Internet: A Tool for Sustainable Human Development?

• Author: Braun, Esther

Who will make the most of the information revolution - the developed or the developing countries?

Does the cost of communication compel countries to turn their backs on its potential?

Does the freedom of the net inhibit the ability to assert creative - and commercial - rights?

Will "cybersquatters" pounce on empty chairs while the musician's gaze is diverted?

The invention of the Internet has been compared to the invention of the wheel, the semiconductor or the steam engine. And the vision of a global information society in which people travel at high speed on a virtual cyberhighway, connecting through mouse clicks even the remotest corners of the world, gained credibility since the Internet became accessible to a broad audience in the early 1990s.

But while this utopia of "global connectivity" has come true to a certain extent for the highly industrialized world with easy access to computers, developing countries which lack infrastructure, computers and skilled users find themselves left out from reaping the fruits of the "information revolution".

The United Nations through various programmes tries to counteract this development. The Working Group on Informatics, established by the General Assembly in 1994, coordinates the United Nations system's information technology use.

"In the UN, we are trying to firstly create awareness among Member States and the Permanent Missions: to get them access to the Internet, teach them how to use computers and to write their own webpages. And once you have achieved this, to hope that this will trickle down from the Permanent Missions to their respective countries", said Ahmad Kamal, Pakistan's Permanent Representative to the United Nations and the Working Group's Chairman, in an interview with the UN Chronicle. "More and more people have started to use computers and e-mail. We have made a lot of progress and I hope we will continue to do so."

The Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) aims at bridging the gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" of access to information through field work in a number of developing countries. When the Programme was hunched by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 1992 as a result of the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, there was a lot of scepticism about using information technology, such as the Internet and e-mail, as a tool for sustainable human development in developing countries. "People did not see the benefit of...