world's annual telecoms investments outstrip those in the developing world by a staggering $30 billion.
The developed countries have only 16% of the world's population but boast 90% of its Internet users. Southeast Asia has a quarter of the world's population but only .04% of Internet users. In sub-Saharan Africa, the Internet reaches only .3% of the population. "The Internet is a hugely powerful and liberating technology," says James Deane, director of the Panos Institute, a London-based think tank, "so people who don't have access to it could be further marginalized and exploited." In the face of such statistics, there is widespread skepticism of the leapfrog scenario, particularly in the corporate sector. Says PricewaterhouseCoopers CEO James J. Schiro, "In our 2000 Global CEO Survey, we found that the 1,020 CEOs are split as to the potential impact of the Internet on economic growth. Fifty percent of them believe that the gap between developed and developing nations will widen; 38% believe the opposite." Pascal Renaud, head of an information and development program at the U.N., says "leapfrogging is like the syndrome of the Green Revolution, when people thought tractors and fertilizer would make the poor countries take off." Professor Manuel Castells of the University of California at Berkeley even speaks of a "technological apartheid" between rich and poor nations, while UNESCO's Philippe Quéau says gloomily: "The more the Internet develops, the more it is concentrated in the U.S. and the rich countries."
Far from buying in to the leapfrogging theory, some third world intellectuals see the Internet as a potential tool for exploitation. Writing in the Paris-based monthly Africultures, Moudjibath Daouda, from Benin, decries what he sees as a neocolonialist battle over the potentially lucrative consumer market among Africa's 1 billion inhabitants. Daouda wonders whether the introduction of the Internet should not wait until "other crucial needs of Africans have been met." Among them: education, health care, safe drinking water.
But true believers argue that information technology will help poor populations meet those basic needs as well as jump-start national economies. Says South Africa's former Minister of Posts and Telecommunications Jay Naidoo: "Using the Internet for applications such as distance education can allow us to leapfrog from high levels of illiteracy to computer literacy. The opportunities are limitless for the Internet as an engine of economic growth and development." For Mounir Diawara, founder of an Ivory Coast communications company, the new technologies are a "divine response" to Africa's needs. "A real revolution is underway," he says. "We missed the Industrial Revolution, so much the better. We shouldn't try to achieve an industrialization that is costly to the environment and a source of conflict between different social levels. The problem here is not to manufacture computers but to be present in the services."
Between the skeptics and the boosters, there are those who see information technologies as a way to help narrow the North-South gap--but only if handled intelligently. One entrepreneur who is trying to use information technologies in the service of development is France's Jacques Attali, a former diplomatic adviser to President François Mitterrand. Attali is founder and president of PlaNet Finance, a non-profit Internet-based group that seeks to facilitate loans for small-scale third world businesses. "The only sure thing," says Attali, "is that when a zone is developed, its neighbors develop--a sort of reverse domino theory. The Net makes people virtual neighbors, so the neighborhood theory of development now applies to everyone." MORE>
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