What Now After The Geneva WSIS?

Abel Caine...Fiji's lone delegate to the Geneva summit.

After the industrial revolution, it is the information revolution that has most significantly changed the way we communicate, work, do business and live our lives. Mass media thinker Marshall McLuhan's idea of the global village first mooted in the sixties is now a reality: what with the ubiquity of cell phones, global instant messaging, Internet kiosks, satellite telephony. It is now technically possible to reach any individual or group of people anywhere in the world from anywhere in the world. Just a minute though: the operative word here is "technically". Yes, the technology, popularly termed ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), for connecting every person in the world with every other exists. However, the money, political will and the spirit of cooperation are, as usual, in short supply. These indeed are the major impediments in the transformation of the world into a truly information-based society.

The recently concluded WSIS (World Summit on the Information Society) addressed exactly these issues. Attended by 12,000 delegates from all over the world, the summit, hosted in Geneva, Switzerland, between 10 and 12 December, debated, discussed and drafted a resolution for submission to a body consisting of 54 heads of state and 83 lawmakers from different countries to take up measures that will interconnect at least half the world's population by 2015. The Geneva summit could be largely termed an agenda-setting exercise. A second summit is to be held in Tunis in 2005 as a follow-up to the Geneva summit, an exercise that will hopefully benchmark progress after the December 2003 summit and set up milestones to the lofty ideal of connecting half the world in the decade after.

The summit's biggest success has been to bring ICT to world centre stage as perhaps the most important tool for human development in the decades to come. The thousands of delegates were drawn from government, cutting-edge information and communication technology, NGOs, social development organisations, content providers and had wide representation from almost all stakeholders of the communication process. Over 1000 organisations participated. It was their inputs that went into the draft resolution aimed at making ICTs work for making the world a better place to live. The success of the summit underscored the fact that ICT has really come to be an extension of basic human rights like the freedom of expression and the freedom to communicate freely. It also acknowledged the power of ICTs in education, poverty alleviation, health and governance besides its central role in one-to-one and mass communication.

ICTs have proved beyond doubt their tremendous capability to propel economic growth and better standards of living; spread literacy and knowledge to the remotest locations on earth; engender greater transparency in government at all levels leading to good governance besides opening new markets and providing new, never-before business tools like e-commerce. Countries that have adopted ICTs rapidly have grown faster than those that have been lax. In fact, development indices are increasingly factoring in connectivity and bandwidth consumption as determinants of human development. On which side of the digital divide a country is will increasingly count in the coming decades. This will impact economic growth, trade and integration into the global economy.

ICT development in the Pacific region has been slow and patchy owing to a number of factors like scarce investment in infrastructure, monopolistic government policies in the delivery of services resulting in high costs for end-users and low penetration of personal computers. Yet, some spectacularly successful ICT projects in Small Islands Developing States (SIDS) were showcased at the Geneva jamboree. Notable among these were the People for Net (PfNet) project in the Solomon Islands that has been aided by UNDP (United Nations Development Programme) and ICT4D projects in Samoa. PfNet came in for praise from several quarters for extending e-mail and other e-services to places that did not even have power supply. Indeed PfNet is a fine illustration of what technology can achieve when aided by a conducive policy environment.

Pacific islands nations were under-represented at the summit and the relative seriousness with which those countries that sent representatives took the summit and their attitude to ICTs seemed to be reflected in the level of functionaries that they sent. While Tonga sent Prince ŒUlukalala Lavaka Ata, its Prime Minister who is also minister for communication, Samoa sent its minister for communication and information technology, its prime minister having had to drop out at the last moment. Fiji's foreign affairs minister also opted out and an assistant manager in the government's ICT development project represented the country. While Tonga and Samoa sent lawmakers, Fiji sent an official.

The Tongan prime minister reiterated his country's faith in the capability of ICTs to contribute to social uplift and went on to add: "It (policy) should be centered on the need to give every citizen access to ICT tools so that all individuals can share the benefits of the technology." He further pointed out that his government's liberalisation policies had resulted in competition among service providers resulting in a sharp decline in access rates: a lesson other islands states would do well to emulate. Samoan ICT users too have a choice of service providers, unlike Fiji's.

The PfNet case study, addresses by Tongan and Samoan lawmakers and by Fiji's sole representative, set the agenda for the Pacific island nations' stake in the ICT pie. Not only were their concerns taken note of, but they also stand to benefit from several outcomes of the Summit. For one, the Overseas Investment Corporation (OPIC) of the United States will establish a preliminary US$400 million support facility to encourage US investment in the telecommunications and information technology sectors of emerging markets. The OPIC facility will support US investments in telecommunications and IT projects that promote the use of ICT-based products, networks, services and applications. Incidentally, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Palau and the Marshall Islands are already benefiting from current initiatives of OPIC. This will likely be scaled up.

Secondly, SIDS could soon have a representative on the United Nations Information and Communications Technology (UNICT) Taskforce. This would make the SIDS voice be effectively heard on the issues and concerns of ICT deployment in the region's many states. However, how the countries will go about selecting a mutually acceptable representative and how they will balance their different perspectives on ICT is a challenge that will have to be met.

Between now and 2005, the agenda is to take ICTs to schools, universities, medical centres, public libraries, post offices and every government office that interfaces with people. The declaration underscores the inclusiveness of the ICT vision in emphasising that developing nations: including SIDS: be made part of all agendas. Recent developments in the region have had governments and the media at loggerheads, especially in Tonga, Papua New Guinea and Fiji.

For all the complexity of political, economic, financial, technological and governance issues of ICTs, the summit seems to have achieved a lot in terms of fostering a common globally inclusive vision for deploying ICTs for the betterment of millions of lives across the world in the time frame of just over a decade. This is a great opportunity for SIDS as it is for the rest of the developing world. How well the islands nations rise to the occasion will have to be seen in the coming months.

€ Dev Nadkarni is coordinator of the journalism programme and senior lecturer print, online and new media at the University of the South Pacific. The views expressed here are his own and not necessarily those subscribed by his employer.