Tackling hurdles to growth

By Kalpana Sharma

KUALA LUMPUR, MARCH 12. The Global Knowledge Forum, which brought together over 1,200 people from 120 countries to the Malaysian capital to discuss ways to meet the challenges to development thrown up in the Information Age, ended on Friday with the announcement of an action plan.

The 17 points in the plan consisted of a range of projects from efforts to integrate technological skills in school curricula to supporting global and regional portals for sharing local content to correct the current imbalance in information flows between the North and the South.

The conference, which consisted of several parallel activities, finally came together in the last two days for the action summit where the details of the action plan were finalised. But even as the details of the plan were unveiled at the concluding plenary, it was evident that the interests of the different players who form what is called the Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) vary a great deal.

The GKP was formed three years ago and was an attempt by some governments, as well as the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme, to engage the main players in the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in a dialogue on how best to increase access to these technologies and how effectively to use them for the purposes of development.

The private sector came into the process with well- known companies in the area clearly seeing the advantages of being part of such a partnership. It is evident that many companies in the North are now involved in corporate social responsibility; they see this as a way of expanding their markets and building a corporate image.

For example, some companies have worked with the UNDP to help 40 countries develop the capacity to design websites. In other countries, statistical information services and data banks have been set-up through this process.

In Bangladesh, the Grameen Bank has worked with private entrepreneurs and a multinational company to extend communication networks to remote villages through the use of the mobile phones.

However, an important aspect that emerged, particularly from the Women's Forum and the Media Forum, was the need to look at the content being communicated by the new technologies as the excitement and hype surrounding new technologies tended to overshadow this central aspect.

Indeed, much of the discussion in many fora on the information age has tended to centre around ways to expand the reach of the Internet and increase the speed with which information is transmitted rather than looking at what is being sent out, who is controlling the content of these messages and whether they have any relevance to the people who are at the receiving end.

The Media Forum, in its conclusions, pointed out that most of the content of the Internet at present was actually dominated by the old media, the print media. As a result, the inequities in information flows between North and South were replicated through the Internet.

It also pointed out that even as new technology made it easier for media practitioners in developing countries to access information, the ability to process and use that information remained limited in the absence of a free environment as well as the skills needed to effectively process the information.

Radio broadcasters participating in the Media Forum also emphasised the need to recognise the greater reach of older technologies like radio; it still reaches 80 per cent of the world as compared to the Internet which at present reaches only 10 per cent of people. Yet, the problems that community radio stations face in many countries have not yet been settled in terms of frequencies, programming and licensing procedures.

The issue of accountability of the transnational media, which included control of Internet portals as well as print and broadcast media, was another important issue that was raised. While people recognised the advantages of a media that cannot easily be controlled and thus can be deemed to be free, this also posed the problem of accountability.

In Malaysia, for instance, the positive aspect of the Internet is being used by a group which has launched a daily newspaper on the net to get around the country's strict censorship laws that have effectively silenced and sanitised the media. On the other hand, the growing power of the transnationals was stifling the chances of nascent democracies to develop strong local content in their media; journalists from Estonia revealed that their media were flooded with cheap programming from the North.

The four-day meeting raised more questions than it answered. But it appears to have triggered a process of thinking about issues that arise from the growth and spread of new technologies like the Internet which need to be addressed.

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Section  : International
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