Defining the Digital Divide

July 22, 2000 -- There’s nothing worldwideabout the World Wide Web.

Only one in 20 people around the world are online, and closeto 60 percent of Internet users live in North America eventhough it accounts for just five percent of the world’spopulation. In Africa, there are a mere 14 million phone lines— fewer than in Manhattan or Tokyo.

There has been mounting concern that developingcountries, which lack the resources to benefit economically frominformation and communication technologies, will be furthermarginalized by the networking revolution.

To address the issue, leaders of the Group of Eight nations decided today toestablish a task force, dubbed “DOT Force,” an acronym for Digital Opportunity Task Force, to search for waysto fuse the widening information technology (IT) gap betweenindustrial and developing countries.

The G-8 gave the aptly named task force the job of supporting thedevelopment of communications infrastructure in poor countriesand drawing them into the Internet-led economic revolution.

“Everyone, everywhere, should be enabled to participate in, and no one should be excluded from, the benefits of the globalinformation society,” the G-8 said in an IT charter.

The DOT Force has as yet nomembers, but the G-8 said it would conveneas soon as possible to promote policies that increase access tothe tools of information “in a manner responsive to the needsof developing countries.”

International Digital Divide

*not including wireless accessSource: Jupiter Communications

Divide Exists Within Nations

The Okinawa summit’s host, Japanese Prime Minister YoshiroMori, is himself on the slow side of what is now referred to asthe digital divide; he said last month that he had never toucheda computer keyboard in his life.

As Mori’s embarrassing admission illustrates, there aredigital divides within countries as well as between them.

In India — despite its celebrated emergence as a softwareand IT powerhouse — nearly a quarter of a million villages lackeven a single telephone.

According to U.S. research firm Jupiter Communications Inc.,there are yawning Internet-use gaps in the United States betweenincome, ethnic and age groups.

Sixty percent more white households in the United States areonline than African-American households, and senior citizensaccount for just 16 percent of the Internet-user community.

While many such gaps are expected to close, Internet contentis still likely to target well-heeled, well-educated and mostlyEnglish-speaking users because of advertising and e-commerce.

Poor Getting Poorer?

The Okinawa summit leaders hope to prevent the IT explosion fromexacerbating disparities between rich and poor countries, wheremillions live without running water and electricity — nevermind phone lines and computers.

“In large parts of Africa today, young girls are morelikely to die before reaching the age of 5 than they are tolearn to read,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers told aU.N. forum on IT this month.

“To put it bluntly, until we see substantial improvement inthese figures, the dream of putting the world’s poorest nationson a fast track to technology and growth will remain just that:a dream.”

The worry is that poor countries lack the education,infrastructure and political policies to support the spread of aphenomenon which is boosting trade, productivity, employment andprivate-sector wealth elsewhere.

Is Technology the Answer?

Or could the new information revolution be a force thatopens “digital opportunities” for developing countries as theyleapfrog stages of development?

“The power of the Internet appears to be bringing worldeconomies closer together over time so that firms in Indonesiacan compete electronically with those in Indiana,” FranciscoRodriguez and Ernest J. Wilson of Maryland University wrote in arecent paper, Are Poor Countries Losing the InformationRevolution?

However, Rodriguez and Wilson said that because poorcountries lack the education, infrastructure and institutionsrequired for entry into these technologies, they stand to missthe opportunity.

A recent study by the World Bank’s Global Information andCommunication Technologies (ICT) Department showed that poorcountries have partly closed the ICT gap with rich ones.

Since 1960, for example, the poorest one-fifth of countrieshave expanded telephone lines per capita about 15-fold comparedwith a threefold increase in the richest one-fifth of countries.

But the picture is different for advanced services: thenumber of Internet hosts per capita increased 29 percent insub-Saharan Africa in 1997-99 compared with 87 percent inOrganisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)countries.

“It is hard to envision countries making any significantuse of the Internet’s potential if their teledensity is verylow,” the paper said. “So expanding connectivity remains aprimary goal for developing economies.”

Infrastructure Bottlenecks

That much can be said for India where teledensity is 2.6 per100 compared with a world average of around 15.

No less worrying, India’s $8.6-billion IT industry has runinto infrastructure bottlenecks such as lack of bandwidth,low-speed leased lines and slow servicing.

The National Association of Software and Service Companiessaid in a recent report that if India does not meet massivebandwidth requirements on time it could be left out of at least30 percent of its target export market.

That, the association said, could translate into anopportunity cost of some $22.5 billion and 650,000 jobs.

So what should developing world policy-makers and leaders ofthe developed world do to tackle the digital divide?

A report prepared by a group of experts for this year’s U.N.General Assembly recommended that the United Nations amass $2billion from its own funds, private industry and other sourcesto help poor countries catch up.

But throwing money at the problem is only one answer.

Experts agree that developing countries themselves mustadopt technology development-friendly regulatory environments,improve teledensity with the help of private sector investmentand prevent billions from falling through the net by giving themat least the ability to read and write.