launched from China late last year.

Socialist President Evo Morales claims that the satellite will make Internet, cell phone service, distance education programmes and over 100 television channels available to everyone in this vast, sparsely populated country.Because Bolivia is landlocked, undersea fibre optic cables do not reach the country, so Bolivians settle for some of the lowest speeds and most expensive connections in the world. Hopes for the satellite are high.

In El Palomar’s yet-to-be-opened telecom centre, Calle and a small group of onlookers watched as a reporter booted up a computer to test the signal.

“Go to the United States. Show us the White House. Search for Toyota. Search for Real Madrid,” they suggested.

Bolivia is the poorest country in South America, and also among the least connected. Only 7.4 percent of inhabitants have access to the Internet at home, by far the fewest on the continent. Because Bolivia is landlocked, undersea fibre optic cables do not reach the country, so Bolivians settle for some of the lowest speeds and most expensive connections in the world. Hopes for the satellite are high.

“It’s a dream, isn’t it?” said Calle, 40, El Palomar’s secretary of education. “I’m happy that my children are going to be able to communicate with the United States, other countries – or here in Bolivia, with La Paz, Cochabamba,” she said.

With a population of just 10 million and a modest national budget, Bolivia is a strange fit among the 45 nations with their own communications satellite, which are typically either wealthy, heavily populated, or both. However, an increasing number of developing nations are making the investment. In the next two years, Angola, Nicaragua, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Turkmenistan and Sri Lanka will launch their own satellites.

Rural areas bring special challenges for Internet expansion. The cost of installing and maintaining equipment and training people to use new technology is higher farther from cities, said Francisco Proenza, an ICT scholar and visiting professor of Political Science at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona.

While the use of mobile phones has increased dramatically, the Internet has lagged behind. In rural Peru, for example, 62 percent of rural households own a mobile phone, while just 7 percent of those living in rural areas make use of the Internet

After a 2009 revision, Bolivia’s constitution guaranteed access to basic services including water, electricity, and telecommunications. In addition to the satellite, the Bolivian government has opened over 300 rural telecentres and offered incentives to telecommunications companies willing to build infrastructure in rural zones.

According to Ivan Zambrana, director of the Bolivian Space Agency, a national satellite is the most cost-effective way of providing access across Bolivia’s diverse rural terrain, which includes mountains, tropical rainforest and desert. It is also a means of protecting Bolivia’s communication infrastructure from political factors that could restrict access, like the United States’ embargo against ally Cuba.

Bolivia’s Ministry of Communications has marketed the satellite aggressively. The agency created a television advertisement, a Facebook and Twitter campaign, and an Android app to promote the project. In the months surrounding the satellite’s launch, billboards reading “Tupac Katari, Your Star” and “Communications Decolonized” were placed in major urban areas throughout the country.

“When we think of Bolivia, we don’t think of technology, we think of rural poverty, but Bolivia has changed,” said Robert Albro, an anthropologist at the American University in Washington who focuses on Bolivia.

Despite the fanfare, sceptics of the satellite argue that Bolivia’s priorities are misplaced, especially with alternatives available.

El Palomar, a rural town a few hours from La Paz, Bolivia. Credit: Chris Lewis/IPS

Many other countries, including neighbouring Peru, have extended access to rural areas by subsidising the use of existing satellites. Google and Facebook are each considering a fleet of low-flying drones that would provide worldwide Internet connectivity. Until now, Bolivia has spent 10 million dollars annually to lease satellite capacity from foreign providers.

To finance Tupac Katari, Bolivia took out a 300 million dollar loan from the Chinese Development Bank, which the government claims will be repaid by satellite revenues within 15 years.

“It puzzles me that countries like Bolivia are launching their own satellites,” said Heather Hudson, professor of public policy at the University of Alaska. According to Hudson, existing satellite coverage could meet rural Bolivia’s needs. “It’s like 20 or 25 years ago, when there was a wave among other countries, you had to have your own airline,” she said.

Meanwhile there are concerns about misplaced priorities. “Our priority is improving the conditions of nutrition, water and the environment,” said Isidro Paz Nina, national coordination secretary of the Movimiento Sin Miedo, a party looking to unseat President Morales in November elections. “The satellite isn’t bad, but we want people to not have to worry about suffering for lack of food.”

Delays and miscommunication have also brought frustration. “The government said that with the Tupac Katari satellite antenna, cell phones, television, the channels and all that would improve. Up until now, it hasn’t been seen,” said Victor Canabini Quispe, a 51-year-old in El Palomar. “I hope the government doesn’t deceive us,” he added.

Meanwhile, the public opening of the telecentre in El Palomar has been postponed due to delays in training a community member to run the centre and disputes over who will pay for the inauguration ceremony.

If the satellite project succeeds, it could have a big impact on life in rural Bolivia. The satellite will be a “window to the world” for children in rural areas, according to Zambrana, the Bolivian Space Agency chief. He said that many Bolivian children living in high altitude climates have never seen a tree in their lives, and will see one for the first time through satellite-delivered images.

In five years, Bolivia “will be more modern, better connected, with more educated citizens. We’re going to be a little richer – or a little less poor,” he commented.

The message is one that is resonating in at least one remote part of Bolivia – San Juan de Rosario, a small community in Bolivia’s arid southwest, and a planned telecentre site.

Gregoria Oxa Cayo owns a hotel here for tours visiting Salar de Uyuni, the world’s largest salt flats, but by necessity she lives four hours away in the larger town of Uyuni. She grew up in San Juan and her parents still live here, but she needs Internet access to run her hotel and travel agency, and there is none in the isolated desert town.

“If there was Internet here, I would live here,” she said.

Khalid Salim (left) and Yassir Younis (right) , owners of the Motawiron mobile applications and software development company that grew out of the Technology Incubator in Gaza. Credit: Khaled Alashqar/IPS

By Khaled Alashqar
GAZA CITY, Jun 19 2014 (IPS)

“After graduating, I joined the thousands of other graduates on the list of the unemployed. Then I read about a project that offers a technology incubator for youth projects, applied, was accepted and now I’m no longer on that list!

Yasser Younis, who is now co-owner of a mobile applications and software development company, was describing his experience of the Palestine Information and Communications Technology Incubator, a unique programme set up and run by the University College of Applied Sciences (UCAS) in Gaza, with the support of Oxfam, which has the ambitious aim of bypassing the blockade imposed on Gaza.

The idea behind the programme is to provide graduate students with the necessary sponsorship and financial support to develop their projects during a gestation period of six months, with project staff on hand to help them network with companies abroad and market their products online.“Ideas are accepted on the basis of specific criteria and the ability of the idea to overcome the blockade on Gaza and market products abroad via the Internet” – Professor Saeed Azzibda, Manager of Development Programmes at UCAS, Gaza

Describing this promising programme, Professor Saeed Azzibda, Manager of Development Programmes at UCAS, told IPS: “Ideas are accepted on the basis of specific criteria and the ability of the idea to overcome the blockade on Gaza and market products abroad via the Internet. If such essential criteria are met, we would embrace the idea and develop it until it becomes a product with foreign trade potential.”

The Technology Incubator qualifies five companies in each assessment session and some of its start-up projects have already developed their own programs and applications that are being sold in the global market of mobile phone software.

The programme has been very well received in the Palestinian community and at international level, with some Arab investors offering successful participants the opportunity to travel and work in Qatar and other Arab countries interested in the field of technology and online markets, or to open headquarters for budding start-ups outside Gaza and increase investment in them.

“We have two dimensions to corporate incubation,” Professor Azzibda told IPS.  “The first is that the company sells its products via the Internet to overcome the blockade of Gaza, and the second dimension is for those students who have created their own companies here to explore opportunities outside the borders of Gaza border and develop strong companies and investments abroad with the aim of also supporting their people in Gaza.”

Two of the graduates from the OCAS programme are Yasser and Khalil Salim, owners of the Motawiron mobile applications and software development company. They graduated from the UCAS programme after six months of incubation and the company is now selling its products online for companies in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and some other countries.

Motawiron recently won a ticket to represent Palestine inthe “Imagine Cup”, the global student technology competition organised by Microsoft Corporation for the best software and applications to serve the world. This was the first time ever that Palestine had been represented in the competition.

Nevertheless, the blockade on Gaza prevented Younis and Salim from travelling earlier this month to Qatar for the Pan-Arab semi-finals of the “Imagine Cup”, although they possessed the necessary papers and the official invitation and tickets.

“Our company has developed the ‘HOPE’ application for mobile phones which helps the deaf communicate with people and integrate into society. We got the first position for Palestine and now compete in the world but we could not travel.  We have shared this application in competitions in order to expand horizons and start relationships with international companies,” Yassir told IPS.

Graduates make up a significant segment of Palestinian society where over 40,000 studentsgraduate each year, creating an urgent need to find creative ways to accommodate young graduates and their talents in the labour market. But the market in Gaza suffers from major weakness and serious decline at various levels because of the continued siege and closures imposed by Israel.

Some international donor organisations, including Oxfam, work in Gaza and try to support domestic markets and the local economy.

They manage large development projects through which they provide significant support to UCAS graduates to deliver their products to the outside world via the internet despite the challenges they face in Gaza, particularly the electricity blackouts for 12 hours a day and the difficulty of bringing in supporting equipment for emerging companies.

“Information technology is among the emerging and promising sectors in Gaza, where products that are blocked from access tomarkets by traditional ways due to the blockade can be offered via the Internet,” Alun Macdonald, Media and Communication Coordinator at Oxfam, told IPS.

“A company producing animated advertising has so far won six contracts outside Gaza with companies in the Gulf states, Canada and Saudi Arabia. Some of the companies have also proved themselves in the local market,” he added.

Meanwhile, young female journalist Nour Al-harazin is taking the media approach in her initiative to overcome physical and political barriers and reach the outside world, by preparing to launch and operate an English-speaking news channel from Gaza via YouTube.

“It would be the first in the Arab world and Palestine.This channel intends to provide reports and human stories from besieged Gaza to the outside world. It will be, for the first time, our right as Palestinians to convey our suffering ourselves to the outside world without any parameters. This is the main idea of the project,” Nour told IPS.

A support network of activists from Western countries is taking shape across social networking sites to help this Palestinian journalist with her project. Having launched an online page for fundraising, Nour has also released a short video on YouTube calling on activists and supporters of justice in the world to provide assistance and financial help for her project so that she can deliver the message of the Palestinians and the people of Gaza in particular.

“The siege and travel ban have always been an obstacle to Palestinians, so I thought of using the Internet and social media to reach out to the world that cannot reach us. The Internet has now become a means to break this siege,” said Nour.

Day after day, Gazans like Nour, Yassir and Khalil continue the struggle to find new ways to break the siege imposed on them and create access to the outside world through commercial relations and media outlets. The global Internet and social media have opened new doors and are now being used as an essential space to challenge closure and isolation.

Credit: Public Domain

By Vesna Peric Zimonjic
BELGRADE, Jun 2 2014 (IPS)

Waters have receded in Serbia after the worst flooding the country has seen in 120 years, and something new has surfaced, apart from devastated fields and property – censorship of the internet.

A number of sites and blogs that criticised the government’s behaviour at the peak of the floods two weeks ago – in which over 50 people died – were hacked, unavailable or removed, showing the “error 404” message whenever an attempt was made to access them.

Some 30 people have been detained in the past two weeks for “dissemination of false news and panic”, in the words of the Public Prosecutor’s Office.

Three young men spent nine days in custody for their Facebook posts, which cited hundreds of casualties in the worst hit town of Obrenovac, 33 kms south west from Belgrade. The three were released but will soon face trial. If guilty, they face six months to five years in prison."There is an obvious effort by the state to narrow the social dialogue … It's also an effort to introduce one-mindedness in the country" – head of the Independent Journalists' Association of Serbia (NUNS)

Sources at the Prosecutor’s Office, who insisted on anonymity, told IPS that “such comments and posts could have caused panic or grave disturbance of public order”, denying that the process represented any type of crawling censorship. Censorship is banned by the Constitution of Serbia.

However, hacking and downing of the Teleprompter.rs and Drugastrana.rs sites that carried highly critical items on Prime Minister Aleksandar Vucic and his government’s behaviour under titles “People are desperate”, “Vucic to stop with pathos and self pity”, “State, we’d won’t keep you any longer” were described as clear censorship by professionals and the Ombudsman of the Republic of Serbia, Sasa Jankovic.

A blog on the most popular site which said “I’ AV (Aleksandar Vucic), resign”, was removed without any explanation from the web site of “Blic” newspaper. Axel Springer Media, the owner of the paper, would not comment on the case.

“There is an obvious effort by the state to narrow the social dialogue,” said the head of the Independent Journalists’ Association of Serbia (NUNS). “It’s also an effort to introduce one-mindedness in the country.”

Ombudsman Jankovic said in a statement that it is becoming harder to hide censorship because “we see more often that some information or critics are being withdrawn from publicly available media and information space.”

One clear case of censorship was the removal of the appeal by Belgrade Mayor Sinisa Mali to citizens of Obrenovac not to leave their homes on Friday, May 16. It was posted on the official site of the Serbian capital of Belgrade, because Obrenovac is one of its city municipalities.

It disappeared from the site after the town was completely flooded the same day, when 23,000 people were hastily evacuated. It remained at cache, only to be re-distributed over Facebook and Twitter en masse.

Mali is one of the top officials of Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) of Prime Minister Vucic. The SNS won last early general elections in May and run the nation together with Socialists of late strongman Slobodan Milosevic. The coalition has run the country since 2012, when Democrats, who toppled Milosevic in 2000, lost elections due to widespread corruption and inability to save the country from the effects of the global downturn.

However, the Prime Minister denied existence of censorship in his recent appearance at state-run Radio-television of Serbia (RTS).

“It is absolutely untrue that there was censorship or that there were demands for certain texts or posts to be withdrawn,” Vucic said.

He was reacting fiercely to a statement by Dunja Mijatovic, media freedom official of the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). At last week’s OSCE meeting in Stockholm, she expressed deep concern over allegations that websites and online content are being blocked in Serbia.

“This is a clear violation of the right to free expression. The Internet provides unparalleled opportunities to support these rights and is essential for the free flow and access to information,” she said.

For professionals in Serbia, the behaviour of Vucic does not come as a surprise. In 1999, at the time of NATO bombing, he was part of the Milosevic’s government, the youngest-ever Information Minister. Strict media censorship, together with repressive laws with fines amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars for independent media marked his time in that position.

“It’s the same as in Milosevic’s era, maybe worse” said veteran journalist Jasminka Kocijan.

She experienced first-hand the consequences of meddling into state affairs earlier this year.

After a widely propagated footage showed Vucic saving a child from snow in the northern town of Feketic, she posted on her Facebook page an item from the Red Cross which described how volunteers really saved people stuck in high snow. She was immediately removed from her editorial post at the state-run Tanjug news agency.

Since coming to power in 2012, Vucic and his team have been diligent in efforts to remove all the satirical or even factual online contents dealing with Progressives. A blog on internal issues within the party was removed back then, while online photos or items on Vucic’s second marriage last November were immediately removed.

The last incident of the online censorship happened on Sunday evening, when the Pescanik.net web site went down. It carried an analysis of three university professors on the doctor’s thesis by Vucic’s right hand and Minister of Interior Nebojsa Stefanovic. The analysis showed that the thesis was a plagiarism.

A Bharatiya Janata Party rally in Bhubaneswar. Much campaigning, particularly among the youth, is increasingly over the internet. Credit: Manipadma Jena/IPS.

By Manipadma Jena
BHUBANESWAR, India, Apr 6 2014 (IPS)

As India votes in its 16^th general election Apr. 7-May 12, the youth, comprising nearly half the country’s 814 million voters, could prove decisive. And the internet is being used increasingly to target youth in the world’s largest democratic exercise.

India has 383 million voters in the 18-35 age group. Underscoring their importance, pollsters have named this huge segment ‘Youngistan’, or the nation of the youth.

Not only have election promises been tailored to woo this segment, but for the first time campaign engagement with voters is taking the internet route, especially over social media platforms."Politicians are listening as well as responding to young voters through social media."

“There’s more participation and what’s more, politicians are listening as well as responding to young voters through social media,” Sunil Abraham of the Bangalore-based non-profit Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) told IPS.

Mobile phone texting, which was used to reach out to voters in the last election in 2009, has made way for a tech-basket of mobile phones, e-mail campaigns, know-your-leader and political party websites, messages via smart phones, interactive Facebook and Twitter accounts, Google hangouts and YouTube videos.

Social media practitioners say at least 10 percent of the 664 million dollars projected to be spent on advertisements and publicity by political parties is likely to go to social media companies.

India’s internet user base has been estimated at 205 million, Facebook users number 65 million, Google+ 36 million, and Twitter 16 million.

In a document titled ‘Social Media and Law Enforcement’, India’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) projects user strength galloping to 243 million by June 2014, of which 192 million would be active users, 56 million of them rural. Active users are categorised as those who use the internet at least once a month.

Fifty to sixty percent of current internet users are in the 18-35 age group, according to Abraham. Politicians are tapping into this huge and growing youth voter base not only to boost their reach but also to monitor engagement and run more effective campaigns.

“Politicians contract us to find out what ‘influencers’ on Twitter are saying about them, and we segregate the positive and negative tweets for a sentiment analysis,” Jwalant Patel, 30-year-old co-founder of social media analytics startup Meruki Analytics and Reporting Services told IPS. ‘Influencers’ are those with at least 10,000 Twitter followers, Patel said.

Of the 70,000 ‘influencers’ that the tech company has identified for its 11 clients within weeks of starting operations, 90 percent are in the 18-40 age group.

Patel claims that 160 of the 543 constituencies that go to the polls will be ‘social media constituencies’ where results will be impacted by politicians’ internet engagement.

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi, 63, has a Twitter following of 3.66 million, while Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) leader Arvind Kejriwal, 45, whose anti-corruption plank is widely believed to have got Indian youth interested in politics, has 1.58 million. The Congress party’s Rahul Gandhi, 43, does not have an official Twitter account.

Sustained youth participation in protests in the Delhi rape case of December 2012 and in favour of the anti-corruption Lokpal Bill are other major catalysts in the politically proactive approach of youth in these elections, say analysts.

The dynamics of electioneering has changed in India, with its 1.2 billion people.

Abraham agrees that the internet in general and social media in particular have had a democratising effect on the voter-voted relationship, but he warns that once the competition gets tougher, political leaders may resort to ‘astro-turf’ battles where they manipulate e-campaigns, as opposed to the more transparent, physical ‘grass turf’ campaigns.

“How can you bet that all the Facebook ‘likes’ are from genuine supporters?” said Abraham.

Many of the youth seem clear on issues of concern to them.

“Most leading parties are promising jobs for graduates, but when a party that has been in power for several years says ‘we will give jobs’, we ask what were you doing all these years? If a new party makes the same promise, give them a chance, we say,” 20-year-old student Siddhant Sadangi told IPS in Bhubaneswar, capital of Odisha state in eastern India.

According to India’s National Sample Survey, one in four graduates is unemployed. The figures are worse for women.

More and more village men are preferring higher education to agricultural work, and this means there will be more demand for higher quality jobs in the near future.

In conflict-hit states, cynicism is apparent among the youth.

Manipur Talks, a vibrant internet forum that connects the widespread diaspora of northeast India’s Manipur state, lampoons pre-election promises. The site calls the election ‘Magic Wand Expo 2014 – the biggest expo for wiz-crafts in the world’ – a spoof on Harry Potter.

Northeastern communities have been protesting discrimination against them in the rest of India. “Politicians have lost credibility here and what’s more, nothing is done to help the Manipur youth diaspora vote,” Manipur-based social activist Chitra Ahanthem told IPS.

Campaigns by India’s Election Commission to enlist young voters through online registration have succeeded in a nationally high 70 percent turnout expectation, according to Election Commissioner Harishankar Brahma. But many of the 30 percent who will not exercise their franchise will be the young from troubled states.

“The youth of Jammu and Kashmir are isolated, alienated, angry,” Bashir Ahmad Dabla, heading the University of Kashmir’s sociology and social work department told IPS from Srinagar.

“Here, unlike elsewhere, the need for political stability takes precedence over economic issues,” said Dabla. “Jobs, education, water, electricity, roads are important but not the priority in Kashmir.”

The last elections in Kashmir saw only 31 percent voting. Around 50 percent of voters in Kashmir are in the 18-35 age group.

Saba Firdous, a 25-year-old graduate in the state, is not voting this time, and it’s not because of a poll boycott campaign by Kashmiri separatists.

“The major issues for youth here are repealing the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act (AFSPA) in Kashmir valley, stopping civilian harassment and killings, resolving the unending conflict,” Firdous told IPS. “Mainstream political parties who go to Parliament will do nothing about these issues, we know.”

Police use tear gas and water canons in Istanbul to disperse demonstrators protesting the new Internet bill. Credit: Emrah Gurel/IPS.

By Ezgi Akin
ANKARA, Feb 14 2014 (IPS)

Turkey is waiting to see if President Abdullah Gul will ratify the government’s controversial Internet bill, which opposition parties, civil society and the international community call a major restriction on freedom of expression.

Gul had said three years ago that “there shouldn’t be any restrictions over the Internet.” Freedom champions are waiting now for him to walk the talk.

Parliament has passed the bill which bypasses the judiciary by authorising Turkey’s telecommunication board, TIB, to take a decision on blocking a website or individual web content in case of complaints of violation of personal rights and right to privacy. The new bill also allows the authorities to track individual web records of Internet users."The Turkish public deserves more information and more transparency, not more restrictions."

The bill has caused serious concern within the European Union. Peter Stano, spokesperson for Stefan Fule, the Commissioner for Enlargement and European Neighbourhood Policy, said the bill introduces several restrictions on the freedom of expression.

“This law is raising serious concerns here. The Turkish public deserves more information and more transparency, not more restrictions,” Stano said.

Turkey’s government, however, says the bill is aimed at protecting people’s privacy. Turkish Premier Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that with the existing law it takes some five days to remove content from the web, and the new law will reduce this period.

“The Internet isn’t being removed, it is being brought under control,” Erdogan said in a televised speech. “Perceiving this [law] as censorship is cruelty. In fact, this law is making the Internet more liberal…By Internet regulation, Turkey will no longer be a country which is being blackmailed by tapes.”

Turkey’s main opposition party calls the bill a “politically motivated” step to increase governmental control over the Internet and stop leaks about a recent graft probe. Social media has become the public information channel of purported graft probe documents and recordings of wiretapped phone conversations, including those of Erdogan and other senior government officials.

The graft probe, which kicked off Dec. 17, has already led four ministers to lose their seats in the cabinet due to alleged involvement in corruption. Erdogan says the probe is a “conspiracy” against him and is aimed at toppling his government.

He accuses influential cleric Fethullah Gulen’s supporters of being members of a “parallel state” that is behind the probe. Gulen, who is in self-imposed exile in the United States, was once a close ally of Erdogan’s government and is believed to have many supporters in Turkey and in the Turkish bureaucracy, especially in the judiciary and police. The two are reportedly locked in a power struggle.

A legislator from Turkey’s main opposition said the bill was a “clear attempt to censor the recent bribe and corruption scandal” and “against basic human rights and freedoms.

“This is against the Copenhagen criteria and may put Turkey’s European Union aspirations at risk,” Aykan Erdemir told IPS, referring to standards that Turkey needs to achieve in order to join the 28-member group.

“Leaving a decision to a bureaucrat without a court order is unacceptable. This is a violation of the presumption of innocence.”

The new bill also calls for all Internet service providers to unite under an umbrella group called the Internet Service Providers Association. The association will have to block a website or content within four hours at TIB’s request. Web page owners would be able to appeal the decision in court.

The bill also allows the association to keep individual web records of Internet users for two years and share them with the authorities on request.

An Internet watchdog group, the Turkish Informatics Association, said the bill is “not constructive but destructive.”

“We are concerned that this will cause self-censorship as users’ records will be archived. People will be afraid of visiting some sites,” İlker Tabak, deputy head of the association, told IPS.

“The websites will be closed without even asking their owners to defend themselves. We have a state governed by laws, and decisions to block [sites] shouldn’t be left to personal initiative.”

The New York-based media freedom advocacy group, the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has labeled the bill a “radical censorship measure.”

“If passed, the amendments to Turkey’s already restrictive Internet law would compound a dismal record on press freedom in the country…Internet freedom has been deteriorating steadily in Turkey for some time,” the group said.

Most recently, an Azerbaijani journalist who works for Turkey’s English language newspaper Today’s Zaman left the country. The “Turkish authorities added his name to a list of people who are barred from entering Turkey” after he posted critical Tweets about Erdogan, Today’s Zaman reported.

Meanwhile, civil rights groups and NGOs have urged Gul to veto the bill. Turkey’s largest business association, TUSIAD, sent a letter to Gul saying the bill “should be revised” in accordance with the definition of basic human rights, including freedom of expression.

The new bill has also prompted protests in major cities like Istanbul and Ankara. Hundreds of demonstrators have taken to the streets to protest the bill and mount pressure on Gul.

Gul’s stance on Internet freedom is starkly different from that of Erdogan who once defined social media as the “worst menace” for societies.

“I think there shouldn’t be any restrictions over the Internet. Everyone should be able to use the Internet freely,” Gul had tweeted in May 2011. But Gul rarely vetoes government bills as he is one of the founding members of the ruling AKP party.

Gul is one of the most active leaders on Twitter with some four million followers so far. Hasip Kaplan, a legislator from the pro-Kurdish Peace and Democracy Party, BDP, said Friday that he would lose one follower if Gul ratified the bill.

“We will see to what extent Mr. President is libertarian. I think the President should veto this. In case he doesn’t I will delete him from my Twitter, I will unfollow him.”

Mobile broadband services are seen as a key tool of development communication the world over, but people in rural Asia and Africa say telecom companies should cater to their needs and not simply impose technology on them.

Experts say spreading the benefits of the digital revolution to rural areas poses a huge challenge for telecom companies, which have so far focused on urban markets.

“The telecom industry has had an easy ride so far. It hasn’t seen what’s coming to them,” Mark Summers, co-founder of Inveneo, a non-profit company promoting broadband connection in Africa warned at the Telecom World 2013 conference here last month.“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life."

He was immediately challenged by a Zimbabwean in the audience who said he lived in a rural area and didn’t need the technology they had all been talking about. He wondered if telecom companies ever asked people like him what they wanted before trying to connect them to the technology.

Similar debates had taken place in the 1970s and 1980s when radio was promoted as a development communication tool, mainly by western consultants.

“They talk of us as if we are uneducated,” Reuben Gwatidzo of the Information Society Initiative Trust of Zimbabwe told IPS.

Gwatidzo said it wasn’t necessary to learn someone else’s language or to have high literacy to be a good carpenter, farmer or build one’s own house.

“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life,” he said. He said he was not against new technology but rural people must be allowed to choose what they want, and not have some “international strategy” imposed on them.

The telecom meet was organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the Thai capital. The meet picked up on longstanding issues.

ITU estimates there will be over 6.8 billion mobile phone subscribers around the world by the end of 2013, but points out that there are 1.1 billion people who do not have access to the Internet, with 90 percent of them in the developing world.

Telecom companies – which target urban markets – have increased their revenue by 12 percent between 2007 and 2011. The industry is largely driven by private operators.

Many argue that private companies are not interested in rural markets because of low purchasing power and high cost of connectivity and that is why governments should step in to provide connections.

“The real challenge is how to structure spectrum allocation to attract carriers to both urban and rural sectors,” said Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, a Ghanaian telecom sector analyst.

“The truth is rural markets are not attractive, but there are mechanisms to address them, including government intervention through which you can tax the urban markets to subsidise the rural markets,” he told IPS.

But not everyone is convinced about the role of the government.

Dhaka-based Abu Saeed Khan, senior policy fellow at LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank, argues that governments can create problems too.

“In Bangladesh, the government has auctioned this bandwidth. It is not cheap, so private operators load the price on the package,” he told IPS.

“When it comes to Internet bandwidth, operators don’t have direct access because the government has erected a barrier – a middleman – so the cost of Internet bandwidth is too high for consumers,” he said.

ITU’s report, ‘Measuring Information Society 2013’, argues that people living outside major cities in developing countries are the ones for whom information and communication technology (ICT) can have the greatest development impact.

In many countries across Asia and Africa, schools and health centres are connected to mobile and broadband technology and farmers are provided information on crop protection and marketing.

For instance, the International Fertiliser Development Centre provides information via mobile phones to farmers in five African countries to protect them from counterfeit fertilisers.

In Malaysia, seaweed farmer Kabila Hassan has set up a successful business – also providing employment to half her village – by using the Internet to market products in China, Japan and the U.S. She received the ITU’s Transformational Power of Broadband Digital Icon Award 2013 here in Bangkok for it.

Brahima Sanou, who is from Burkina Faso and is director of the Telecom Development Bureau at ITU, believes mobile phones can be the new development anchor.

He pointed out several examples of this – such as Senegal where fishermen use mobile phones to find out the price of fish before they come ashore; Rwanda where it is used to follow government services in rural areas; and Costa Rica where it is used to combat non-communicable diseases.

“People who never had access to any technology are now using mobile phones. We have to develop (services) for people (through) what they own already, not bring new tools,” he said.

Dr Rohan Samarajiva, a Sri Lankan telecom expert who is the founding chair of LIRNEasia, told IPS that the findings of a six-country sample survey on how poor people were revealing.

“It is very clear that they are accessing more than voice services through wireless platforms,” he said.

“We were surprised when, while doing research with poor people in Java (Indonesia), they clearly stated they were not using the Internet, but later they started talking about Facebook and various other activities.”

“This shows that they are using mobile phones without necessarily going through the steps they think are necessary to use the Internet,” Dr Samarajiva noted.

He said their sister organisation in Africa had the same findings.

“So it’s a different conception of the Internet,” he said. “The whole world is moving towards mobile devices. We will see an explosion of its use.”

As phones are transforming from merely voice communicators to what is called 3G or 4G, which transmits voice, visuals and data, a large chunk of humanity in rural Asia and Africa is waiting for a transformation in their lives but with technology that is relevant to their needs.

Women at ICT workshop in Namaingo, eastern Uganda. Credit: Susan Kinzi/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
BANGKOK, Dec 4 2013 (IPS)

Only 16 percent of Africa’s population of over a billion is online. But as Internet and mobile phone connectivity grows rapidly, the continent wants to join forces with Asian powerhouses to change its digital landscape.

While offering its vast market, Africa hopes to leverage Asia’s information and communication technology (ICT) prowess to develop sectors as diverse as banking, telemedicine, education and cyber security.

“There is a lot of opportunity for collaboration,” says Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, director and leader, McKinsey’s Business Technology Practice, South Africa.“North America, to be honest, is not relevant to our markets. There are very interesting opportunities in terms of South-South collaboration."

“Asia’s experience with the Internet is five or maybe 10 years ahead of Africa. A lot of the talent, skill and technology available (in Asia) may be of great use,” the Ghanaian engineer-turned-telecom strategist told IPS.

He was here to attend Telecom World 2013 organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) last month.

A large contingent of African countries led by Nigeria mounted a big roadshow at the event, both to display their growing mobile and broadband communication-oriented economies and to attract Asian investment.

“North America, to be honest, is not relevant to our markets. There are very interesting opportunities in terms of South-South collaboration, especially around banking, education and so forth, where collaborations will allow for bigger markets and therefore more innovation availability,” Yeboah-Amankwah said.

“Larger Asian and African e-commerce players could collaborate to make the opportunities even bigger. For us, integration between large African and Asian players is an exciting idea,” he added.

According to ITU statistics, more than 720 million Africans have mobile phones and some 167 million already use the Internet. And the figures are rising fast as mobile networks are built up and the cost of Internet-enabled devices falls.

But Asia is far ahead. Comparative figures show that a total of 3.5 billion out of the global 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions are from the Asia-Pacific region.

So when it comes to ICT, Africa has Asia on its mind.

“Technology is new to all of us. We are all learners. We can work together to make technology work for us,” said Dr Hamadoun Toure, secretary general of the ITU, who is from Mali.

According to ITU figures, in 2013, there are almost as many mobile subscriptions as people in the world.

Asian countries are world leaders in ICT, with South Korea heading ITUs’ global ICT development index, India known for its IT expertise, and Chinese telecom companies being the biggest global operators.

Ji-Yong Park, senior research associate at the Korea Internet and Security Agency (KISA), told IPS they have been helping African countries improve their Internet security. “Last year we trained over 200 government officials [from Africa],” he said.

India has assisted many African countries in upgrading their IT training facilities, among them the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence in ICT established in 2003.

Malaysia is helping set up a multimedia university in Tanzania while Thailand is launching a Thaicom satellite with a footprint over Africa to help improve communication within the continent and with Asia.

“We see Africa as the future. They have a lot of land to provide food for people around world. Their weather is the same as ours, so we can use the land of Africa, we can communicate by satellite and we can have e-agriculture and we can communicate with remote sensors,” an advisor to the Thai minister for ICT told IPS.

“African and Thai people are almost the same in terms of development and the type of people. When I go there, I feel this is a nice place, they just lack infrastructure for new kind of technology,” the advisor said.

Rebecca Okwaci, minister of telecommunications and postal services, South Sudan, told IPS, “We look towards Asia because a lot of technology we need is in Asia.”

She said China’s leading ICT firm Huawei has given a lot of technical assistance since South Sudan’s independence in 2011, as has India.

“Our ICT programme is already connected with India. Universities in India have projects with us in e-education and they are training our staff within the ministry,” she said.

Okwaci said they are also looking for assistance from Asia in telemedicine projects. “We can customise their experience for South Sudan,” she said.

African countries see the ICT partnership with Asia as a change from the old model of development assistance from the West.

“Traditionally the relationships have been in terms of grants or loans. Now we have relationships that are fuelling growth in Africa, especially in ICT,” Rwanda’s Minister of Youth and ICT Jean Philbert Nsengimana noted.

He said his country already has a good partnership going with South Korea.

“We contracted Korea Telecom to build our national broadband, which was completed in the last two years. Now we are working together to develop the last mile connections. We get assistance in cyber security. We send our people for training,” Nsengimana said.

He also said they have strong relationships with India and China in the ICT sector.

China’s Huawei has a research and development centre in South Africa and seven training centres across Africa. It employs over 5,800 people in 18 countries and its revenue from African operations was 3.42 billion dollars in 2011.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics last month said it hopes to corner half the 20 million smart phone sales expected in Africa next year.

The future looks bright for Asia-Africa collaborations in the ICT sector.

Eu-Jun Kim, regional director for Asia-Pacific of ITU, told IPS, “The challenges are similar, namely affordable and sustainable access, especially to broadband, and in both Asia and Africa we have vast land and vast population that could benefit from the application of ICTs.”

Tribal women from Chattisgarh in India record a message. Credit: Purushottam Thakur/IPS.

By Keya Acharya
RAIPUR, India, Nov 23 2013 (IPS)

Deep in the forests of central India live the Gond tribals, an almost forgotten lot, neglected as much by the state as by mainstream media. Many cannot read or write. But thanks to a new technology, and the rapid spread of mobile phones through India, they are now picking up their cell phone and making their voice heard.

A tele-news platform called CGNet Swara is helping change their world.

Ask Naresh Bunkar, a 38-year-old tribal in Chhattisgarh state who has used it time and again. “Computer mein chhappa jata hai” (“It gets typed on the computer”), he tells IPS proudly in Hindi, pointing out how CGNet Swara helps news spread through the Internet.

Through it, tribals air their grievances, share news and get administrative work done – all for free.

“I don’t need to pay one paisa for it,” says Bunkar, a field leader of sorts for tribals in the area.“It’s going to sound very strange for a computer nerd to tell you that technology is not the secret ingredient here.” - Bill Thies

It was through CGNet Swara that he first reported how a forest ranger had taken a bribe of 99,000 rupees (1,000 dollars) from 33 tribal families while promising them land deeds under India’s Forest Rights Act (2006). The news was circulated, and two months later he called again to say that the official had returned the money and apologised.

In another example of CGNet Swara’s influence, a teacher who had stolen school money, classroom furniture and food grains given by the government for tribal children was suspended after a report on his misdeeds was aired on the network.

Encouraged by such success stories, tribals have swiftly embraced CGNet Swara, which literally means ‘Chhattisgarh’s voice’ through the Internet. Started for the central Indian state, where 32.5 percent of the population is tribal, it is fast spreading to other parts of this vast country to reach out to areas that were beyond the pale of modern communication.

“While Indian states got divided on linguistic lines, the Gonds of central India were forgotten,” Shubhranshu Choudhary, a former BBC journalist, told IPS.

“They don’t have a newspaper in their native Gondi language, but the only new thing I have found on my return here is that most people now have cell phones,” he says.

Choudhary used that cell phone knowledge to set up CGNet Swara in 2010. The system operates in a region beset with Maoist insurgency. Its inhabitants often find themselves caught in the crossfire between the guerrillas and state forces.

A native of Chhattisgarh, he says the ferment in the region stems from years of neglect.

“We are trying to create another ‘development’ paradigm,” says Choudhary. “This communication system could well become the Google of the poor.”

Here’s how it works. When a tribal dials the number +91 80 500 68000, the message goes to a server in Bangalore. The caller disconnects and waits. Within seconds he receives a call and a recorded voice tells him to speak after the beep.

The server has been set up by Bill Thies, a self-confessed geek from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) working at Microsoft’s Research Laboratory in India’s IT capital Bangalore.

Using a simple desktop and modem, Thies used a freely available software called Asterisk to build 10 lines that automatically call back ‘missed call’ numbers and then record a two-minute message from the caller.

“But,” says Thies, “it’s going to sound very strange for a computer nerd to tell you that technology is not the secret ingredient here.”

The ‘secret ingredient’ is the unique media networking system set up by Choudhary, whose community interests aligned with Thies in user-generated technology.

‘Swara’ now has 400 callers daily, dialling Thies’ server in Bangalore to either listen to or record their own news.

Each message goes to the moderator, Choudhary, and through him to about 50 strategically located volunteer sub-editors for cross-checking of facts and local follow-up.

The volunteers are educated Indians, well-versed in their spheres of work and residence, coming from a web-based Yahoo group called CGNet, set up in 2004 by Choudhary and journalist Frederick Noronha of Goa.

For instance, Bunkar’s message on the forest official’s bribe demand was first checked by CGNet’s locally based editorial volunteers for accuracy. It was then sent to the principal chief conservator of forests who found the allegation to be true and suspended the official.

The network – with the website – has even helped people access a popular rural job guarantee scheme.

The state government, however, seems reluctant to acknowledge its potential as a parallel system of governance.

“I personally find it an effective source of feedback and grievance redressal from the grassroots. I do make use of it off and on,” Chhatttisgarh Chief Secretary Sunil Kumar, the state’s top bureacrat,  told IPS, taking care to emphasise the non-official nature of the way he uses it.

Choudhary calls the network a kind of ‘citizen journalism’ wherein there is local news for local residents who are otherwise neglected by the mainstream media.

CGNet Swara now covers all of Chhattisgarh. It’s also popular in the nearby states of Madhya Pradesh and Jharkhand. The news system has spread by word of mouth to the tribal belt across Gujarat, Rajasthan, Odisha, Jharkhand and Andhra Pradesh – an area Choudhary calls the ‘media dark zone’.

Ironically, the region’s ultra-left Maoist radicals, who claim to fight for the marginalised, have issued threats to Choudhary, asking him to close down CGNet Swara.

Choudhary, who divides his time between Delhi and Bhopal, says the Maoists are threatened by the concept of self-empowerment that the news system has brought to its users.

CGNet Swara is evolving into a radio system using a free medium-wave bandwidth, and Choudhary believes users will pay a small amount for subscribing. Running on a UN Democracy Fund and Knight Fellowship finances so far, the system is now looking for financial independence.

A health consultation network called Swasthya Swara is also being set up where traditional healers who make use of herbal medicines will be on air.

“We are extending our Swara system into a mobile-based voice portal,” says Choudhary. “There is no need for a newsroom now. Geography is now history.”

And, for the unempowered tribal population of India, whose numbers run into tens of millions, that’s indeed good news.

An ECPAT campaign picture against sexual exploitation. Credit: Arabella Shelbourne.

By Silvia Giannelli
ROME, Jul 7 2013 (IPS)

The scandal around the under-age prostitute that former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi allegedly had sex with is not about just that one girl: an estimated 10,000 under-age girls become victims of sexual exploitation every year in Italy.

Most of them are not “seen”; street prostitution is in fact on the decline. But that is only because these “services” are accessed more and more online.

“Sometimes I worry when I hear people discussing underage prostitution,” Myria Vassiliadou, anti-trafficking coordinator at the European Union Commission for Home Affairs, told IPS. “When you talk about girls and boys whose bodies are used for sexual services, it is an illegal activity.”

According to European Commission statistics, based exclusively on identified and presumed victims, 9,528 victims of trafficking were reported by EU member states in 2010. Of these, 66 percent were used for sexual exploitation, and of these, 12 percent were girls and three percent boys below 18.

The official figures do not come close to describing the real situation. In Italy 9,000 to 11,000 children become victims of sexual exploitation every year, according to End Child Prostitution, Pornography and Trafficking (ECPAT) estimates. ECPAT is an Italian NGO defending children from sexual exploitation."Selling one’s sexuality is a way of obtaining something immediately, be it a seat in the parliament or the latest phone or designer clothing."

“In Italy, the outdoor prostitution we usually think of involves mainly migrant girls,” Yasmin Abo Loha, Italian coordinator of ECPAT told IPS. The main countries of origin are the eastern European countries, followed by a constant flow from Nigeria, and now emerging trafficking from Asia, mainly China.

“The victims that are forced to prostitute themselves on our streets are usually girls of advanced age,” said Loha. “We also estimate that 15 to 20 percent of the victims are boys, but it is particularly difficult to give a precise percentage especially when it comes to male prostitution, which is the hardest to intercept.”

There is also a myth to dispel, said Vassiliadou. “We are used to saying that trafficking is something that affects migrant people, but 61 percent of the victims of trafficking we now know are EU citizens.”

With Italian children, the main arena where contacts are made for sexual exploitation is now online. In most cases, the phenomenon cannot be defined as prostitution since in many cases contact may not lead to physical sexual intercourse, but may involve pornography and more.

The new forms vary quite widely, “from teenagers simulating sexual intercourse among them and then selling the images,” said Loha, “to step-by-step stripteases on webcam, where the price starts from 15 euros to show the breasts and can go up to 50 euros.” In such cases the payment can be a phone top-up or other direct presents.

Prostitution in the strict sense usually happens around underage clubs where teenagers perform sex acts in exchange for money. “If we compare it to the standard forms of prostitution, where minors are forced, Italian teenagers seem induced by a certain message and a cultural change that is happening,” said Loha.

“Today, selling one’s sexuality is a way of obtaining something immediately, be it a seat in the parliament or the latest phone or designer clothing,” said Loha.

The many dangers of sexual exploitation that stops short of prostitution have been hidden behind the publicity around the Berlusconi scandal.

“However we put it, a person under 18 that is sexually exploited is a victim,” said Vassiliadou. “There is a law against it and I don’t think we should be having a debate on that.” Yet, the fact that Karima el-Mahroug (the Moroccan girl Berlusconi allegedly had sex with) was 17, and the fact that she looked older, gave space to a vivid debate on whether she was or not aware, and responsible for her actions.

Instead of concern, there was gossip, Loha said. “We often hear these comments also from professionals in our area, who think that 17-year-old teenagers are grown up and can do what they want. The fact is that the law states the opposite and as such must be applied.”

The debate should focus instead on ways to end trafficking and sexual exploitation, Vassiliadou said. “Because for victims to be there, it means there is someone willing to buy the services.”

The attempts to counter this have to come through training, campaigns, actions targeting the persecutors and the victims, and through media. But the problem is that so far there is no successful model to apply, Vassiliadou said.

“We don’t have any example, anywhere in Europe. So as far as I don’t have an answer I need to ask more questions, and push more.”

ANP candidate Syed Masoom Shah on his way to the hospital after an Apr. 14 bomb attack in Charsadda, a town in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, that injured four people. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, May 10 2013 (IPS)

If you can’t beat them, at least innovate. That seems to be the lesson that Pakistan’s Awami National Party (ANP) has drawn from its predicament.

Exhausted of being at the receiving end of an endless barrage of bomb and suicide attacks by Taliban militants, the party has turned to technology for succour.

It is using the Internet to reach out to the electorate across its various constituencies in the northern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, its main support base.

ANP leader Mian Iftikhar Hussain told IPS what a blessing it was to be able to reach the people through Skype ahead of the May 11 elections.

“Through it, we can reach the electorate without putting our lives in danger,” he said. Technology has helped them protect not just their own lives but also those of the people who come to listen to them.

Hussain, a former information minister in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, lost his only son, Mian Rashid Hussain, in a terror attack by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) in October 2010.

The ANP, which has been in power in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, one of Pakistan’s four provinces, for the last five years (2008-2013), had earned the wrath of the outlawed TTP due to its firm stand against Islamist militancy.

It has paid a high price. Around 800 of its leaders and workers have fallen prey to attacks by the TTP in the past five years. And the violence has only worsened in the run-up to the elections.

The ANP remained its primary target, but the other liberal parties – such as the Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) and the Pakistan People’s Party – have also been victims of its ire. Bombs and suicide attacks on ANP and MQM candidates and offices became the order of the day.

“It was the ANP (provincial) government which took the most successful military action against militants in the Swat district of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa,” said Muhammad Jamil, who teaches Pakistan Studies at the University Public School in Peshawar. “The TTP had ruled Swat from 2007 to 2009 till it was evicted by the ANP-led government in 2010.”

Swat is also where the brave Malala Yousafzai comes from. The 14-year-old was shot in October last year by the Taliban for championing the cause of girls’ education.

The ANP, Jamil told IPS, was the only party carrying out an “open and brave campaign” against the Taliban, which made it the focus of their violent agenda.

“The TTP is afraid it could face more stern action if the ANP is voted to power again. It is therefore making every attempt to keep the party away from election and to pave the way for parties which have a soft spot for the Taliban,” he added.

It may not quite succeed, given the ANP’s ability to get around obstacles. First, its women leaders took charge where the more prominent candidates could not canvass, going from village to village soliciting women to vote for their candidates and trying to persuade men to do so as well.

Now it has included the internet in its armoury to circumvent the militants and communicate with its supporters.

And people have taken very well to seeing their leaders communicate with them on internet, said ANP leader Bushra Gohar.

“Our workers appreciate the new move because the ANP couldn’t put the lives of workers on the razor’s edge by holding public meetings. Via Skype, we are able to communicate our message to the people in an atmosphere of peace,” she told IPS.

“Many of our candidates have wanted to be present physically in public meetings but could not because of the threat from militants,” she added. “The use of internet has resolved our problem.”

Hussain turned to Skype again in Taro locality, some 15 kilometres from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa capital Peshawar, to spread his own and the party’s message.

Ali Haider, who organised the Skype address, said it was an unqualified success. “We are planning more such meetings where ANP’s leaders and candidates can address the people on Skype. These are very safe,” he said.

“Where there is a will, there is a way,” Sanaullah Khan, a Mardan-based ANP worker, told IPS. “We have been listening eagerly to the speeches being delivered by our leaders via Skype.”

Former Khyber Pakhtunkhwa chief minister and ANP leader Ameer Haider Khan Hoti is contesting the national assembly seat from his hometown. Having survived a suicide attack on Feb. 15, 2013 in Mardan, he, like the others, could not campaign in person for the elections.

People are organising Skype speeches for him as well in Mardan.

Khan said they had also been working on developing the party’s webpage and were posting regular election updates on Facebook.

“The response is unprecedented because a majority of our leaders have also opened Twitter accounts to send their message to the workers,” he said.

Muhammad Namir, a schoolteacher in Mardan, was among those who heard Hoti’s speech on the internet on May 3. The leader, Namir said, recounted the many projects his government had executed in the five years of its rule and asked the people to give their vote to the ANP’s candidates again in this election.

“Party workers say that the use of internet has saved them from attacks,” Namir told IPS. “For public meetings, you have to make arrangements. But for an internet campaign, all that is required is a laptop.”

The ANP has also been using songs to motivate the masses,” said Muhammad Shoaib, a local journalist in Swabi. ANP candidates have survived three terror bids in Swabi, the fourth most populous district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

The party’s election songs have elevated the people’s mood. The ANP put out an album of 11 Pashto songs for the election campaign. Sung by well-known singer Gulzar Alam, the songs reinforce the themes of peace, democracy and progress – the very things the ANP is promising to the electorate.

“The songs are enticing the people because they relate to the protection of Pakhtun soil,” Shoaib said. The Pakhtun population forms a majority in the province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

In an electoral battleground bloodied by the militants, the songs seem to be more than a small comfort.

The Cuban government’s economic reforms must consider the myriad opportunities offered by the Internet, a key platform of the dominant economic model on the planet, according to interviews with both experts and average people.

“It is not an option for our future development, it’s an imperative of our time,” economist Ricardo Torres told IPS. “Without the mass application of the New Information and Communications Technologies (NICT), to production processes and social life, there are no contemporary possibilities of development.”

Meanwhile, people who participated in the interactive section of Cafe 108, the website of the IPS office in Cuba, felt that mass access to the worldwide web would mean first of all, “Finally landing in the 21^st century”, and more job opportunities together with the expansion of state enterprises and small private businesses.

However, the NICT and especially the Internet issue, is a complicated one in Cuba due to financial and political concerns, particularly because of the more than 50-year old conflict between Havana and Washington.

The global expansion of the Internet in the 1990s happened as Cuba entered the economic crisis that continues today, which followed the fall of the Soviet Union and the European socialist bloc, Havana’s main trading partners.

According to Torres, Cuba’s “unique socioeconomic and geopolitical situation” meant that “not enough resources have been earmarked for the development and use of these technologies”. The United States’ covert delivery of mobile phones, computers and Internet connections has been regarded by Cuba as meddling in its internal affairs.

In 2011, a fiberoptic submarine cable arrived at the Cuban coastline, thanks to a project between Havana and Caracas to grant greater independence in communication between the Caribbean and Central America. In May 2012, the Venezuelan Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Jorge Arreaza, told reporters that the cable was operational.

Cuban authorities remain absolutely silent about the cable, though there has been a noticeable improvement in local connectivity.

Cuba now has a minimum bandwidth of 323 megabits per second, the allowable capacity via satellite. According to official sources, the fiber optic cable will increase current transmission speeds by 3,000 times, and decrease operating costs by 25 percent, but satellite services will not cease.

The Ministry of Information and Communications has said it will boost the so-called social use of NICTs, but not its commercial application. Appearing before Parliament this month, the head of the ministry, Maimir Bureau, said the government prioritises access to Internet sites in places linked to social and community development, such as schools.

He also reported that projects are underway to reduce the costs of mobile phones. Today, few people have Internet connections or email at home; most use “dial up” (technology that allows access through an analog phone line) or wireless. Some shell out the high prices charged at Cyber Cafes, and especially at hotels.

Meanwhile, private sector job opportunities, opened up by an updated Cuban economic model, could further expand with an affordable Internet service for entrepreneurs and cooperatives.

Unable to take advantage of all the possibilities offered by the current Web, some independent initiatives are timidly exploring the promotion of services via email, in websites, social networks like Facebook or Twitter or messages to mobile phones. Among them is the Alamesa project for the “diffusion of Cuban gastronomy”.

The group, which also manages associated food services through the World Wide Web, has as its main tools a web directory on national restaurants and an electronic newsletter. The Chaplin’s Café restaurant in Havana and handcrafted lamps company LampArte have profiles on Facebook.

La Casa restaurant is on Facebook, Twitter, WordPress, Flickr and YouTube, and regularly interacts with users of the international travel site TripAdvisor. MallHabana, the exclusive shop of online remittances to Cuba is also online. These initiatives especially seek to attract international visitors.

Faced with national difficulties, many family businesses seek alternatives to offer their goods and services online. The exclusive leather handbag company Zulu, owned by Cuban Hilda M. Zulueta, has its own site, managed by one of the daughters of the artisan who lives in Spain, the owner told IPS.

In 2011, only 1.3 million of the 11.2 million inhabitants of the island had cell phone connections, according to the National Office of Statistics and Information. It also recorded 2.6 million online users, a figure that includes Internet accounts and Cuban intranet, which provides access to some international and local websites.

Before thinking about divulging his musical production, the well-known soundman Maykel Bárzaga dreams of having his own connection to easily update and activate the essential software for his home studio recordings. Five years ago, he took this option for associated creators of the non-governmental Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.

“When you buy equipment or a programme for music editing, you must activate it and update it by placing a key on the provider’s page,” he told IPS.

He also pointed out that the “Internet is a stunning source of work, since it allows musicians to perform international projects without each of them leaving their country.” The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimated in 2012 that the Internet economy will grow in the coming years to more than 16 percent annually in the developing markets of the world.

Expanding channels for retail is one of the many economic opportunities that would come with unrestricted access to the Internet, which was identified by participants of Café 108.

In their view, among other things, many people could make a living with new professions, Cuba could export services through the web, the tourism industry would have more independence to fully own sites and be better positioned, and companies and cooperatives with professionals from the whole country and the world could emerge.

By Thalif Deen
NEW YORK, Nov 2 2012 (IPS)

As the digital revolution continues to spin out of control, several newspapers in the United States have either stopped their presses and ended print runs, or gone online.

After 149 years as a daily, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, based in the state of Washington, became an online-only newspaper when it ended its print run back in March 2009. Four months later, the Ann Arbor News ended its print edition after 174 years of publication. It, too, shifted online.

Dr. Shelton Gunaratne, professor of mass communications emeritus, Minnesota State University. Photo courtesy of Dr. Gunaratne.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2006 for public service reporting, reduced its daily print frequency to three days a week in Sep. 2012.

The Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, another Pulitzer Prize winner, will follow suit as a three-day publication beginning January of next year.

And last month, one of the best known international news magazines, Newsweek, announced it was going all-digital after 79 years in print and with its circulation declining from 3.3 million copies in 1991 to 1.5 million last June.

Given recent history, many wonder whether print media is headed for the graveyard.

Dr. Shelton A. Gunaratne, professor of mass communication emeritus, Minnesota State University, says the Internet has revolutionised the oligopolistic news industry by enabling anyone to become a journalist at will.

It has also “slashed the arrogant braggadocio” of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today – all of which may sooner or later have to follow the humble path of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, he added.

After the Post-Intelligencer and the Rocky Mountain News collapsed, the Ann Arbor News became a “hybrid” – primarily an online product supplemented by hardcopy twice a week, said Gunaratne, author of the trilogy “Village Life in the Forties: Memories of a Lankan Expatriate” (iUniverse, 2012); “From Village Boy to Global Citizen (Volume 1): The Journey of a Journalist” (Xlibris, 2012); and its second volume, entitled “The Travels of a Journalist” (Xlibris, 2012).

In an interview with IPS U.N. Bureau Chief Thalif Deen, Gunaratne discussed the factors that have led many American newspapers today to become hybrids. Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: What are the reasons for the death knell of the print media?

A: The reason is that most people are now likely to access magazine-type content on the Internet through web sites, blogs and podcasts. Moreover, they are also increasingly using their mobile smart phones and wireless tablets to read the news.

Q: Is the shortfall in advertising also having an impact on newspapers? 

A: Advertising subsidised about 80 percent of the production and distribution cost of a U.S. newspaper. However, with the digital revolution in the 1980s, the advertising industry discovered that it could reach target audiences for specific goods and services much more cost effectively through the proliferating online media.

Q: Where does the World Wide Web fit in?

A: The information age began in the 1990s, when the World Wide Web became available for public use as part of the Internet. The web was a boon to the mass media, media consumers and the advertising industry. All three found refuge in cyberspace, which they found out to be a much more congenial environment for their coexistence.

The Web will accommodate much more than the New York Times’ pledge: “All the news that’s fit to print.” Rapidly declining ad revenue is the core problem threatening print journalism in the advanced world.

Q: As the younger generation is more and more inclined towards digital information, how do you envisage this landscape developing over the next 25 years? Is the current trend the beginning of the end of the printed newspaper?

A: The younger generation of Americans born after the digital revolution thumbed their noses at the print media. I saw in my classes kids who avoided reading newspapers except for the sports pages. They didn’t read their assigned textbook chapters either.  The digital revolution changed their interest from reading and writing to electronic and visual media.

This revolution, which marked the shift from analogue mechanical and electronic technology to digital technology, assisted by the microchip, hailed the beginning of the information age.

The rapid spread of cell phones, first in advanced countries, then in developing countries, in the 2000s also helped undermine the economic viability of the printed newspaper.

Internet users in the world have increased exponentially. Currently, Indonesia has more mobile telephones than its population. Cloud computing entered the mainstream in the early 2010s. By 2015, tablet computers and phones are expected to exceed personal computers in Internet usage.

Q: Is this phenomenon limited only to the United States (and the Western world), or is it likely to affect the developing world as well?

A: Tina Brown, publisher of Newsweek, is quoted as saying that print (not digital) licences for Newsweek are “enormously strong” in countries such as Japan, Mexico, Pakistan, Poland and South Korea.

International Telecommunication Union (ITU) data show that in 2011 about 35 percent (or 2 billion) of the world population were Internet users, compared to 18 percent in 2006. At this rate, the existing Digital Divide between developed and developing countries may disappear before the demise of the U.S., which I have written will occur by 2043.

Of the five countries that Tina Brown mentioned, Japan and South Korea, where the Confucian reverence for the printed press is still high, and in Poland, the traditional newspaper, including the print version of Newsweek, may linger substantially longer.

Unlike the United States, where news is considered another commodity, many other countries treat news as a social good.

The disappearance of the printed newspaper may not occur in countries where news is not deemed a commodity. The Rome-based Inter Press Service news agency (IPS) began as an antidote to capitalist journalism and adopted the philosophy of presenting news as a social good.

Communication consultant Ken Goldstein, who studied 60 years of circulation figures for paid newspapers in Canada, UK, and the U.S. and whose data show 60 years of declining circulation, says that newspapers will one day vanish.

Excerpt:

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)