Information Society Luncheon Forum: Information and Communications for Development

Keynote address by
Dr. K.Y. Amoako, Executive Secretary, ECA and Under-Secretary General of the UN
14 May 1996
Midrand, South Africa

Honourable Ministers

Excellencies

Distinguished experts from around the world

Ladies and Gentlemen:

It is a particular pleasure to be with you today. The forward looking theme of this conference, the participation of so many critically important actors in the field, and the conjunction of private and public interests represented here today all foretell a meeting of significance. Eons from now archaeologists will look back at meetings like this one as they search for the foundations of their fully live information societies. What we build here and how we build it will help shape the future for generations.

The honour you have given to me and to the Economic Commission for Africa in asking me to give the keynote address at this special luncheon forum is not lost on us. We are serious participants in information developments on this continent, and we plan to remain active as this continent considers its future in informatics.

To move into the Information Society, Africa must be clear on what it wants and make its desires clear to others. If we are clear, if we have a compelling vision for ourselves, then it is likely that our choices will turn into our own reality. If we are not clear, then we will either be perpetual observers of the information highway or find ourselves on a road not fit for our needs.

Africa obviously starts late in planning the architecture of its information highway. A small indication of this is found in the agenda of the Internet Society, meeting next month in Montreal. Of some 300 presentations, connectivity in Africa figures as only one small item.

But being late in planning our information society offers some advantages. We can profit from the experience of others, and we have the potential to leapfrog some kinds of problems. For example, informatics offers solutions to distance education, extension of health and agricultural services, early warning systems to disasters, trade and tourism promotion and other benefits which in the past would have required far more expensive solutions.

To be able to take solid benefit from the information age we see growing around us, Africa requires an architecture for our informatics planning -a framework.

Building Africa's Information Society is central to the strategic vision I have elaborated for the Economic Commission for Africa, which I joined as Executive Secretary less than a year ago. I am very pleased to inform you that the ECA Conference of Ministers responsible for economic and social planning and development shares that vision. Just last week the Ministers adopted an action framework to build Africa's information and communications infrastructure. This framework is called the African Information Society Initiative.

By the year 2010 the Initiative sees an information society in Africa where:

• Every man and woman, school child, village, government office and business can access information through computers and telecommunications;
  
  
• Information and decision support systems are used to support decision making in all the major sectors of each nation's economy;
  
  
• Access is available throughout the region to international, regional and national "information highways";
  
  
• A vibrant private sector exhibits strong leadership in growing information-based economies;
• African information resources are accessible globally reflecting content on tourism, trade, education, culture, energy, health, transport and natural resource management;
  
  
• Information and knowledge empower all sectors of society.
  
  

We take seriously the action framework outlined by the Initiative. The framework will be the basis for ECA's own programme of work in its focus area of Harnessing Information for Development. This is one of but five focus areas for our entire programme of work. Most importantly, the African Information Society Initiative will serve as the framework for the priority area of informatics under the United Nations System wide Special Initiative on Africa. ECA is a lead agency for the informatics part of the UN Special Initiative, the implementation of which will involve several key United Nations agencies, including the World Bank, UNESCO, the International Telecommunications Union and UNCTAD.

The implementation of the African Information Society initiative will take place at country level, starting with national Information and communication Infrastructure plans, and it will be elaborated through programmes and pilot projects reflecting national needs and priorities. ECA, with its partners, will work directly with countries to assist in drawing up national action plans, to develop programmes and to draft projects to help support systems for government, business and society. AISI also foresees cooperation, linkage and partnership between African countries to share the success of accumulated implementation experiences and to stimulate regional development in various information and communications fields. Thirdly, the initiative calls for bi-lateral and regional mechanisms to stimulate cooperation between African countries. And finally, it calls for support and partnership with the international public and private sectors.

As I indicated, the starting point of the action framework is the formulation and development of National information and Communication infrastructure plans in every African country, always based on national needs and priorities, initially probably on a five-year basis.

The implementation of the plans inevitably must begin with infrastructure development, without which little of the initiative can be realized. It will be necessary to upgrade and develop telecommunication infrastructure and networks at the national level as well as to improve regional inter-connectivity and to provide gateways to international telecommunications networks. It is here that technological advances offer Africa more cost-effective and appropriate technologies to leapfrog over several generations of intermediate technologies still in use in the industrial world. On infrastructure, we will follow the able lead of the international Telecommunications Union.

Human resource development is the sine qua non of the initiative and the element that will make it sustainable. The initiative calls for the building of new capacities through education and training not only for engineers and information systems specialists, but for planners and managers as well, to be trained in information technology - not only in its use, but most importantly, in its possibilities: it is they who need the ability to adapt, adopt and exploit new technologies, and to manage change.

AISI is Africans own initiative. It was prepared by a High Level Working Group of African Experts in information and communication technologies (several of whom are in the room with us today), at the request of African ministers responsible for economic development and planning who have now endorsed it. I urge not only your close study of the AISI initiative, but your support of it. (You have a copy of the Initiative in your luncheon package, next to your menu!).

The Initiative, we feel, is a very important framework for action. ECA plans to play a full role in helping its Member States to implement it. Achieving the objectives of the Initiative will require support from many sources. In additiion to our partners already working with us on the informatics area of the United Nations Special Initiative for Africa, to implement the AISI we are calling for an international partnership: from the G-7 and other donor countries and from the private sector.

Let me underline the fact that the vision of the African Information Society Initiative rests upon national actions to create much needed enabling environments for an information society. Creating the enabling environment is a critical challenge.

The Initiative boldly speaks about "the liberalization of national telecommunications and public broadcasting services", about the importance of "intellectual property, privacy and the free flow of information". It sees important roles for the private sector, NGOs and the media. All of this may seem new to some governments which not long ago struggled to find ways of monopolizing news for their peoples and which even now may have mixed feelings about whether the information highway should run through their countries.

The choice seems simple, but it is not. Controlling information flows need to be weighed against the benefits of attracting our diaspora back to Africa, because this great pool of talent will want to remain connected to the worlds it has known, of connecting within Africa and the rest of the world, and of reaping enormous educational advantages by a range of services from simple connectivity to participation in virtual universities. Since these choices deal so fundamentally with the quality of society we desire, they can rightly be called political choices. Governments need to find a level of comfort with an enabling environment for information. There needs to be careful discussion as well as a clear understanding of choices and consequences. I would submit that the task is for dialogue both at the technical and political levels.

Beyond questions of user access to information systems will be questions of access by providers. Here, too, Africa has had a history of attempting to control access, hence state telecommunications have been seen as having a right of total market control. It seems likely that state telecommunications systems (or privatized monopolies of previously public systems) will continue to have major roles to play in Africa's information future. But we also need to make room for a whole host of private parties offering services around the core infrastructures. For example, two weeks ago a Nairobi newspaper interviewed two Kenyans who are offering a range of Internet access services in Kenya. He is a veteran of NYNEX, and she left a career in the World Bank. These two are typical of numerous young Africans - both returning to their countries from the diaspora and those who never left- who are anxious to start value-added information services- information-based businesses that promise jobs and economic growth. Software services from Africa could attract business to this continent, such as is now the case in Asia and Latin America.

The action framework will help foster basic policy and physical infrastructure, the backbone of the information society. But there is need to address very critical issues of access and application.

The burden of ensuring equitable access to the benefits of the Information Society in Africa lies both with Governments and the private sector. They must ensure that access to the information society and its benefits are equitable- across regions and gender, between cities and rural areas, - and that its arrival does not mean the creation of new elites, of new inequities built around information as a resource. All of Africa's people are stakeholders in the Information Society. The information revolution is not about pipes and computers, but about people and how they live. Information empowers and information frees people at all levels of society, regardless of their gender, their level of education or their status, to make rational decisions and to improve the quality of their lives. The technology is there: voice-recognition software, machine translation, solar-powered units, wireless communication- to be accessible to the rural areas and to the poor, through community telecentres, for example. Governments will be strengthened by the access they will have to all their citizenry and that their citizenry will have to them. The private sector will find that extending access can be profitable, as formerly unserved areas use access to build economic activities. However, it is up to Governments to ensure that equitable access is an essential part of national information and communication plans.

The question of who owns the information on the information highway must also be addressed. As a cultural issue, it is sensitive. The information highway may be a lot less attractive to Africa if all one can get on it is non-African information. And it has zero political attraction if there is little prospect that Africa will be a contributor to the global databanks. Africa must participate in the global information society both as a producer and a consumer. Africa has tremendous amounts of useful and unique information, but in most places that information is neither organized nor accessible. Much of this information could be useful in planning and decision making both by the public and private sectors. Crafting Africa's entrance to the global information highway is an opportunity to demonstrate that Africa has experience, literature, trading opportunity, knowledge, and relevance in a wide number of areas. There is a lot at stake: we Africans must not be dependent upon external analysis of core issues of importance to our development. We must not self-marginalize, and we must demonstrate that we are worthy producers of information. In building Africa's information society, the information content area is as important as the physical infrastructure.

ECA has long been sensitive to this issue. We are an active producer of information about Africa's economic and social situation; we have long established a network of information to link with governmental and research establishments in Africa; we have assisted governments and sub-regional and regional development institutions in organizing their development information. Presently we are constructing an ECA World Wide Web site to disseminate Africa's development information. Using others' Web sites, more users now download ECA's documents weekly than what our hard copy distribution used to achieve on a yearly basis. The challenge here is to build the information highway in Africa, so that our target clientele can access our information electronically. We have also begun to produce CD-ROMS on African development, and will continue to work within Africa to build capacities to disseminate African information electronically.

ECA is but a part of the answer to the issue of how will Africa hold up its end as an information supplier. I use us as an example only to demonstrate that market demand is there and that we must encourage both consumption and production of information if we are to be full players in this new age.

The combination of policy and programme frameworks, such as will be afforded in the African Information Society Initiative, emphasizing equity and connecting to produce as well as to consume information, should serve Africa extremely well in the years ahead. This is a time of choosing at the national and regional levels, and of plotting our future so that Africa can be a full partner in the global economy, in the global information infrastructure. May the archaeologists of the future find that we did our job well.

Thank you.