digital divide network - article database

The terrorist attacks inflicted upon New York and Washington coincided with the scheduled opening of the 56th session of the UN General Assembly and led, rightly, to its postponement. Current reports suggest that the General Assembly debate will start in November but it could be delayed further for security and policing reasons. In fact, several elements of the General Assembly process have gone ahead, including high-level dialogues on "strengthening international economic cooperation for development through partnership."

One of these dialogues, held on 20 September, set out to address the integration of developing countries in the emerging global information network; in short, how to get them integrated into the ‘internet family’. This follows on from the creation of the UN Information and Communication Technology Task Force, the UNICT which is tasked to set out a strategy for closing the digital divide and ‘respond to the urgency of the challenge facing the world’s poor and emerging economies’. The strategy is development-oriented and no worse for that, but, significantly, its brief has omitted any reference to peace, conflict prevention or conflict resolution. How could this have happened at the United Nations and how it can be addressed and corrected?

The thrust to address the emerging global Digital Divide came about through the World Economic Forum (WEF) which started over 30 years ago, essentially providing a meeting point on European economic issues. Although it has since gone global (Kofi Annan, Simon Peres and Yasser Afarat made high-profile presentations in 2001), it has tended to present such contributions within an economic perspective. Thus, issues relating to peace, conflict prevention and conflict resolution are contained within the domain of others such as governance and development as subsections, if at all. This is understandable as the overwhelming majority of WEF members represent commerce and finance and do not get involved in the conscious pursuit of peace in the course of their normal business.

At its February 2000 meeting, the WEF created the Global Digital Divide Initiative (GDDI), an action-oriented programme which fairly reflected the activities of its principally commercial members. The initiative gathered widespread support, reaching the agenda of the G8 summit in Okinawa in July 2000. The G8 host, Japan, introduced two initiatives in Okinawa. Firstly, a review of the Miyazaki initiatives for conflict prevention and secondly, the creation of the Digital Opportunities Task force, the DOT force , based on the WEF initiative.

Alas, the G8 members chose not to link these two initiatives when setting up the DOT force. The broad-based composition of the DOT force offered the opportunity to address this lacuna but even though the UN was represented by several agencies and, indeed, by ECOSOC, it failed to do so. For their different reasons, the G8 states and the commercial partners shrank from linking development and peace, a nexus taken as a given by all. Further, whether by design or oversight, no organization with interest or experience in the field of peace was invited to join the DOT Force.

Throughout the G8 member states, the DOT force teams set about contributing to a single set of proposals for presentation by sherpas at the G7 summit in Genoa, July 2001. Their final report titled Digital Opportunities for All: Meeting the Challenge including a proposal for a Genoa Plan of Action was completed on 11 May 2001. As expected, peace, conflict prevention and conflict resolution are not mentioned. Anyway, the smoke of Genoa turned out to obscure all but the simplest of messages from the summit and the DOT Force’s recommendations appear to be stuck in the sand already.

But, over the same period, there were those who felt that the UN should not act in a subservient role to the G8. The initial impetus for the UNICT came from a meeting of experts in April 2000 and the endorsement of their proposals by ECOSOC and by the Millennium Summit Declaration (8 Sept 2000). But, inexplicably, issues such as peace, conflict prevention and conflict resolution are not mentioned. Inexplicable? Well, not really as it became clear that leading member states did not want the UN creating another salient it could not sustain. But most interestingly, the UN’s task force is introduced as ‘an innovative public-private partnership under the UN umbrella but with functional autonomy, in which member states, the private sector and nonprofit organizations participate as equal partners in spearheading the effort to bridge the digital divide (to assist) those marginalized or left behind’.

It is clear that such a consortium, like the G8 Dot Force, would never want to tackle issues such as peace and conflict prevention. For many consortium members, the link between peace and development is not an issue, certainly not one they feel comfortable with. Yet for others, it is of utmost importance. It seems that the spillover of this linkage into the lives of the developed world went dismissed. In the interests of building links with global corporations -- check the membership of the task force -- the UN has sacrificed the search for peace on the altar of its vaunted public-private partnership ( www.un.org/partners/business). With nobody challenging the importance of the link between peace and development, how could the UN have so boxed itself into a corner? At a time when the UN’s programmes for Africa are under severe scrutiny and when the Security Council’s members recently embarked on an extended tour of several African states in the cause of peace (not development), the continued exclusion of these vital pre-conditions to sustainable development should be rigorously questioned.

By coincidence, the first APC Africa Hafkin Communications Prize in recognition of outstanding and creative uses of information and communication technologies was awarded in September to the Bayanloco Community Learning Centre in Kaduna State, Nigeria, an initiative of the Fantsuam Foundation led by Kazanka Comfort. Ms. Comfort's work on a women-led peace initiative in the villages, where women act as detectors of potential flash-points of communal violence and as peace brokers, made her realize that fast communication among the rural women could mean the difference between life and death in an emergency situation. She had seen email in action while abroad studying and felt it could be a solution. Let nobody doubt the speed with which the Internet is reaching isolated communities!

The mistaken belief that sustainable development, inward investment flows, indigenous capacity-building, poverty alleviation, transparency in commerce and legal affairs -- and good governance can be attained so effortlessly without utilizing every new tool such as ICT for its application to address the security of and improve the stability of weaker societies will bring further delays to progress -- and frustrate developing nations and donors alike. These are issues which principally affect Africa and, unless this lacuna is addressed and forcefully confronted, we will end up, once again, confusing means with ends.

So, having identified the problem, how can this be corrected? The third declared brief of the UNICT Task Force states that it should "pool the experiences of both developed and developing countries in introducing and promoting ICT for development." I propose that this brief should be amended to end with the words ‘..development, peace, conflict prevention and conflict resolution’. This would clearly flag to all parties, especially the commercial community whose investment in developing countries is so vital, that the sharing of knowledge in these important fields is as much a capacity-building investment as it is in the fields of governance and civil society.

In summary, the United Nations is allowing itself to be pulled in the wrong direction on this matter. Yes, it advocates initiatives for peace but, in this instance, it has allowed itself to be led away from using the most powerful tool for communication it has to hand, the Internet, for the advancement of peace.