Information Summit Opens With Call To Fight Poverty – “”Over 70 percent of all Internet users live in the world’s richest countries,
where only 16 percent of the globe’s population lives,” Secretary General
Yoshio Utsumi of the International Telecommunication Union, the summit’s lead
organizer, said yesterday. “And 1.5 million villages have no access ˜ at all
˜ to even the most basic communication services.”
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
By Traci Hukill
U.N. Wire
GENEVA ˜ The World Summit on the Information Society opened today with a call
from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to harness the “extraordinary power” of
technology to the global fight against poverty.
“From trade to telemedicine, from education to environmental protection, we
have in our hands, on our desktops and in the skies above, the ability to
improve standards of living for millions upon millions of people,” he said.
“We have tools that can propel us toward the Millennium Development Goals;
instruments with which to advance the cause of freedom and democracy; vehicles
with which to propagate knowledge and mutual understanding.”
Annan’s exhortation came at the official opening of the three-day summit,
which has drawn 12,000 delegates ˜ including heads of state, ministers, the
media and representatives of civil society and business ˜ to forge a plan for
bridging the global digital divide. In a world in which half the people lack
access to a telephone while a small portion of the remainder is saturated with
connectivity, this is no small task.
“Over 70 percent of all Internet users live in the world’s richest countries,
where only 16 percent of the globe’s population lives,” Secretary General
Yoshio Utsumi of the International Telecommunication Union, the summit’s lead
organizer, said yesterday. “And 1.5 million villages have no access ˜ at all
˜ to even the most basic communication services.”
The United Nations’ ambitious attempt to level the playing field has
culminated in a sprawling conference of more than 200 events, many of them
aimed at including women, youth, indigenous peoples and other marginalized
groups in the information society. An entire group of events called ICT4D,
short for “information and communication technology for development,” examines
how to use technology to further poor countries’ development agendas. A
high-level UNESCO panel is bringing together U.N. leaders and Nobel Prize
winners to discuss the importance of linguistic and cultural diversity on the
Web.
Aside from theoretical debates, however, intense negotiations have centered on
how to pay to bridge the digital gap. Representatives from 192 countries
trying to reach agreement on a declaration of principles and a plan of action
˜ a sort of non-binding constitution ˜ were stymied over the issue, as
developing countries lined up behind a Senegalese proposal for a voluntary
Digital Solidarity Fund and rich countries, led by the European Union and
Japan, argued for the use of existing institutions to finance ICT in the
developing world. Yesterday afternoon the parties finally agreed to allow
individual countries to set up and solicit donations for national digital
solidarity funds ˜ a move applauded by the United States, which links its
donations to evidence of good governance ˜ while a study is carried out on the
adequacy of existing mechanisms and the feasibility of a new global fund.
The fact that this summit takes place in two phases, with the second to follow
Nov. 16-18, 2005 in Tunisia, enabled negotiators to effectively put off making
a final decision on how to fund the endeavor.
A contentious issue addressed in the declaration of principles was that of
human rights. China, Iran and some other countries sought general language
pertaining to human rights, whereas Western democracies wanted to invoke the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with its specific provisions for
freedom of expression, according to a source involved in the proceedings. The
Western countries prevailed, but opponents of the move countered by insisting
on the inclusion of an article within the declaration that balances the
freedom of expression clause with language about responsibility and the limits
of such freedoms.
The plan of action and the declaration of principles will be signed by heads
of state and their representatives on Friday, the final day of the summit, as
delegates prepare to return home. At that point, Annan said today, the work
begins.
“But let us recognize that we are embarked on an endeavor that transcends
technology,” he said. “Building an open, empowering information society is a
social, economic and ultimately political challenge.”
Tags: digital divide
