Part2: Development and Donor Trends: Information and Development = the new new? (from the Background Paper for Communication for Development Roundtable)

Debates and focus on the potential of communication technologies, combined with a growing understanding and acknowledgement of the role of information and "knowledge" in development, have helped to transform donor and international agency attitudes to the role of information in development. Five years ago, the role of communication and information in alleviating poverty, promoting equity and achieving sustainable development remained in the same position as it had for many years: on the margins of development agendas.

Today, the role of information, knowledge, communication and advocacy in development is better recognised and arguably has a higher profile than ever before. While these areas continue to be chronically underresourced and continue to face major evaluation challenges in terms of demonstrating impact and sustainability, they have moved emphatically from the periphery to the mainstream of donor agendas.

There are many reasons for this shift, with governments increasingly recognising the development implications of transational information flows, of the concerns over the "digital divide", the potential of new communication technologies, and the growing characterisation of humanity living increasingly in global information societies driven by global knowledge economies. Perhaps the key events and trends have been:

The Knowledge Debate

In December 1998, the World Bank focused its keynote World Development Report on Knowledge for Development. In doing so, the Bank was signalling its own intended transformation from being principally an economic entity into becoming a "knowledge bank", where the expertise and accumulated wisdom that it held and could access was becoming as important as the money it could lend and dispense.

The report sparked substantial debate both within the development community and within the Bank itself, with many welcoming the shift as a further sign of the evolution of the Bank's thinking away from a "postWashington consensus" view of economics to one which was more socially oriented. Others criticised the Bank for its apparent view that the principal problem facing developing countries was one of ignorance, combined with fears in conflating the terms "information" and "knowledge", that the report apparently did not address the problem of who judges what is and is not knowledge.

The centrepiece of the Bank's "knowledge bank strategy was the development of a new Global Development Gateway, a highly controversial internet initiative designed to bring together on one supersite all the available "knowledge" on development issues. The initiative met with criticism from civil society organisations who argued (and continue to argue) that it represented an unnecessarily duplication and competition to existing initiatives, that editorial control of the site is too heavily centralised within the Bank itself or within participating governments, that while consultation processes around the Gateway have been significant very little change has resulted from them, that the Gateway, in attempting to centralise information in one place, ignores the fundamental advantage of the internet in enabling a highly decentralised architecture in information recovery; and that the exercise is an unjustifiably expensive use of Bank funds. The Gateway however has been developed and still plans to be the largest portal for development information in the world (www.developmentgateway.org).

The Bank also went on, among several other initiatives, to support the Global Knowledge Partnership, a major grouping of donors, governments, international organisations and some civil society organisations which organised a major Global Knowledge II conference in Kuala Lumpur in 2000 (itself a follow up to an earlier "GK" conference in Toronto in 1997.) That conference mapped out a "Global Knowledge Action Plan" which committed key participants to supporting a range of initiatives under the general titles of Facilitating knowledge exchange and content creation; Building networks and partnerships; Addressing policy and regulatory frameworks; Promoting advocacy, empowerment and governance; and Promoting community based social development.

ICTs and poverty

The debate on knowledge was inextricably linked, and largely driven by, the increasing recognition of the potential of communication technologies in development. While some organisations closely connected to Communication for Development Roundtable meetings, such as IDRC have been pioneering and advocating the use of ICTs for many years, it is only in the last half decade that they have so radically begun to inform development strategies and agendas.

A series of major conferences, policy initiatives, and international reports have contributed to this change. It is impossible to list here all the hundreds of events that have occurred over the last two or three years in this area although two recent developments are perhaps worth highlighting here.

Human Development Report 2001

One is the Human Development Report 2001, Making technologies work for human development, a bold and highly optimistic report arguing that both information and genetic technologies offer huge promise in tackling fundamental poverty "Often those with the least have least to fear from the future" and it put forward six main arguments.

1. The technology divide does not have to follow the income divide, and throughout history, technology has been a powerful too for human development and poverty reduction.
2. The market is a powerful tool of technological progress, but it is not powerful enough to create and diffuse the technologies needed to eradicate poverty.
3. Developing countries may gain especially high rewards from new technologies, but they also face especially severe challenges in managing the risks.
4. The technology revolution and globalization are creating a network age, and that is changing how technology is created and diffused.
5. Even in the network age, domestic policy still matters. All countries, even the poorest, need to implement policies that encourage innovation, access and the development of advanced skills.
6. National policies will not be sufficient to compensate for global market failures. New international initiatives and the fair use of global rules are needed to channel new technologies towards the most urgent needs of the world's poor people.

The G8 DOTForce

In 2000, the G8 countries at their Okinawa meeting made the issue of communication technologies a major theme of their summit. The summit, which was held on an island inaccessible to protesters, drew criticism from many civil society organisations for failing to take significant action on developing country debt relief (thus prompting the burning of laptop computers in protest). The summit did nevertheless follow through on its commitment to set up a Digital Opportunities Task (DOT) Force.

The DOT Force was a highly unusual initiative for the G8, with task forces constituting in each G8 country of a representative each from government, industry and civil society, with additional representatives from a small number of developing countries. The report of the DOT Force was finalised in mid 2001 and presented and approved at its Genoa meeting, although the issues it dealt with were overshadowed by the focus on the violence surrounding the meeting, and the focus on anti globalisation protests.

The DOTForce made 9 key recommendations which it committed itself to implementing (full report at www.dotforce.org):

Action Point 1: Help establish and support developing country and emerging economy e strategies

Action Point 2: Improve connectivity, increase access and lower costs

Action Point 3: Enhance Human Capacity Development, Knowledge Creation and Sharing

Action Point 4: Foster Enterprise and Entrepreneurship for sustainable economic development

Action Point 5: Establish and support universal participation in addressing new international policy and technical issues raised by the internet and ICT

Action Point 6: Establish and support dedicated initiatives for the ICT inclusion of the least developed countries

Action Point 7: Promote ICT for Health Care and in support against HIV/AIDS and other infectious and communicable diseases (3)

Action Point 8: National and international effort to support local content and applications creation

Action Point 9: Prioritise ICT in G8 and other development assistance policies and programmes and enhance coordination of multilateral initiatives.

The UN ICT Task Force

A new ICT Task Force has just been launched and is mandated by UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan to find new, creative and quick-acting means to spread the benefits of the digital revolution from which four billion of the world's people are currently excluded.

The members of the Task Force come from the public and private sectors, from civil society and the scientific community, and from leaders of the developing as well as the most technologically advanced countries.

Task Force priorities, below, are defined by the ECOSOC 2000 Ministerial Declaration.

1. To forge strategic partnerships between the United Nations system, private industry, trusts and foundations, donor governments, programme countries, and other relevant international actors.
2. To pool the experiences of both developed and developing countries in introducing and promoting ICT for development.
3. To develop innovative modalities for strengthening the ICT capacity of the developing countries.
4. To assist Member States in creation of national ICT strategies, policy frameworks, and regulatory environment to ensure connectivity and universal access to ICT.
5. To promote ICT for development applications: building human resources and institutional capacity, including e-health, e-education, e-government, and e-commerce.
6. To mobilise new and additional resources - financial, technical, and human - for promoting and funding ICT-for-development programmes and projects.

Further information can be found at www.unicttaskforce.org

ICTs leading to a wider analysis of the role of information in development

While many donors and international agencies are fundamentally reviewing their approach to communication technologies, for some this is also leading to a more fundamental thinking on the role of information in development per se. The ICT debate is combining with debates on a wider set of issues, such as knowledge, good governance, global inclusion and a greater focus on development strategies being owned by developing country societies, to create increasing institutional debates and renewed interest in the role of information in development.

A Global Civil Society

Another major, and accelerating, development over recent years is the emergence of a global civil society. While increasingly strong and dynamic civil societies at a national level have been developing and been recognised for several years, the scale and impact of a global civil society, principally enabled by ease of communication through email and the web, is a more recently recognised phenomenon. The publication of an inaugural Global Civil Society Yearbook in 2001 by the London School of Economics saw the coming of age of this concept (see The Yearbook online).

It is arguably the women's movement which has been at the forefront of this development, first with the evolution of a formidably organised, coherent and effective caucus around the Beijing and Cairo conferences, and more recently with a series of initiatives carving out international spaces on the internet and using this to take forward a global movement.

One example is WomenWatch, a joint UN project to create a core Internet space on global women's issues. It was created to monitor the results of the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995. It was founded in March 1997 by the Division for the Advancement of Women (DAW), the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women (INSTRAW), together with other UN and other international partners.

One of the most remarkable of the initiatives from Womenwatch was an online email debate set up in preparation for Beijing +5 review with 10,000 individuals joined an online debate which covered 12 critical areas of concerns, each area of debate running for 6 weeks. 1,000 people contributed substantively to the debate, the average ratio: 52% from north, 48% from south. The debate generated information on shared and unique obstacles, lessons and practices. A summary, archives and full report available on the WomenWatch website at www.un.org/womenwatch/forum

Another key development is the emergence of Oneworld.net, a global network of civil society organisations, with a partnership now of more than 1,200 civil society partners grouped around a growing network of 10 Oneworld Centres.

Although not explicitly civil society based, another major portal in the field of communications has emerged in the form of the Communication Initiative. A combination of the interest in new technologies, an increasing recognition of the importance of the role of communication in development, and a hunger among communication practitioners worldwide for better information sharing and understanding on communication issues was captured very successfully by the creation of The Communication Initiative (www.comminit.com). The Initiative is a partnership of major development organisations seeking to support advances in the effectiveness and scale of communication interventions for positive international development. The Initiative has become the key point of reference for debates and news for communication practitioners in this field.

World Summit on the Information Society

While it is impossible to list all the initiatives currently underway in the information and communication field, one other development is worth highlighting. The International Telecommunication Union is organising a major two stage "summit", the World Summit on the Information Society, the aim of which is to develop a common vision and understanding of the Information Society and to draw up a strategic plan of action for concerted development towards realizing this vision. The Summit will also provide a unique opportunity to gather the world community to assemble at a high level and to develop a better understanding of this revolution and its impact. It aims to bring together Heads of State, Executive Heads of United Nations Agencies, industry leaders, non-governmental organizations, media representatives and civil society. The summit takes place in two stages, first in Geneva in 2003 and then in Tunis in 2005. Further information can be found at www.itu.int/wsis/index.htm

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(3) This item is of particular relevance to this roundtable. It committed the G8 to:

a) Enhance the valuable uses of ICT in health education, knowledge sharing, monitoring, statistics, and delivery of care and in meeting internationally agreed health targets, particularly in the areas of HIV/AIDS and other infectious and communicable diseases.

b) Expand the use of ICT in the campaign against HIV/AIDS and other infectious and communicable diseases utilising appropriate forms of communication such as community radio, broadcast media, telecommunications and the Internet. The initiative should be focussed in severely affected areas with content, applications and strategies shared and replicated more broadly.

c) Create an "ICT Against HIV/AIDS" network in partnership with governments, the private sector, non-profit and international organizations emphasizing a) the logistical and management aspects of treatment in the field, and b) preventative measures through the dissemination of information to the general public, health sector professionals and policy makers