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Bright light, out of a tiny screen

Thursday, December 24, 2009

AS WE START SHUTTERING down the decade being called "The Aughts" in some of the media -  that era of wretchedness measured on a Double-O Gauge scale - I’m declining the chance to wallow in pessimism.

It’s hard, though, not be influenced by all the hand-wringing prevailing through the media’s year-end and decade-end reviews (or even by just a seasonal greeting from a hot-shot media friend, who described the decade’s end as “about the lousiest year I can remember”).

 

All the same, at the confluence of two important areas of preoccupation – communications technology, and third-world development – I’m able to report grounds for optimism, enough maybe even to happily qualify as cock-eyed in the Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein definition.

 

Before the decade and simultaneously the new millennium were first ushered in, I was working full-time at the United Nations, and bent on a Quixotic mission of making the media-consuming public fully aware of the UN’s Millennium Goals - notably the Goal of halving (yes, halving, no less) global poverty by 2015.

 

Inevitably now, as that date looms alarmingly close, the target looks even more unrealistic than when it was first so blithely set, in those all-too-often blithe meeting-rooms at UN headquarters.

 

I’m unlikely to be contradicted when I say that, in five years from now, the nearly 400 million people across the globe who have less than a dollar a day on which to live will definitely NOT have shrunk to half of that number.

 

But those who care need not despair.

   

 

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ONE OF THE LEADING STIRRERS of our consciences while the Goals were being thrashed out was economist Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University – and at the time a senior advisor to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

 

Even while globally the hoped-for progress has not transpired, Sachs has been operating pockets of experimentation across sub-Saharan Africa, which individually provide beacons of hope based on real life. They are his Institute’s so-called Millennium Villages – 12 of them, carefully chosen in differing settings and climates from Ethiopia to Malawi, with the intention of demonstrably fighting poverty at the local community level.

 

Since the new millennium dawned Sachs has often contended that "the cellphone is the single most transformative technology for development". And now with almost ten years’ experience upon which to exercise skepticism, the indispensible continent-wide aggregating and originating service AllAfrica.com (in pre-digital days known as the Africa News Service) has been doing just that - exercising skepticism. 

 

A lengthy, probing interview with Sachs, conducted by the service’s Cindy Shiner, prompted him to expound in some detail on the actual economic benefits brought by the cellphone. I’ve been heartened to see this thoughtful and deeply-informed analysis spreading through the communications industry’s own commentariat, and through development experts’ dissertations – and now surfacing afresh just a day or two ago among the BBC Africa Service's influential broadcasts.

 

Sachs spells it out this way:

 

"Rural poverty has in the past been defined almost by its isolation. Communities that don't have motor transport, that lack basic roads, electricity -- these communities live by themselves in a state of subsistence. Making business in these settings, even getting very basic information about prices of food products in local markets, being able to make a transaction, being able to hire truck services, being able to call for an emergency, has been impossible until the cellphone ... Soon pretty much every village is going to have at least one, because connectivity is spreading dramatically.

 

It doesn't take more than a few phones to make a transformative difference in an area. We're seeing small businesses develop …  being able to find clients, make purchases, get supplies".

 

Speaking against a background in which, quite apart from the mushrooming wireless connectivity on land, fiber cabling under the ocean is now connecting much of eastern and southern Africa directly with the internet services of the rest of the world, Sachs has felt able to conclude:

 

"I actually think that we've turned the corner on the Digital Divide -- not that it's closed, but that a gap that seemed to be widening pretty relentlessly is now going to be narrowing in the coming years - and I think narrowing quite quickly”.

 

Does it mean we’ll reach the envisaged Utopia by the middle of the next decade? Of course not. But it looks amazingly more hopeful than the cynical pessimists among us were cautioning during those extravagant dreams of the 1990s. Merry Christmas everyone.

 

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