Development Strategy: Close Information Gap
7/7/97
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Headline: Development Strategy: Close Information Gap
Source The Wall Street Journal
Date: 7/7/97
Copyright: 1997 Dow Jones & Company, All Rights Reserved
The Outlook
Development Strategy: Close Information Gap
Deep in the Amazon jungle, the remote village of Pykany struck a deal
with British retailer Body Shop, to sell essential oils from the rain
forest. Nothing so unusual about that, maybe. But then the tribal
chief went on the Internet and told an 'electronic conference' of 100
people all over Latin America how the deal was done.
That's just a tiny example of how the latest information technology
might improve the lot of the rural poor. It is hard to say whether the
Brazilian chief did anything to close the vast income gap between the
richest and poorest regions of the world. Yet he took a small step
toward closing the information gap -- the gap between those who have
easy access to knowledge and those who don't.
This gap between the info-rich and info-poor is quickly becoming a
fashionable topic in economic-development circles these days. And
narrowing the gap is a rising preoccupation of economists, aid officials
anad government leaders. A conference on the topic in Toronto last
month, co-sponsered by the World Bank and government of Canada, drew
more than 2,000 participants from around the world.
It was an occasion for debate and disagreement. Experts can't even agree
on what is the best information strategy for the poorest peoples of the
world. Some suggest that wiring the schools of sub-Saharan Africa world
do wonders for economic advance - in other words, the Internet as
strategic bullet in the war on poverty. Others say simple technologies,
such as wind-up radio, would do far more good.
"You need to do both," is the diplomatic answer of James Wolfensohn,
president of the World Bank. He notes that India, for instance, has both
technologies elite in need of advanced technologies and an impoverished
majorty in need of something simpler.
Wathever the disagreements, the issue of the information gap will
probably get more attention in the future, and that is good. Given that
the global economy is increasingly knowledge-intensive, policy makers,
business people and investors alike will pay more attention to a
country's ability to absorb information, and knowledge, especially in
digitized form.
Ranking nations by their ability to absorb information has become a
cottage industry. International Data Corp., Framingham, Mass., has
compilide a popular "Informatioon Society Index" that ranks 55 countries
by their capacity to absorb knowledge. The study ranks such factors as
rates of telephone, radio and computer ownership, school enrollments and
degreee of press freedom.
The U.S., Sweden and Canada are among those in the first rank.
Argentina, Russia and South Africa are further down the list. Near the
bottom are Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan, Indonesia Egypt.
Missing from the list, though, are 1500 countries that aren't even
ranked, mostly because reliable data on the spread of computers,
telephones and basci literacy aren't available.
It is a symptom of a troubling reality: in the electronic global
village, whole neighborhoods are lacking the basics.
More than 80% of the world's population can't make a telephhone call.
Even in rapidly developiing coountries such as Peru, "telecenters" serve
640 people with basic communications such as telephone and fax service.
In part of eastern Europe, waiting time to get a phone line is 10 years
or longer. In really poor countries such as Mozambique, only one person
in 300 has telephone service. Wiring up such a nation world be
expensive..
"Who is going to pay?" asks Venancio Massingue, a rector at Eduardo
Mondlane University in the Mozambique capital of Maputo. In the Toronto
conference room, with a score of interntional bankers and aid officiais,
there is an uneasy silence. Indeed, some combination of taxes, aid and
private investment has usually been the winning formula for upgrading
telecommunications around the world, yet many poor countries still
resist letting go of the state-run monopolies, and many investors are
understandably wary of the least-developed nations.
Still, the recent past is studded with success stories of countries,
from South Korea to Ireland that have combined a skilled, educated
populace with information technologies to bootstrap their way up the
economic ladder. While the Internet may be oversold as a strategy, its
use as a medium of instructions looks promising. And its role in
commerce could be even more so.
Consider for moment the information system spanning all of Latin America
that has been put together by the Rome-based International Fund for
Agricultural Development. It has linked 500,000 poor households in 3,600
communities across the continent, with guidance by 5,000 technical staff
members.
The project is interesting for what it hasn't done. It hasn't bought
computers of software, forcing farmers to find their own Internet
access, perhaps at a nearby school. It has focused on using the
technologies, setting up a "virtual farmers market," for example, where
Chilean potato farmers with a huge excess crop found welling buyers in
Sao Paulo, Brazil. It was this same project that got the Amazonian chief
on-line to share his tale of wheeling and dealing with Body Shop.
As these experiments spread, they can form a body of "best practices" in
even the most basic sorts of enterprise. And as they circulate, they
will bring the power of information, once reserved for giants, to even
the smallest players in the global economy.
BERNARD WYSOCKI JR.