Honorable Ministers
Distinguished delegates
There is a poster that UNICEF published some years ago which some of you may be familiar with. In that poster a child is asked “What would you like to be when you grow up?’ The child responds, with a very calm face “ALIVE!”
When I had the honor to chair the Council of the International Telecommunications Union in 1999 I suggested to my fellow councilors that to me the UNICEF poster was the most representative picture of the challenge that was before us. I was trying then to remind my colleagues, most of whom, like me, were engineers, that our work was about people’s lives, not just engineering.
Today I am truly honored to have been asked address this august meeting on the subject of accelerating development through Information and Communication Technologies or ICTs. It is my singular pleasure to do so.
I would however like at the outset to say that ICTs are very powerful tools that can be used for both good and bad. Today, thanks to ICTs, we are able to watch a war being raged getting a minute by minute account of killings taking place thousands of kilometers away from us. Wars are also fought using ICTs to identify and destroy lives and property using command and control technology among others. It goes without saying therefore that the use of ICTs, like any other tool, if not in a proper context can bring more harm than good.
Chairperson,
My participation at this Conference convinces me that there is no need to persuade any of the distinguished participants that ICTs can be used to accelerate our development goals. The link between telecommunications and development has been made for many years, mainly by academics. The first international recognition of what is today referred to as the digital divide was in the mid seventies in the report of the ITU High Level Commission chaired by Sir Donald Maitland called the ‘Missing Link’.
About twenty years later, Vice President Al Gore of the United States talked about the Global Information Infrastructure or GII when he addressed delegates to the World Telecommunications Development Conference of the ITU in Buenos Aires. This was a historic speech which was a political recognition of the Internet which he termed a network of networks. It was also the first time that the global nature of this network of networks was brought so sharply into the political consciousness. It is in this speech that the concept of the knowledge economy was also brought into sharp focus when he stated that at that time, in 1994, eight out of every ten new jobs being created in the United States were arising from knowledge economy.
He also informed the delegates that the government had asked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to take measures intended to connect every school and clinic in the USA to the Internet. This was ten years ago.
At that time, although telecommunications were considered as an important part of development, the technology was not really seen as being linked so closely to most of our daily activities in the manner it is today.
While in the US the focus was on the infrastructure in Canada and Europe the emphasis was already on its impact on society hence the term Global Information Society was used as opposed to Global Information Infrastructure.
A year after Buenos Aires Conference, which was a meeting of telecommunications ministers, in 1995, President Mbeki, then in his capacity as Executive Deputy President of South Africa addressed the G7 Summit on the Information Society. In that address President Mbeki called on these leaders to include developing countries in this important dialogue about our common future and invited them to hold a similar conference with leaders from the developing world. The Information Society and Development or ISAD conference then took place in May 1996 in Midrand, South Africa.
The G7 meeting marked the first stages in the involvement of leaders at the highest level in the issues of ICTs and the ISAD conference marked the first international high level meeting linking the Information Society with development.
The recognition of ICTs as an important tool for development increased with time. In 2000 the G8 meeting in Okinawa adopted the Okinawa Charter on the Global Information Society which recognized that these leaders had an important role to play in assisting developing countries to bridge the digital divide. That charter established the Digital Opportunities Task Force or DOT Force made up of the G8 and nine developing countries including Egypt, South Africa and Tanzania. The report from this group was instrumental in shaping many current efforts in this field including those of the UN ICT Task Force and the NEPAD e-Africa Commission.
The past three years have seen the most dramatic changes in how ICTs are perceived and treated. In these years leadership in ICT matters not only moved laterally from being the domain of the ministries of communications but also vertically from being led by Ministers to Heads of State or Government. This alone is a clear demonstration of the central role that these technologies have come to occupy in the development agenda of nations both developing and developed.
This move in how ICTs are treated brought about the need to look more closely at the structural challenges associated with the new central role that ICTs now occupied.
In 2000 the UN ECOSOC High Level Meeting adopted a resolution on this matter which not only became part of the Millennium Declaration but also established an advisory structure to the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the UN ICT Task Force which was appointed in 2001.
In Africa, when NEPAD was adopted by our leaders in 2001 in Lusaka, the development of ICTs was identified as one of the priority programmes for accelerated implementation. NEPAD later established what is now known as the e-Africa Commission. The difference between this Commission and the ICT structures that exist currently such as the Pan African Telecommunications Union ATU is that the e-Africa Commission works not only with ministries of communication but with all ministries depending on the ICT application. This which could be governance, health, education or local content development. It is also not a coincidence that the Commission is chaired by the chairperson of the Commission of the African Union former President of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konare and it is under the Patronage of President Wade of Senegal.
At the national level the countries are also increasingly seeing the need for addressing the institutional challenges linked to the cross-sectoral role of ICTs in development. In South Africa, as Minister Asmal stated in his address, President Mbeki established a Presidential National Commission on the Information Society and Development in February 2001. At that time he also established the Presidential International Advisory Council on the Information Society and Development. This is in line with countries such as Mozambique which has a Commission chaired by the Prime Minister and Finland, Ireland, Australia, Malaysia and a few others.
What is clear is that building the Information Society is not and can no longer be a responsibility of one ministry. Such a task requires a structure with several key ministries of which education is a part.
I may be so bold as to suggest that in fact because of the central role of education in development, the ministries of education should be the natural champions in building the Information Society.
The role of teachers and the need to incentivize the teaching profession not only for those who are already in the profession but also for those youngsters who are yet to decide on their careers is central to building an information society in Africa such that we are equal and active participants in the Global Information Society.
The ITU is the oldest UN agency; it is older than the UN itself. It has done a great job in adapting to and leading the different technological developments starting with the telegraph, then the telephone, the radio, television, global broadcasting and later satellite communications. In all these developments it has maintained a pre-eminent and role establishing standards and regulations as well as assisting with policies. The ITU has however recently not been able to cope with the requirements imposed by the development of the newer technologies such as the Internet. The main reason could be that up until then the issues were mainly technical. There was no need to address issues of content as the separation between the content and the infrastructure was very clear.
The impact of the earlier technologies on people’s lives was not as evident and overwhelming as is the case today. This then brings to the fore the need for an increased and sharper role for UNESCO in matters related to building the Information Society.
The recently concluded World Summit on the Information Society that took place in Geneva last December adopted a Declaration and a Plan of Action. If you allow me, I would like to suggest that UNESCO and the ministries responsible for education and those for culture will need to play a much more significant role in the implementation and further development of these documents in preparation for the second phase of the Summit to be held in November in 2005.
The Declaration reflected for the first time, our common vision in building the Information Society. It linked the building of the Information Society to the achievement of our development goals especially the Millennium Development Goals. The Declaration also adopted the eleven key principles which have associated action lines in the Plan of Action.
Finally the Plan of Action identifies the ten objectives targeted for the year 2015.
As concluding remarks I would suggest or re-iterate the following
a) Building the Information Society is not the preserve of any one ministry but the responsibility of all.
b) In order to build the Information Society effectively and efficiently it is important to ensure that there is leadership and coordination from the highest office
c) Building the Information Society may seem expensive but not doing so will be unaffordable
d) Every cause needs a champion. The role of education in development places a special responsibility on the Ministers of education to be the natural champions for the cause of building the Information Society.
I am well aware of the heavy burden that ministers of education already. However I would like to suggest the following as areas we may look at for implementation in the near future and which we could be of assistance within the context of the NEPAD.
I. The question of the need for developing a policy framework for e-education or e-learning has been discussed extensively as needing urgent attention.
II. There will be a need to look at possible strategies aimed at not only ICT teacher training but also incentives for teachers to embrace this addition to their already tight workload.
III. The ICT sector is very challenging mainly because the technological developments are so rapid. It however requires policies. Familiarization with these technologies by policy makers is essential. The question of putting in place a framework to achieve this needs urgent attention and could be one of the important and urgent areas of collaboration between the NEPAD and UNESCO.
Chairperson,
I started my remarks by recalling the UNICEF poster. I would like to conclude by saying that one of the reasons why that poster meant so much to me is because as a child I grew up as a refugee in some of the African countries represented here today. I recall how every day when I woke up in Morogorogo looking at the beautiful Uluguru Mountains, all I could think of was not their beauty but the fact that South African Defense Force airplanes could emerge from behind those mountains and kill all of us in a few minutes. The difference between me and the child on the poster is that somehow I had hope, given to me by the warmth that I got when I lived with Tanzanians, Zimbabweans, Batswana and Zambians that some day we will be free.
Many children in Africa today however still live without that hope because of our wars. What is more frightening however is that many more will, if we do not act, live in a similar fear not because of wars but because they will be totally marginalized from the rest of world and perhaps re-colonized.
I plead with you therefore to take on what I have taken the liberty to defined as your natural champion role in building the Information Society in Africa so that as President Mbeki put it in his State of the Nation Address ‘ no African child should ever again feel ashamed to be an African’.
Much love to people of the world
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