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Contributions from
the Column
InWEnt Forum
Internet can help achieve the MDGs
Water management: a good bye to general formula
10/2005 |
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[ Information society ]
Data highway to the Millennium Goals
Satellite dishes do not get rice to the hungry and fibre-optic cables do not deliver drinking water. But they are vital for the attainment of the UN Millennium Development Goals. The Second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in November in Tunis should provide a road map.
[ By Christian Taaks ]
The figures published by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) look good: in 1992, the industrial world had 14 times more telephone lines than the developing world; over the next eight years, the difference shrank to a factor of five. Similar developments have also been seen on the mobile communications front. In 1992, there were 30 times more users of cellular phones in rich countries than in poor ones; ten years later, there were only four times more. The private sector played a key role in this progress. Its investment in information and communication technology (ICT) in the closing decade of the 20th century exceeded the total volume of official development aid.
But there is certainly no cause for complacency. The digital divide may have narrowed globally but it has actually widened in certain countries. In many places, there are still glaring differences in development between urban and rural communities as well as between rich and poor. Yet it is precisely where the challenges are greatest that the private sector is slow to get involved – because profit prospects are poor.
Peter Ammon of the German Foreign Office believes that modern information and communication technology is a vital tool in the fight against poverty. But deploying it is beyond the budget of the public sector, so the United Nations Millennium Declaration looks to private-sector partnerships to make the new technologies available to all. Ammon quotes from the statistics to illustrate the scale of the task ahead: “There are still more Internet users in Manhattan than in Subsaharan Africa”.
Access barriers
India has surged forward in development terms thanks to modern communications. Nevertheless, modern information tools are still scarce in rural areas. Namrata Bali, secretary general of the Self Employed Women's Association (SEWA), thus warns of the dangers of neglecting traditional structures. 97 percent of India's working women work in the informal economy, she points out – the majority of them in rural areas. But computers and Internet access are still expensive and the infrastructure they require is available only in cities. Another barrier to Internet use is a linguistic one: the language of the Net is English. SEWA focuses its ICT promotion effort on furnishing rural communities with mobile phones. The association provides affordable loans to equip small businesses with modern communication technology. The gains made are in more effective marketing for products and services, preventive health care and private communication. “The people sector has to be in the centre”, Bali says.
Like SEWA, more than 125,000 village phone operators in rural Uganda are following the lead of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, replicating the Village Phone Programme it launched in 1997. The aim: to get telecom services to small businesses and private individuals. To cover the cost of the basic equipment (mobile phone, aerial, advertising materials, prepaid card), prospective operators in Uganda receive a loan of 250 dollars. Phone time is then sold to customers at a markup, to finance the business and pay back the loan. Richard Mwami, general manager of MTN villagePhone Uganda, reckons his company now reaches 70 percent of the country.
Tim Wood, technical programme manager at the Technology Center of Grameen Foundation USA (US sister of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh), wants to extend the business model to other developing countries as soon as possible. Not without pride, he points out that the Uganda project started up as a purely private initiative with no government involvement: “The government did not get involved in a public private partnership until the project was already up and running.”
Wood has clear ideas about the role of government: “It needs to encourage private-sector activity”. On the other hand, he notes, initiatives can only be launched where the necessary infrastructure exists. Creating that infrastructure is a job for government. So some co-ordinates for public private partnerships are already defined.
Help for those most in need
According to Kerry McNamara of the World Bank's Information for Development Programme (infoDev), politicians need to lay foundations for active, innovative and appropriate development of the ICT sector. And they need to guarantee that the entire population gets access. The main focus is growth, development and poverty reduction. Local innovative potential needs to be cultivated not only to promote local economic development but also for reasons of subsidiarity: “Don’t forget the forgotten and think twice about providing further advantages to the advantaged.”
As director of Brazil's regulatory authority for communication ANATEL, Marcos Bafutto has found that every country needs a national strategy: “The ICT sector requires stable conditions, rule of law, credibility, dependability, binding rules, fair competition, technological neutrality, planning reliability and above all transparency”. That, he says, is why regulatory authorities are needed. They guarantee equal opportunities for all market players and ensure fair prices. Which is often a difficult balancing act. Thomas Ganswindt, member of the corporate executive committee of Siemens AG and the United Nations ICT Task Force, appeals for trust in market mechanisms but says they can only work efficiently where political and legal conditions are dependable and transparent. Only then can genuine competition develop. In most cases, Ganswindt finds that it is not lack of money but a surfeit of risk that slows down investment. Politicians and officials, he says, should intervene only if the market fails to work effectively on its own. He believes that traditional development aid mechanisms no longer meet modern requirements.
Rapid progress requires a change in donor practice. Pierre Dandjinou, the United Nations Development Programme's regional advisor on ICT for Development in Senegal, is disappointed with the lack of commitment shown by many donor countries at present. He believes the key to solving Africa's problems lies in creating a functioning infrastructure. What people need, he says, is easy and affordable access to the Internet.
With Herculean tasks like that to be performed, Klemens van de Sand, the German Development Ministry's Commissioner for the Millennium Development Goals, advises the donor community to see first what the private sector does. He knows that governments are often part of the problem: “There needs to be a political will to achieve the Millennium Goals”. However, Shaun Lake, the managing director of the South African company Global Trade Training, increasingly finds the private ICT sector competing with development cooperation projects, which is bad news for everyone: “For the private sector it is frustrating to see that the donors are issuing numerous pilot projects without taking into account existing practical experiences”.
For Peter Zangl of the European Commission's Directorate-General Information Society and Media believes participants in the Second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS II) in November 2005 in Tunis face no lesser task than steering a technological revolution around the world: “We must make sure that everybody catches this train. At WSIS II there must be a move from plan to action.” As President of the Preparatory Committee for WSIS II, Janis Karklins sees good chances of the summit doing that. He believes that achieving the MDGs and bridging the digital divide are two sides of the same coin – and that politicians and private sector need to work together: “Governments and companies share similar long term development goals – social and economic development”.
Dr. Christian Taaks
works for the International Cooperation and Policy Advice Institute of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation in Potsdam, the InWEnt Development Policy Forum as well as other organisations.
c.taaks@t-online.de
This article was prompted by the international policy dialogue “Mainstreaming ICTs for Development: the Key Role of the Private Sector” staged in June 2005 by the InWEnt Development Policy Forum and the Federal Government. Print documentation is available from the Development Policy Forum in Berlin. A more detailed version in English can be viewed online at
http://www.inwent.org/themen_reg/ef/events/ict/index.en.shtml
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