Harnessing ICTs for development

Harnessing ICTs for development

Good evening ladies and gentlemen of this august gathering, thank-you for renting me this podium for a few moments to share my thoughts with you about an issue that is very dear to my heart.

This issue is more than an issue – it is a mission – an almost evangelical mission to encourage the use of information and communication technologies – or ICTs - for development.

The dust has not yet settled from the World Summit on the Information Society held in Tunis last week. And already people are asking: “why did we have that Summit? What’s so important about ICTs? Surely computers and cellphones are just tools?”

We did not have a UN Summit for the Car; for the telephone or even for anti-iotics. Why then do we have a Summit for the Internet? What is so special about this invention that mostly carries pornography anyway?

Bear with me for a few moments, and I will attempt to answer these very valid questions.

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World leaders, ministers, captains of industry and a vast array of non-governmental organisations gathered in the Tunisian capital to discuss ways to re-shape the future of the Internet and to explore better methods of harnessing the latest information and communication technologies (ICTs) for development purposes.

In short they were trying to find ways of bridging the digital divide.

In an effort to achieve these goals – 46 Heads of State and Government, Crown Princes and Vice-Presidents as well as 197 Ministers/Vice Ministers and Deputy Ministers representing every corner of our globe, delivered literally hundreds of speeches extolling the virtues of the World Wide Web and of the latest cell phone technology. More than 300 parallel events ran concurrently with the Summit. These events included panel debates; round table discussions; book launches and practical demonstrations of the latest gadgets.

At the end of all this hoopla, what did the nineteen thousand people who attended the Summit actually produce? Will there be any tangible benefits for those who are using the latest ICTs, or even better still, for those who would use the latest ICTs if they could – (pause) - if they had access!

The easy answer would be to dismiss the whole affair as a talk shop – or a junket for officials travel the world at government expense. But such a facile answer would ignore some very valuable outcomes that will, over the medium term, bring immense value to the under-privileged majority of our country and of our continent.

To understand why I say this, let us take a closer look at some of these outcomes.

At the formal level – the World Summit on the Information Society produced two high level documents – a political declaration of principles entitled “The Tunis Commitment” and a plan of action dubbed “The Tunis Agenda for the Information Society”.

The two documents implemented together would see an ideal world born in the next few years. In this ideal world the ICT haves, would help the ICT have-nots broaden access to the latest technologies and soon, all governments would be able to offer health care, education and e-government amongst other social benefits, to their entire populations.

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), delineated at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2000 – would all be attained by 2015.

This is not going to happen. And it’s not going to happen for a variety of reason that time will not allow me to discuss here.

But at least goal posts have been set up. At least governments, businesses and civil society know what they should be striving for. Now they can work on how to implement the plan of action and how to make best use of ICTs for development purposes.

The Summit also came up with an innovative way of contributing towards a digital solidarity fund. A Golden Book was set up online where donors can publicly commit funding or technical expertise to assist in development related projects.

However, the abovementioned outcomes, as valuable as they might be, pale into insignificance when compared with what is, in my view, the most valuable of all outcomes at such a meeting.

(some suspense here)

This immensely valuable, yet frustratingly intangible outcome is the one that can have lasting consequences long after anyone even remembers the Tunis Summit.

This incredibly valuable benefit is education.

If there is no other outcome of the World Summit on the Information Society – then the educational aspect would still have made it worth the millions spent on the two phase summit.

When the Summit was originally conceived in the late nineties – an education was not one of the goals envisioned.

But in the end, the years or preparations, months of inter-sessionaries, weeks of Prepcoms, and hectic days of Summits in Geneva and Tunis provided an intense education for the hundreds of thousands of people who participated in the arduous process.

Diplomats, who had never heard of a Domain Name System, (DNS) now easily talk about the DNS; government officials who used to think that a server, was someone who brought you your meals, now debate intensely about why Africa should have its own root server; while business people and civil society activists compare the merits of open source versus proprietary software.