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ECOSOC
2000 Information
TechnoLogy When a Bangladesh-based microcredit institution issued business loans to farm-village women so they could purchase cell phones, the concept of poor people selling phone services to other poor people was looked at by many as an hopeless idea. But isolated farmers were able to increase sales by renting use of the cellulars to find out when and where market conditions were profitable, avoiding long treks for little return. Then the farmers began coordinating regional marketing strategies over the phone, stabilizing profits and building the economies of their villages. The farming community of Pastocalle, Ecuador, located 3,000 metres high in the Andes, found itself directly in the path of crop-eating army ants. Local agricultural authorities were called in, but the ants remained unstoppable. With luck, Pastocalle came into contact with a woman from an international non-governmental organization who specialized in linking community networks via the Internet. The community previously had pooled funds to buy a single computer with Internet access, and a call was sent out. Within days, a community in Peru suggested an organic material that is easily found in the Andes, and spreading it on the fields proved an effective deterrent to the ants. A research institute in New Delhi, India, placed a computer screen in the outside of its compound wall, facing a slum neighbourhood. There was a point-and-click mouse attached, but no keyboard. Within weeks, slum children who had never touched a computer learned by trial and error how to access sites and save pages, even enter information. Observers dispatched by the software company discovered that the children had developed their own language to describe what they were making happen. The commercial transformation that began not more than five years ago, when a handful of advanced technology companies began aggressively marketing their products over the newly established World Wide Web. The transformation of the Internet into a mass-market is now commonly compared in scope and impact to the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century. How important it is for the countries of the South to catch up with the new information economy and the emerging global knowledge society~ and their means of doing so, are issues that the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations is taking up as the main theme of its year 2000 session. Information technology (IT) enthusiasts, including a growing cadre within the Third World, are looking for miracles. As the above stories suggest, access to information technology and Internet connectivity can catapult small and medium-sized firms in emerging economies, and even local artisan guilds in the poorest and most isolated regions, directly into the heart of regional, national and global markets. Information technology can help leapfrog the shortcomings of conventional services and infrastructure, such as poor transportation, lack of access to conventional communication services and to information in all fields of human experience. The effects of disasters can be stymied. Lives can be saved as when surgeons carry out operations with a live videoconferencing link to specialists on the other side of the globe. IT, a product of the intellect, tends to stimulate and multiply the returns on human ingenuity wherever it travels. But on the other side of the equation is the prospect that an increasingly greater proportion of the world’s wealth and economic activity will be shuttling in digital form between the most electronically advanced countries, pushing less developed nations further to the margins of the global economy. Lack of useable telecommunication infrastructure widely accessible, high-capacity telecommunication lines that make large-scale Internet affordable is a big hurdle. Fortunately, some solutions are at hand. Ocean-crossing submarine fibre-optic cable systems have virtually unlimited capacity for communication of words, pictures and data. At the local level, mobile phones allow Internet access in areas where landlines are unavailable. Pared-down Internet information can be transmitted on the second generation digital mobile phones currently in use, and third generation phones, developed in conjunction with the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) a member of the UN family should allow better quality and transmission speeds even higher than current fixed-line technology. Difficulties, possibly even harder to overcome than the technological ones, are found also in the realms of political, business, cultural and legal practices. Business-to-consumer electronic commerce, for example, involves transactions conducted using credit facilities over the Internet. But in many countries, credit cards are rare, upfront cash payments are popular even with large-scale enterprises, face-to-face relations and bargaining are essential to doing business, and the local language is rarely found and difficult to use on the Internet. Order of magnitudeThe. ITU’s I 999 ‘ Internet for Development’’ Report shows that fewer than 6 per cent of Internet users are to be found in developing regions of the world, which account for some 84 per cent of the world’s population. A similar disparity is found in the distribution of Internet hosts worldwide. According to1 999 figures from the ITU’s, 5.9% of all Internet hosts were in developing countries (3.7% in developing Asia-Pacific,1.9 % in Latin America and the Caribbean and 0.3% in Africa). A major or indicator of e-commerce capability is the worldwide distribution of secure Internet servers (capable of handling encrypted on-line payments). In 1998, only 4.3 per cent were located outside of the top 29 technologically advanced countries. IT and developmentThe implications of how and whether the rest of the world’’ can catch up with the advanced countries goes far beyond the question of how far and how fast First World firms should invest and seek markets. More basically, IT is perhaps the central development issue at the dawn of the new Millennium. Not only are the new technologies the key to unlocking economic growth; they impinge on and can impact virtually all of the most pressing global issue: health, education, the advancement of women, cross-border and cross-cultural, understanding and tolerance. The public sector - national governments and international agencies - has a key role to play. The triumph of the Internet is widely regarded as a by-product of unfettered entrepreneurialism, but it would not have achieved such remarkable growth and popularity without a reliable and well developed infrastructure and effective public policy. Increased Internet accessibility in all sectors of the world’s population will require a variety of public policy and regulatory issues that encourage greater Internet diffusion. In his report to the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan states that for tile immediate future, the individual consumer model of using information technology that prevails in the industrialized countries will prove too expensive for many developing ones. Internet users in most developing countries, for example, pay a high price for installation of fixed lines, and are hit with high local connect charges and Internet provider fees. The cost of leased lines used by Internet Service’ Providers to transmit Internet traffic is also steep. Finally, developing countries are disadvantaged by the Internet ‘s wholesale pricing model, which obliges their Internet Service Providers to pay for the cost of each end-to-end connection to United States Internet backbones, even though the traffic is two-way. International agencies are working to extend the reach of the new information technologies. The Trade Point Programme of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development is bringing on-line trading and paperless customs clearing to more than 70 developing countries. The UNDP is setting up village- level cybercafes, which bring Internet and fax services to rural areas, and the ITU is working to provide developing economies with the communication infrastructure needed to take advantage of the new digital economy. National governments have taken a hand. A 50-kilometer long Multi Media Super Corridor has been constructed by the Malaysian government in the newly created city of Cyberjaya. In Nepal, the government has liberalized access to the Internet via satellite (using VSATs: Very Small Aperture Terminals), making Nepal one of the cheapest countries in the region for Internet access. Argentina has established a special prefix for dialing into an Internet Service Provider, allowing for discounted calls and a single, nation-wide price for areas without local providers. Chile has also set up a system whereby Internet calls are charged at half the local rate, and the national telecommunications company in Indonesia has contracted with a local service provider to allow for lower public access rates and widespread availability in cities and towns. Conversely, IT has benefited governments. In Mali, a new Government Intranet is making public services faster, more effective and more transparent. In short, national legislation and regulatory structures are critical to how far and how fast the new information technologies spread. There is no easy fix, Secretary-General Kofi Annan says in his Millennium report,for the institutional impediments in many developing countries, above all unsupportive regulatory environments and exorbitant charges imposed by national authorities. ECOSOC IT Programme The Charter of the United Nations mandates the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) a global presence in coordinating development policies, tantamount in importance to the financial role of the Bretton Woods institutions. ECOSOC has chosen to focus on the issue of how IT can best work for development at its high-level segment, chaired by ECOSOC President Makarim Wibisono (Indonesia) and taking place 5-7 July in New York. United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, World Trade Organization Director Mike Moore, UNDP Administrator Mark Malloch Brown, ITU Secretary-General Yoshio Utsumi and UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero will lead the discussion. They will be joined by the new Managing Director or a high-level representative, of the International Monetary Fund. Ministers dealing with information technology or development from more than 50 countries also are expected to attend and to participate in the July meeting. Recommendations from the ECOSOC meeting will be reported to the Millennium Assembly of the United Nations, opening in September in New York. Staged concurrently with the high-level ECOSOC meeting will be an unprecedented public exhibit at UN Headquarters, bringing together educational displays by private sector firms from around the globe, international agencies and Governments. Leading up to ECOSOC’s high-level meeting are a series of panel discussions, as well as a series of regional meetings taking place on five different continents. Expert discussions, working groups and regional meetings are organized by the ECOSOC bureau, with support from the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs and the regional commissions. Full partners in the ECOSOC IT campaign are international agencies, funds, and programmes from the UN family of organizations, including the World Bank, the UN Development Programme, the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, the International Telecommunication Union, the World Intellectual Property Organization, the International Labour Organization, the United Nations Environment Programme, the United Nations University and the United Nations Fund for International Partnership. Journalists without UN credentials who wish to attend ECOSOC iT events should send a letter of assignment to fax number (212) 963-4642, and follow-up with a call to the UN Media Accreditation Unit at (212) 963-7164.
Information materials are posted on the ECOSOC 2000 IT web site at: un.org/esa/coordination/ecosoc/itforum For more information on the presidency
of ECOSOC 2000, contact the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Indonesia
to the United Nations, ECOSOC IT Events 200023 March 3 April |