| Archive: Issue 5 - Fall/Winter 1997 |
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| UN
Committee Statement on Information Poverty and Inequality 14. An indication of the magnitude of investment required is seen by the estimate that in Sub-Saharan Africa raising teledensity to 1 telephone mainline per 100 inhabitants (from the current 0.46 mainlines per 100 inhabitants) would require an investment of US$ 8 billion. The estimate assumes, however, that the cost of a mainline closely mirrors the prevailing international prices, whereas experience shows that typically the cost tends to be about three times higher in Sub-Saharan Africa. The enormity and scale of the challenge to provide universal access in basic communication and information services to the developing world would thus make it advisable to focus on the community level and on reinforcing major development missions such as education, rather than the household or individual level. Even so, harnessing and spreading the potential of the new information and communication technologies to developing countries will be a daunting challenge. 15. The organizations of the United Nations system alone cannot undertake this massive and exceedingly costly investment. Such investment will help alleviate poverty and create new livelihoods and open up new markets. We call upon the private sector, governments, civil society and other development organizations to engage with us in a purposeful and systematic endeavour to shape and manage this process by:
16. We are conscious of the fact that modern communication links - and especially Web-based approaches - will materially impact on programmes, programme content, modalities and quality of delivery - and hence on the future of multilateral cooperation and technical assistance per se. For our part, we will accelerate our ongoing internal reform and change processes to create modern, cost-effective and globally networked organizations involving a strengthening of our in-house technical capacities and changing staff attitudes and perceptions, especially among senior managers. Another objective will be to strengthen ties and intensify communication among our far-flung offices opening up opportunities for decentralisation and for an instantaneous presence of technical backup and support. 17. Beyond, we intend to harmonize and coordinate our strategies for modernising and enhancing capacities and effectiveness. The objective will be to create a United Nations system-wide Intranet (Internet for internal usage) to facilitate cooperation among the organizations to ensure integrated exploitation of competencies of organizations and coordination at national level. We shall seek to promote cooperation among our respective organizations through the use of compatible systems which we already pursue through the separate mechanism of the Information Systems Coordination Committee. We aim to ensure the compatibility, accessibility and convergence of communications and computer-based systems. 18. All this must be complemented by constantly updated and well managed web-sites for each of our organizations offering hyperlinks to relevant web-sites both within the UN system and outside. This will confer competence and global authority to our organizations in the electronic age. Indeed, as assessing reliability becomes difficult with more than 65 million web pages on the Internet, the UN system should become web focal points, each in their area of competence. We must strive to make our web sites the foremost entry points for information on poverty, development and sustainability and universal human values and heritage The Information Systems Coordination Committee, which was established in 1994 with the intent of harmonizing approaches of UN organizations and facilitating access to UN related information, has made a good start. 19. We also need to explore and comprehend the implications and potential of the ICT era. Do rapid technological advances trigger the emergence of a right to communicate and a right to access information? What are the consequences for the global labour market, including the gender impact and the role of trade unions, and the international division of labour; the prospects for access to global markets for goods, products and services from developing country economies; opportunities for global sourcing; the scope for participatory approaches involving youth, local and community groups, women and indigenous organizations and other disenfranchised groups; the impact on the elderly; the consequences for traditional postal services; the dimensions of international copyright and trade in services? 20. At present, innovation in terms of ICT technology choices, approaches and content responds by and large to the needs and perceptions of industrialized countries and their business sector. We suggest that innovations for both hardware and software must also become demand- and needs-driven to be able to respond to development objectives and needs. This shift from supply-driven to needs driven approaches must become a global priority and influence the direction and pace of future innovation. Only then can ICT take hold and make a significant impact in developing countries - after all the markets of the future. Among others, this will require the design of products apt for use in electricity-poor environments (including hardware independent from electric power such as solar-based or crank-technology driven) and for use by illiterate people (facilitating accessibility through iconographic software and culturally and linguistically diverse content). But partnership and alliances will be driven both by the technical and financial realities. 21. Thus, we are particularly concerned by the staggering financial needs required to narrow the present gap between information haves and have-nots. A scarcity of funds and insufficient investment flows inevitably hamper the modernization of telecommunication networks and the introduction of promising technologies for advancing sustainable human development. As official development assistance flows are not projected to increase dramatically over the next years, we must stimulate innovative approaches to raise a critical mass of resources. 22. In our view, the sheer magnitude of the task will necessitate the urgent formation of new and novel cooperative mechanisms:
23. We, the heads of the organizations of the United Nations system, have agreed to pursue cooperatively, and in a more systematic manner, the development of strategic approaches to the broad issues of the global information economy and society; therefore, we have agreed to commit ourselves to improving universal access to basic communication and information services. 24. In order to demonstrate our ability to bridge the information gap, we have agreed to undertake through coordinated action, at the country level, pilot projects in the broad areas indicated in the Annex. 25. The involvement of Member States is essential in responding to the challenges of change. We therefore invite the Secretary-General of the United Nations, in his capacity as Chairman of the Administrative Committee on Coordination, to bring the Statement to the attention of the General Assembly, with a view to seeking its endorsement. Executive Heads will also submit the Statement to their respective Governing Bodies. Attachment INDICATIVE AREAS FOR POSSIBLE PILOT PROJECTS 1. Interactive long-distance education and learning: Conventional teaching and learning methods are increasingly unable to respond to the rising demand for learning, driven by burgeoning illiteracy, a dearth of well-qualified teachers and faculty, shrinking public funds for the education sector and the growing acceptance of the concept of life-long learning in a world driven by rapid change. At all levels of the educational process, long-distance education can become a viable complement to conventional schooling and training - in particular reaching out and delivering education services to isolated countries and regions, which often are the poorest. Where even television may prove to be unaffordable, one must rely on radio and the development of community-based media, especially rural radio. 2. Telemedicine: Telemedicine comprises opportunities for medical practice and education through the combination of telecommunication and medical technologies. Telemedicine allows interactive audiovisual communication between physician and practitioner in distant locations, facilitates the exchange of medical information for research and educational purposes and enables diagnostic imaging and clinical analysis from distance to compensate for a lack of specialists or dispense advice to doctors. Electronic means may thus help to improve the quality and delivery of health and reproductive services to rural areas. Access to computer and telecommunication services can help transform the role of health workers and enhance the quality and outreach of health services and preventive health care in underserviced rural communities. 3. Telebanking and micro-credit schemes: Telebanking can assist banks to adjust to the needs of the poor and communicate with the illiterate and poor at the village level and to promote micro-credit schemes. The available technology is tailor-made for a market characterized by a vast, impoverished and mostly illiterate rural population, high crime and widespread fraud 4. Environmental protection and management: Environmental protection and management is a wide field for various applications of information technologies, including sustainable forestry and logging practices, waste management and disposal, support to agricultural extension services, water resource management, managing irrigation and natural resource exploitation. 5. Participatory processes, arrangements and good governance: Communications is not only a means to disseminate knowledge, information and values, it is also a basic component of all democratic societies. Its instantaneous character is bound to affect decision-making in political, economic and business spheres. It will equally impact on democratic (or autocratic) systems and governance structures, their responsiveness, transparency and accountability and strengthen participatory and approaches within civil society, empowering especially women and youth. The technology is apt to create novel structures at the community level to manage individual and public affairs by all stakeholders in sustainable development and empower those most affected by poverty through broad-based access to information and partners. 6. Virtual laboratories for solving development problems. New methods of work which were still unthinkable just a year ago are now possible. By combining the Internet, virtual reality, real time 3D computing, Net-phone technologies, groupware and virtual team work, it is now possible to create permanent "invisible colleges" of scientists working on critical research subjects, at relatively little cost. The principal objective is to link researchers with the special needs and knowledge of the developing countries to the infrastructure and practices already fly established in the developed countries, in order to provide access to scientific know-how and information more quickly, on a larger scale, in an interactive format and to disseminate it most rapidly. These techniques are one solution to the South-North brain drain, allowing scientists from the South to be associated virtually in all key discussions taking place in the world research community. 7. Universal
access to world's knowledge and culture. Public information
institutions, which are natural foci for access to information needed
for development, have not been able to exploit their potential to
the full in developing countries due to immensity of needs and scarcity
of resources. Information and communication technologies provide
the institutions with the means to promote cost-effective, development-oriented
information services for all sectors of society, building on networking
at the national/regional levels. Of particular importance is public
domain information that the info.-market seems to neglect, for different
reasons: insufficient potential profitability, small readership
(or more paradoxically), the public nature of the original data.
Such information should be inventoried, digitized and accessed with
Internet servers through the support of appropriate public policies
on copyright issues related to information technologies, the development
of electronic cultural industries, and promotion of the Internet
as a public utility accessible to all at the lowest possible cost.
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