Despite real progress on some fronts, there remain dramatic disparities in levels of human development: the digital divide is threatening to exacerbate the existing social and economic inequalities between countries and communities.
The principal objective of the World Summit on the Information Society should be the identification of strategies and actions that would mainstream ICT into the work aimed at achieving the Millennium Development Goals, which provide the wider social, economic and political context.
One third of the world's population has never made a telephone call. Seventy percent of the world's poorest live in rural and remote areas, where access to information and communications technologies, even to a telephone, is often scarce. Most of the information exchanged over global networks such as the Internet is in English, the language of less than 10 percent of the world's population.
In response to these growing concerns, in March 2001, the United Nations Economic and Social Council requested the Secretary-General to establish an Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) Task Force. The Council recognized the tremendous potential of the digital revolution for economic growth, poverty eradication and sustainable development. Countries in which most people do not have access to the new technologies cannot play a full part in the new global economy at a time when knowledge acquisition and information are becoming pre-requisites for human development and progress. And the longer they remain outside the global economy, the harder and costlier it will be to catch up. The digital divide must then be bridged before it is too late.
In order to spread ITCs and their benefits to the developing world, intensified cooperation and strong commitment among the private and non-profit sectors will be required.
The private sector - through innovation, risk taking and investment - can help develop a country's ICT infrastructure. The private sector can contribute to achieving development goals with investments that can produce a positive impact on social and economic development outcomes. Companies can do well by doing good. First, they can help devise ICT solutions that are built to last. Secondly, they can participate in public private initiatives that are driven by user demands, identified and realized through direct participation and ownership. Thirdly, such initiatives should be sensitive to local conditions and limitations. And finally, initiatives should be explicit about their development goals and how they will have a direct impact on the target population. All these aspects suggest that ICT interventions focusing on development goals must address a variety of interrelated dimensions to secure an enduring impact. The potential impact of ICT interventions would be far greater if they were conceived in conjunction with private sector economies. There is no doubt that the private sector could be a great asset to ICT initiatives in developing countries.
Governments, on the other hand, can play a role in providing a favourable policy and pro-competitive environments to ensure market fairness and flexibility as well as exercising leadership through strategic investments in ICT applications and content.
If public and private partnerships are built on complementarities between the profit motive of the private sector and human development goals, we can achieve sustainable results and the harmonious development of a global networked society.
The UN-ICT Task Force is helping to build partnerships in key areas such as low-cost connectivity access, human resources development and capacity building, and business enterprise and entrepreneurship. It also provides a platform to analyse how programmes for promoting education, combating disease, promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women, and those targeting youth, the disabled and people living in poverty in general, can be leveraged and enhanced with ICT.
Our objective is to work towards an ambitious but achievable agenda, in which progress would offer all human beings a chance of achieving lifelong prosperity. We have begun to transform our societies and together we can and must find our way towards a universal and inclusive information society in which wealth creation and social well-being go hand in hand.
* Challenges and partnerships -A contribution of the United Nations Information and Communication Technologies Task Force to the World Summit on the Information Society - ICT News
