Development briefs
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Millennium Summit Road Map
Goals and Targets
Poverty and Hunger · Education · Gender Equality · Child Mortality Maternal Health · Disease · Environment · Development
Target 1: Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people whose income is less than one dollar a day.
Goal 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger
Target 2: Halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
Goal 2: Achieve universal primary education
Target 3: Ensure that by 2015 children everywhere - boys and girls alike - will be able to complete a full course of primary schooling.
Goal 3: Promote gender equality and empower women
Target 4: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education, preferably by 2005, and at all levels of education no later than 2015. Goal 4:
Reduce child mortality
Target 5: Reduce by two thirds, between 1990 and 2015, the under-five mortality rate.
Goal 5: Improve maternal health
Target 6: Reduce by three quarters, between 1990 and 2015, the maternal mortality ratio.
Goal 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases
Target 7: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS.
Goal 7: Ensure environmental sustainability
Target 8: Have halted by 2015 and begun to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.
Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development
Target 9: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes, and reverse the loss of environmental resources.
Target 10: Halve by 2015 the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking-water.
Target 11: To have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers.
Target 12: Develop an open, rule-based, non-discriminatory trading and financial system.
Target 13: Address the special needs of the least developed countries.
Target 14: Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States.
Target 15: Deal comprehensively with the debt problems of developing countries.
Target 16: Develop and implement strategies for decent and productive work for youth in developing countries.
Target 17: Provide access, in cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, to affordable essential drugs in developing countries.
Target 18: Make available, in cooperation with the private sector, the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications.
UN Chronicle: Copyright © 1997-2001 United Nations.
Eradicating Extreme Poverty and Hunger
How We Define Poverty
By Ramon Osiris Blanco
To talk about poverty and define it empirically seem like an easy task from the privileged point of view of the cultured and educated, or by means of moderate or highly acquired capacity that makes it possible to distinguish the parameters that identify it.
By 2003, there will be over two billion poor people in the world fighting for survival. My colleagues and Dominican acquaintances, through their own experiences, agree on the definition of poverty as the total absence of opportunities, accompanied by high levels of undernourishment, hunger, illiteracy, lack of education, physical and mental ailments, emotional and social instability, unhappiness, sorrow and hopelessness for the future. Poverty is also characterized by a chronic shortage of economic, social and political participation, relegating individuals to exclusion as social beings, preventing access to the benefits of economic and social development and thereby limiting their cultural development.
The United Nations has established that poverty and excluded people exist in all regions of the world; therefore, there is a diversity of reasons why people cannot satisfy their basic needs. It also concluded that two conditions—social and individual—limit the possibility of access to resources, knowledge and benefits, to fulfil human needs.
The social condition is tied intrinsically to the political and economic realm, as it is the administrators of power who regulate the distribution of resources and services, establishing parameters that generate inequalities that are sometimes manifested in land distribution, infrastructure, capital, markets, credit, education and information, or consulting services or other fields that might establish differences in human development.
In the individual condition, inequality translates to limitations in access to services such as education, health, recreation, potable water and public hygiene. Rural areas where 77 per cent of poor people in developing countries live are the most adversely affected. The United Nations has established that the region of Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized of the developing world, a result of the great migration that occurred in the last twenty years. Three fourths of the population live in cities, where 40 per cent of the total population is poor, with limited access to potable water, polluted air, bad sanitation and serious health problems.
When analyzing the roots of conflicts, we found that economic limitation was always present in most cases of armed conflicts and civil wars since wealth is unevenly distributed in these areas. In such places, it is common to find totalitarian systems, which protect the economic privileges of the ruling minority to the detriment of the majority, through political repression, militarization, discrimination and human rights violations. In another aspect, when a macroeconomic crisis occurs, the poor are the most affected. As a result, comparative studies drawn between countries show that inflation is one of the biggest concerns in the world.
Because of this, modern economists try to determine how the levels of well-being are related to economic indicators: gross national product, employment and salaries. However, when economic bonanzas are accompanied by an increase in poverty, as often happens in developing countries, it has been because the economic growth has been based on an uneven distribution of opportunities and employment between the cities and rural areas, as well as between their respective inhabitants. The uneven distribution of employment is clearly evident when the poor have no access to good jobs with good wages and working conditions, stability, safety, security and other benefits. On the contrary, they are drawn to jobs with low wages and no opportunity for promotion, poor working conditions and often arbitrary discipline.
Poverty reduction in Latin America is miniscule if we compare it with population growth. Even when diminishing rates of poverty reached 36.7 per cent and extreme poverty 15.1 per cent, it is no less true that we are speaking of 179 million poor people and 78 million who are deprived, which exceeds the figures in 1986 by 40 million unprivileged people and 20 million extremely deprived. Finally, we believe it is important to emphasize that the declaration on "the right to nutrition" (approved by consensus by the Commission on Human Rights and ratified during the 2002 substantive meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council) asserts that hunger constitutes a violation of human dignity and requires urgent measures at the national, regional and international levels to eliminate it, including mobilizing and utilizing financial and technical resources, including relief of external debt for developing countries, to strengthen national activities by implementing policies for safe and sustainable development. A joint world effort is necessary for fairer distribution of wealth, to achieve human progress and happiness.
Biography
Ramon O. Blanco is an Ambassador at the Permanent Mission of the Dominican Republic to the United Nations. An Agricultural Engineer, specializing in the field of extension and rural development, he researches and writes about progressive public policy issues. His views are his own and do not reflect the position of the Government of the Dominican Republic.
UN Chronicle
Halting and Beginning to Reverse the Incidence of Malaria …… and Other Major Diseases
By Erika Reinhardt
The Malaria Challenge
The decoding of the most dangerous malaria parasite, Plasmodium Falciparum, and the most important mosquito that transmits it, Anopheles Gambiae, signals a turning point for global public health. The Tropical Disease Research (TDR) programme and its partners, including its co-sponsor, the World Health Organization (WHO), have pushed for over a decade to bring genetics into the struggle against malaria. For the past two years, TDR has been training more than 100 scientists from Latin America, Africa and Asia, enabling them to analyze the genomes, identify vulnerabilities and build new genetically-based drugs and insecticides.
In an effort to control malaria and save the lives of half of the 800,000 children who die of the disease each year, WHO has urged countries to switch to a new type of treatment whenever there was strong evidence that conventional medicines were no longer working. For decades, the best-known treatment for malaria was chloroquine, an inexpensive medicine that has saved millions of lives. In recent years, however, the malaria parasite has developed resistance to the drug and is no longer an effective treatment in many countries. Resistance to a second-generation drug, known as SP or "Fansidar", is also spreading. As an alternative, WHO recommended Artemisinin-based Combination Therapies (ACTs), which are derived in part from a Chinese herb and kill the malaria parasite very fast, allowing the patient to recover rapidly and with very few side effects. The Board of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria has decided to fund proposals to "Roll Back Malaria" in Zanzibar and Zambia, which include purchasing and phasing-in the use of new ACTS.
International Effort to Eradicate Poliomyelitis
Since the Global Polio Eradication Initiative was launched in 1988, the number of cases has fallen by 99.8 per cent, from an estimated 350,000 cases to 483 in 2001, while the number of polio-infected countries was reduced from 125 to 10. The Global Polio Eradication Technical Consultative Group is overseeing a programme of research and consensus-building on the development of post-eradication polio immunization policy options to be considered by the World Health Assembly as early as 2005. UNICEF and WHO have launched a $50-million appeal for 2003-2005 to immunize 22 million children in the Horn of Africa, which is "one step away" from being certified as polio-free; only two cases have been reported in Somalia and none in Ethiopia and Sudan.
Global Strategy on Traditional Medicine
As traditional medicine becomes more popular worldwide, there is concern among health practitioners and consumers on the issues of safety, policy, regulation, biodiversity and protection of traditional knowledge. WHO released a global strategy that provides a policy framework to assist countries in regulating traditional medicine. About 80 per cent of the people in Africa use traditional medicine. In wealthy countries, growing numbers of patients rely on alternative medicine for preventive or pallative care. Traditional medicine is also used in the treatment of infectious diseases, including malaria. In Africa, North America and Europe, three out of four people living with HIV/AIDS use some form of traditional treatment. The $60-billion global market for traditional therapies is growing steadily. Unregulated commercialization threatens to make these therapies unaffordable to many who rely on them as their primary source of health care. About 25 per cent of modern medicines are descended from plants first used traditionally.
Guide for Essential Medicines
Bad prescribing habits are very common worldwide, according to WHO, leading to ineffective and unsafe treatment, exacerbation of illness and harm to patients, as well as increased costs for insurance systems and Governments. It has released the WHO Model Formulary, a guide that provides comprehensive information on all 325 medicines contained in its Model List of Essential Drugs, which aims to improve patient safety and limit superfluous medical spending. The guide will help national governments and institutions in developing their own national formularies and is particularly relevant for developing countries, where commercial and promotional materials are often the only available source of drug information to health workers, prescribers and patients.
Link Between Trade and Public Health
A joint study by WHO and the World Trade Organization, WTO Agreements and Public Health, examines the link between trade and public health and covers infectious disease control, food safety, tobacco, environment, access to drugs, health services, food security and biotechnology. According to the study, countries have the right to take measures to restrict imports or exports of products when it is necessary to protect the health of humans, animals or plants, and when liberalizing services, they retain the right to regulate in areas such as health. It suggests that policy makers would benefit from closer cooperation, ensuring coherence between their different areas of responsibility.
Health-Worker Crisis in Africa
The emerging crisis of health manpower in Africa threatens to defeat the efforts of Governments, private health-care providers, non-governmental organizations and donors for health improvement. At a joint consultative meeting, organized by WHO and the World Bank, participants stressed that doctors, nurses and other health workers were the most important health input. Unsuitable training programmes, inadequate cooperation among the many parties concerned, and losses of staff to opportunities outside Africa made the region's health-care facilities barely able to function. The recruitment by European countries of large numbers of graduating nursing students, particularly in South Africa, has created an additional sense of urgency to the crisis. Participants recognized that new funding initiatives, such as debt relief through the heavily indebted poor countries (HIPC) programme and the global HIV/tuberculosis/malaria fund, combined with heightened awareness among Africa's development partners, provided new opportunities to address the health manpower issues in their various dimensions.
Pollution Kills Millions of Children
Every day, 5,500 children die from diseases caused by consuming water and food polluted with bacteria, according to "Children in the New Millennium: Environmental Impact on Health", a report released by UNICEF, UNEP and WHO. The report warns of low public awareness of children's special vulnerability to environmental health risks. Diarrhoea and acute respiratory infections, largely influenced by environmental degradation, are two of the leading causes of child mortality. The report also identifies other environmental problems directly affecting children, such as high levels of toxic chemicals and depletion of natural resources. Lead in the environment—much of it from leaded gasoline—causes permanent neurological and developmental disorders. Millions of children work in agriculture, putting them at high risk of pesticide poisoning. They are also disproportionately vulnerable to global environmental problems, such as the impact of climate change, depletion of the ozone layer and loss of biological diversity. The report calls for increased national investment in early child care. One notable success in many countries is the transition to unleaded fuel.
India and China Rapidly Expand TB Control
India and China have demonstrated how the strategy, known as DOTS, promoted by WHO for control and treatment of tuberculosis (TB), can be rapidly and effectively expanded. According to WHO, both countries have achieved high rates of case identification and cure, even where the technology and public health infrastructure are inadequate. While the two case studies highlight the effectiveness of DOTS, they also underline the difficulties of implementing it. In both countries, nearly half the population is not yet covered by the strategy, and case identification rates for TB remain below the global target of 70 per cent.
Nurse preparing a hypodermic syringe for a TB patient. WHO Photo/P.Virot
The study on China analyzed the effects of DOTS after ten years in operation. By 2000, 8 million suspected TB cases had been evaluated, 1.3 million smear-positive cases treated under DOTS, and 90 per cent of the treated cases cured. In the areas where DOTS is being implemented, 30,000 deaths annually have been averted and the percentage of previously treated TB cases has decreased. In India, DOTS coverage expanded to nearly half of the national population over a three-year period that began in October 1998, during which the number of patients under the treatment increased from 80 to over 1,300 per day, reaching more than a million TB patients by early 2002. The rapid expansion of DOTS coverage has saved nearly 200,000 lives and over $400 million in indirect costs. WHO and its partners are leading the global effort against tuberculosis by expanding the Strategy, which is used in 148 countries. The Global Plan to Stop TB has set two main targets for 2005: identify 70 per cent of estimated new infectious TB cases and cure 85 per cent of cases identified. The DOTS expansion projects in India and China were funded with loans from the World Bank.
New Rules on Recycling Old Batteries
The technical group of the Basel Convention on the Transboundary Movement of Hazardous Wastes and Their Disposal has finalized guidelines promoting the environmentally-sound recycling of spent lead-acid batteries, an important step in the efforts to reduce the global risk of lead poisoning. UNEP reports that lead has caused innumerable poisonings, particularly in children and workers, and that the safe recycling of lead-acid batteries requires strict environmental and occupational standards that can only be ensured by specialized firms. In many developing countries, spent batteries are broken manually using an axe, which is extremely dangerous to the workers.
Venous Thrombosis in Air Travel
WHO has launched a comprehensive research programme to investigate air travellers' thrombosis. Epidemiological, pathophysiological and clinical studies will determine the frequency and causes of venous thrombosis and identify risks and ways to prevent it. Research will be conducted under the auspices of WHO and the International Civil Aviation Organization. The International Air Transport Association is fully committed to the programme and will give its full support. Preliminary results from some studies will be available within a year, although the full programme will take up to four years to complete.
Copyright © United Nations
Ensuring Children Complete Primary Schooling: Protecting the World's Languages
By Alfred Capelle
Many of the world's languages today are dying and many are considered endangered. They die when their oldest living speakers pass away.
Where are the children and grandchildren of these speakers? Generally, they are alive and well, but are speaking some other language they learned in schools where their parents sent them, because they thought it would open doors to getting good jobs and making a better living. In the rush to adopt this language of perceived opportunity, they neglected the language of their home community, never learned to read or write it and eventually found they could not even remember how to speak it. They also neglected learning how to fish and hunt, grow crops, sing and dance, or talk about things in the old way. In joining the modern world, they had left the old world behind, unable to return even if they had wanted to.
UNESCO Photo
What we see here is the downside of westernization and modernization. But is it inevitable? I think not. There are ways to soften its effect and make our children capable of living happily in both worlds. I will mention here three that are closely interrelated. The first is bilingual education, which helps students learn to read and write the language they have heard from birth—the language of their home community—while also learning the world language that offers wider opportunities. The insight thereby gained in the relation between letters and sounds of the language they know well is then easily transferred to the reading and writing of the world language learnt in school. They are enabled to become ambidextrous in languages as it were—one might say, "ambi-lingual".
There is another element to bilingual education that goes beyond the teaching of reading and writing in two languages. Students need to learn to use the home language in dealing with western things and concepts. Equally important, they need to learn to talk in world language about all the activities of daily living in their home communities, and the old ways of getting a living from the land and the sea. They should also learn to use either language in any situation, so that they can feel equally at home in their home communities and in the world community, and be in a position to have something to offer to both.
It sounds easy enough, but why isn't it done more often? There is a negative attitude that stands in the way, one that is commonly held about bilingual education and multilingualism generally. The idea—the fallacy—is that the human brain can hold just one language well and that any space given to another will crowd out something from the main one, or that they will interfere with each other.
However, this idea has no basis in fact. If the truth be known, most people in the world know at least two languages, and know them well. Look at the membership of the United Nations. Monolingual speakers are definitely in the minority, and they are at a disadvantage in dealing with the modern world, having others to translate for them in many situations where they could cope better if they knew both languages themselves. Truly educated people are multilingual, and modern studies show that the human brain is capable of dealing well with the full vocabularies of several languages without mixing them in any way. Its limits in this regard are still not known. All that is necessary is the proper conditions for learning each language.
The third requirement for preserving the world's languages is the wherewithal. It takes well-trained teachers, as well as well-financed schools, to carry out programmes of bilingual education. And this is where the United Nations can help especially.
The UN should do what it could to focus more attention on the human and national institution capacity-building effort and the financial support provided by such UN agencies as the United Nations Development Programme and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to the local national educational systems with the more vulnerable languages, in particular those of small island developing States.
The aim is to improve these education systems in implementing bilingual education and develop and retain the native languages while also improving the teaching of the world language. This is very instrumental in solving all other social problems that the United Nations is trying to eradicate through such forms as the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg.
These UN agencies would do better also if they utilized their resources to mount a concerted public relations campaign to instil positive attitudes toward bilingualism everywhere. Bilingual education cannot flourish without strong support from enlightened parents in each home community. And the United Nations can and should help.
Studies involving sophisticated brain-imaging technologies called functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, have revealed some intriguing patterns in the way the brain processes first and second languages.
Native and second languages are spatially separated in Broca's area, which is a region in the frontal lobe of the brain that is responsible for the motor parts of language movement of the mouth, tongue and palate. In contrast, the two languages show very little separation in the activation of Wernicke's area-an area of the brain in the posterior part of the temporal lobe-which is responsible for comprehension of language.
Source: How the Brain Learns a Second Language, www.brainconnection.com
Biography
Ambassador Alfred Capelle is the Permanent Representative of the Republic of the Marshall Islands to the United Nations. Prior to this assignment, he was President of the College of the Marshall Islands and a Marshallese Language Consultant.
New Study Finds Teacher Shortage Caused by Poor Working Conditions
Population growth and declining working conditions are creating a severe shortage of teachers across the globe that may lead to a slide in education standards, according to a new global study by the International Labour Organization and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
The study found that during the 1990s the number of school-aged children outpaced the growth in the number of teachers worldwide, packing classrooms in some developing countries with as many as 100 students per teacher.
At the same time, the study reveals that deteriorating working conditions and low salaries in the industrialized nations are discouraging new recruits to the profession, creating shortages and threatening to diminish the quality of education at a time when the need for new knowledge and skills is growing dramatically.
The report notes that the number of female teachers increased throughout the decade, but they still remain well under half the total in many countries where the presence of more female teachers could help increase the access of girls to schooling. In addition, women remain under-represented, often severely, in educational management positions, providing further evidence that the "glass ceiling" persists in education.
Developed countries are also facing a difficult future. The teaching force as a whole is ageing, and Governments are battling to attract young people to the profession. Research indicates that low salaries may be partly responsible for the lack of new recruits. In donor countries, for example, a teacher with 15 years experience earns an average of $27,525 annually—significantly less than equally qualified professionals in other fields.
A Commitment to Good Governance
'Il Buon Governo'
By Antonio Maria Costa
When the UN Secretary-General appointed me to head the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna, I felt honoured. I also felt a sense of trepidation, thinking: "This is half job and half mission." But the job part had to come first. On my first day in office on 7 May, in a town-hall meeting with all staff members of the UN city—as our building complex is known here—I spoke of the internal priorities that we must address in order to work on global priorities more effectively. I stressed the concept of good governance as a fundamental requirement for the credibility the Office must have. And I used history and arts to make that point.
I told them: "Many of you may have visited the town of Siena, in Tuscany—one of the foremost centres of Italian Renaissance. In the town hall, Il Palazzo Pubblico, are the much admired Ambrogio Lorenzetti's two famous frescos: il buon governo (the good government), and il cattivo governo (the bad government). There is no better way to represent the very modern notion of governance than by going back a few centuries and appreciating its artistic portrayal in Siena's il buon governo. (Incidentally, and perhaps symbolically, the representation of the il cattivo governo did not survive the centuries and was damaged beyond repair.) Why is this relevant half a dozen centuries later? Because Member States are the stakeholders of this UN city, which we must run effectively on their behalf."
This is a guiding principle of the work I have been doing in Vienna since joining the Office. From previous professional incarnations, I have learned that management can be a very lonely experience, no matter how large and well staffed the office is. So during my first week in office, together with senior colleagues, I decided to establish a key management deliberating body—the Executive Committee—which meets weekly and is empowered with main decisions, acting in a collegial, transparent and accountable manner. In order to face the global challenges of drugs, crime and terrorism in a systematic way, we have undertaken an effort to produce a guide on our operations during the next couple of years or so. This road map will be a management tool, showing how we intend to implement programmes and projects—where, to what extent and for what purpose, including evidence of the expected results.
The 'People's Computer': An Extraordinary Tool to Bridge the Digital Divide
By Sarah Cattan for the Chronicle
Simputer is a low cost portable alternative to PCs, by which the benefits of IT can reach the common man.
The digital revolution has not only brought fundamental changes in the communications and information industry but also created a new type of poverty, the "information poverty". While more than 80 per cent of the world population has never used the Internet, the digital divide—the information and technology gap between industrialized and developing nations—keeps widening with 91 per cent of Internet users representing 19 per cent of the world population.
In Western countries, information and communication technology (ICT) has become an integral part of daily lives. However, the 100 million computers connected by the Internet throughout the world only represent 2 per cent of the world population. With the immense benefits ICT has demonstrated in the North, such a divide is simply unacceptable. In addition to facilitating access to information, ICT can have a crucial impact in reaching the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000. By providing knowledge, ICT can reduce poverty, give a voice to the less empowered, and make a real change in diverse fields, ranging from education to health and culture, for example, by promoting the history and traditions of the most marginalized people. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan explained at "Telecom 99", the global telecommunications forum held in 1999 in Geneva, Switzerland, "being cut from basic telecommunications services is a hardship almost as acute as deprivations of jobs, shelter, food, health care and drinkable water".
Granting every citizen access to telecommunications services has become an imperative to universalize the scope of ICT benefits. Scientists in India and Brazil have recently developed two projects aimed to offer the poor access to the Internet Age. In Brazil, academics have created the "Computador Popular", a desktop whose sole purpose is to connect to the Internet. Lacking a floppy disk drive or a hard drive, which are unnecessary to surf the Internet, the computer and the monitor are relatively affordable, at an estimated price of $250. The project was requested by the Government, which has shown a strong commitment to reduce the digital divide that prevents 95 per cent of Brazilians from having access to the Internet. The Government also plans to set up a loan programme that would enable low-income citizens to borrow funds to buy the machines with loans they could repay at about $15 a month. It has also started screening proposals from manufacturers and will introduce incentives to kick-start production.
Members of the Simputer Trusteeship, the Brain behind the Simputer.
In India, the "Simputer" project was initiated and carried out by a charitable trust founded in 1999, after the Global Village, an international seminar on information technology for developing countries, the previous year stressed the need for a low-cost mass access device that would bring local language information to the masses. Conceived by academics and businessmen from Bangalore, the Simputer—an acronym for SIMple compUTER—is a pocket computer that gives illiterate people the possibility to handle a computer and use the Internet; with its touch-sensitive screen, modem and text-to-speech capabilities, this mini-equipment reads information aloud in local languages.
The Simputer was specifically designed to reach out all socially and geographically marginalized segments of society. By using the free, "open-source" Linux operating system, it saves licensing fees. Moreover, because its estimated cost of $200 could still be too expensive for certain people, it features a "Smart Card", which allows individual management of information and thus enables the sharing of one Simputer by an unlimited number of people. In addition to being affordable to all social sections of India, where the median income in rural areas is as low as $30 a month, the Simputer gives Internet access to the most remote populations, made possible by its running on AAA batteries, independent of electricity, wires and personal computer stations.
Envisioned by its creators as an "evolving platform for social change", the Simputer can further enhance low-cost IT projects. In Southern Africa, for example, it has already been used for collecting data for new HIV vaccines; by giving each participant a way to enter his or her data in the system, it avoided mistakes often made in copying data by hand. The Simputer presents other advantages for detecting health problems; for example, since it runs on AAA batteries, a doctor equipped with the machine could collect data in the field and then evaluate it in his laboratory in order to spot an epidemic. These are only a few examples of the amazing tasks the "Computador Popular" and the "Simputer" can perform in developing countries. The distribution of such ICT tools by India and Brazil to other countries could also benefit developing and least developed countries by boosting the network of South-South cooperation. As was urged at the Seoul Forum on South-South Cooperation in Science and Technology in February 2000, such cooperation is crucial for the development of the poorest countries. By encouraging countries to find their own solutions to development problems, it could foster their self-reliance and increase their participation in international economic activity and world trade.
By breaking two of the major barriers to universal access to the Internet, namely cost and illiteracy, the "Computador Popular" and the "Simputer" are extraordinary projects that promise to have a great impact on narrowing the digital divide. However, the success of such enterprises rests on whether the international community will give enough support to encouraging companies to manufacture these computers in sufficiently large volumes to make them truly cost-effective. Triggering the cooperation of the private sector and civil society will precisely be one of the objectives of the World Summit on Information Society, which will be held in December 2003 in Geneva. This Summit will, for the first time, bring together Governments, civil society and the private sector to address the urgent challenge of the digital divide—a challenge that "can—and will—be bridged", as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared in his Millennium Report in 2000.
Links
Simputer (
http://www.simputer.org)
World Summit on the Information Society (
http://www.wsis.org)