Mercado laboral

Multilateral (and bilateral) providers of development assistance such as the World Bank and the United Nations are engaged in urgent policy debates concerning the economic growth and poverty reduction potential of ICTs. ICT is in fact conceived of as a new development paradigm by the international donor community (Hilbert, 2001). This wellspring of international support for ICTs is a clear indication of the ways in which its role is perceived within the development industry. Among the most salient international initiatives are the World Summit on Information Society under the auspices of the ITU⁴⁶; the G-8’s Digital Opportunity Task Force (DOT Force); the UN ICT Task Force; UNDP’s Information Technologies for Development Initiative (Info21); the World Bank’s Global Information and Communication Technologies Department (GICT); and the World Bank’s Information for Development (InfoDev) initiative. The UN ICT Task Force (2002:1), for example, is mandated to:

“lend a truly global dimension to the multitude of efforts to bridge the global digital divide, foster digital opportunity and thus firmly put ICT at the service of development for all”.

increasingly accepted to be multidimensional and therefore strategies at every level need to be more flexible to incorporate the heterogeneous contexts and livelihoods of the poor (Carter & May, 2001).

46 The ITU is organising a World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), 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 realising this vision (see http://www.itu.int/wsis/).

The WSIS aims to bring together Heads of State, Executive Heads of UN agencies, industry leaders, NGOs and civil society. The summit takes place in two stages, first in Geneva in December 2003 and then in Tunis in November 2005.

Kofi Annan, Secretary-General of the UN, links the digital divide to development, poverty and inequality when he states:

“One of the most pressing challenges in the new century…[is to]…harness this extraordinary force of ICTs, spread it throughout the world, and make its benefits accessible and meaningful for all humanity, in particular the poor”

(Annan, 2001:1).

As Servaes (2000:xi) remarks in the introduction of Walking on the Other Side of the Information Highway, many developing country governments have attributed a leading role to ICTs in their strategies for economic growth and are being encouraged by multilateral agencies such as the IMF and World Bank to do so. For example, the World Bank’s GICT Department’s mission is as follows:

“Information and communication technologies…are opening new opportunities for developing economies. These opportunities will assist developing countries bridging the digital divide through economic growth, increased jobs, and improved access to basic services. GICT was created to leverage the strengths of the World Bank Group in addressing these needs and taking advantage of these opportunities” (GICT, 2000:n.p.).

The G-8 Heads of State at their Kyushu Okinawa Summit in July 2000 created the DOT Force, whose mandate is to encourage the use of ICTs since:

“they offer enormous opportunities to narrow social and economic inequalities and support sustainable local wealth creation, and thus help to achieve the broader development goals that the international community has set” (DOT Force, 2001:3).

The UNDP (1999) is another recent high-profile convert to the digital cause. Thus, even those who deal in poverty eradication and sustainable development have now come around to accepting a technocratic route to their objectives. Various recent international ICT-related programmes have been initiated in the context of the UN system. ‘ICT for development’ is one of the key areas of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD) Internet gateway on Science and Technology for Development (UNCTAD, 2003). This gateway hosts the homepage of the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (UNCSTD), provides continuously updated information on best practice in the assessment, transfer, adaptation and mastery of technology, and also offers opportunities for partnering and networking in science and technology.

Moreover, at its fifth session, held in Geneva in 2001, the UNCSTD selected as the theme for its inter-sessional period 2001–2003 ‘Technology development and capacity-building for competitiveness in a digital world’ (UNCSTD, 2001). The programme for this inter-sessional period is being carried out by three panels addressing specific aspects of the main theme, with particular attention being given to the assimilation and application of ICTs for the purpose of enhancing competitiveness of developing countries and transition economies. The first of the panels is studying indicators of technological development for ‘stocktaking’ purposes. The second is exploring the link between foreign direct investment (FDI), technology development for capacity building and strategic competitiveness. Lastly, the third panel is concentrating on the transfer, diffusion and use of ICTs.

The first panel met in Geneva in May 2002 to identify the most important factors affecting technological mastery and development for competitiveness, to attempt to measure them, and to provide a rational explanation of their determinants (UNCSTD, 2001). In addressing the need for technology indicators it was decided that countries should be grouped into those that were ‘catching up’, ‘keeping up’ and ‘getting ahead’. It was agreed that the key objective for collecting a set of indicators was to identify concomitant policies and programmes.

Besides the activities of the UNCSTD, it is also important to mention the launch in early 2002, by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) in partnership with the Markle Foundation and in consultation with public and private institutions and individual expert partners, of the Global Digital Opportunity Initiative (GDOI, 2003).

This initiative is attempting to increase the impact of ICTs in achieving developing countries’ development goals by building on the strategic framework developed by the Digital Opportunity Initiative at the 2001 G8 Summit in Genoa.

The G-8 countries, for instance, have emphasised that “IT empowers, benefits and links people the world over [and] access to the digital opportunities must, therefore, be open to all” (G-8, 2000:1). The expectation is that the extension of global telecommunication networks and the use of the Internet can provide a new means for developing countries to benefit from their participation in the global economy.

Deployment of advanced ICTs is expected to provide a major stimulus for economic

growth. Despite the very substantial gaps in the availability of the new technologies, developing countries that do gain access are expected to benefit substantially.

In its 1998/1999 World Development Report, entitled Knowledge for Development, the World Bank framed poverty as a lack of knowledge and positioned its poverty alleviation objectives in an analysis of the ‘information society’ approach:

“Knowledge is like light. Weightless and intangible, it can easily travel the world, enlightening the lives of people everywhere. Yet billions of people still live in the darkness of poverty – unnecessarily” (World Bank, 1999:1).

The World Bank’s (1999:1) new approach to development is based on the assumption that “poor countries – and poor people – differ from rich ones not only because they have less capital but because they have less knowledge”. The focus on the role of knowledge in development processes is the result of new understandings about the relationship between economic growth and the application of knowledge. It assumes that knowledge is a neutral, manageable commodity that can be shared freely and easily, and that ICTs can provide the appropriate tools for accessing, archiving, transferring and communicating information and knowledge. Critics of the new knowledge-based development paradigm argue that this approach to development is a convenient vehicle to promote a neo-liberal agenda (Coraggio, 2001; Mehta, 2001).

The mode of development is linear/evolutionary and entails the diffusion of knowledge from more developed to less developed societies.

In May 1996 the United Nations’ Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) adopted its African Information Society Initiative (AISI): An Action Framework to Build Africa’s Information and Communication Infrastructure. As AISI is viewed as a guiding framework for multiple donors, the document may shed some light on the way the African ‘information society’ is conceived of by some key players. AISI is seen as an ambitious, long-term programme directed at the utilisation of ICTs to stimulate overall economic and social growth in Africa (ECA, 1996a). It was put in place through the collaborative action of a network of partners, among which include the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) and the World Bank.

ECA’s African Information Society Initiative suggests that Africa is on the brink of a new era, that of the ‘information society’. AISI defines the information society in terms of technological innovations and its potential for change:

“Africa’s information society [is] a term used to refer to the pervasive benefits to all Africans of proactive policies on information and communication technologies” (ECA, 1996b).

The prospects for development through the investment in and use of ICTs are presumed to be tremendous (Hafkin, 2002). The reasoning is quite similar to that in Western countries. Prices of new ICTs are becoming increasingly affordable as costs continue to fall. Cheap ICTs offer developing nations the opportunity, not only to leapfrog entire stages of development in setting up their own information infrastructure and applications (ECA, 1996b), but also to accelerate development in all spheres of African economic and social activity (ECA, 1996a). This is a rather optimistic view which puts ICTs and information at the centre of social and economic change. This view seems to be based on four basic, and highly questionable, assumptions: (i) that ICTs are neutral and easily transferable; (ii) that information as such is neutral (and equals knowledge); (iii) that Africa and its citizens, by means of ICTs, have access to information which is necessary and sufficient to accelerate development; and (iv) that information will be free or near to free in the ‘information society’. These assumptions correspond with modernisation theory’s perception of the relation between ICTs, information and development (Pool, 1990:283). The AISI Action Framework can be criticised on the grounds that it is technologically deterministic, does not pay attention to the complexity of social reality and for failing to analyse the origins of technological innovation (Tsui, 1991).

The assumption that access to information is necessary and sufficient to accelerate development is questionable. Many problems of development are structural problems of distribution and power. Information as such may have little impact on such problems and, indeed, could aggravate them under certain conditions by increasing the resources available to urban and rural elites (Hudson, 1984:154). Furthermore, the AISI equates information with knowledge. The generation and application of knowledge depends upon much more than access to a global information infrastructure and the information it contains (Mansell & Wehn, 1998:323). Many of the promises made by proponents of ICTs conflate and confuse notions of

‘information’ and ‘knowledge’, with these terms often being used interchangeably and uncritically. As the Panos Institute highlights:

“Knowledge is not the same as information; it is the sense that people make of information. Knowledge is infused with the insights, expertise and capacities of those who have it. People need to be able to make their own sense of information – to interpret it, to evaluate it, to reach their own understanding of it” (Panos Institute, 1998:n.p.).

The AISI Action Framework does not really deliberate this point, as it mainly seems to stress that connectivity to an information infrastructure is sufficient in producing applicable knowledge. An associated assumption underlying the view of the AISI’s Action Framework is that information will be available for free or at very low prices.

This assumption runs counter to an observable evolution of growing commercialisation of information (Schiller, 1996:Chapter 1). The shift observed in the last two decades from public service policies towards more market-guided policies has already left its mark on the availability of public as well as scientific information (Webster, 1995; Hamelink, 1997). The picture the AISI presents of a future information society and the easy road towards its completion is over-optimistic and maybe even dangerous, as it presents a view in which investment in the right technology seems sufficient for development.