Stuart Corner
Friday, 27 June 2008 06:08
Opinion and Analysis
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The head of the International Telecommunication Union, Hamadoun Touré met up with the newly retired chairman of Microsoft, Bill Gates last week for a little chat about improving communications in developing countries, and he told Gates: "My dream is to connect the world" It’s been the unfulfilled dream of every one of his predecessors over the past two decades.
Back in 1984 the ITU issued a landmark document, the Missing Link, produced by the Maitland Committee. Its key recommendation - that by 2000 every person on earth should have access to a telephone - became almost the mantra for the ITU and others seeking to bridge the communications gap between rich and poor nations, along with "half the population of the world has never made a telephone call."
To achieve the Maitland goals, the ITU set up the Centre for Telecommunications Development which later became the Bureau for Telecommunications Development. Neither was very successful and the ITU's World Telecommunications Advisory Committee set up in 1992 resulted in the formation, in 1995, of WorldTel, a body designed to channel private equity into telecommunications projects in developing countries. It was hoped that with the support and encouragement of the ITU, investors would see WorldTel as a unique vehicle for accessing telecommunications markets in developing countries.
That did not work. In 2002 I wrote: "The organisation seems to be dormant...The
'investments' page of its website lists just four investments: one each in Bangladesh, Mexico, Africa and Egypt." Those same four, and only those, are still there six years later!
And Utsumi was quite frank about the ITU's failure. He told the ITU's 2002 World Telecommunications Development Conference in Istanbul: "My message today is that the telecommunications sector must take urgent steps to bring basic telecommunications to all the world's inhabitants. We must take a fresh look at our policies, and modify them to fast track our objectives. As we review our programmes and their implementation, we should do some honest introspection and ask ourselves, has the telecoms fraternity been working to bridge the digital divide, or is it unwittingly and systematically contributing to widening the divide?"
However what the world's oldest international organisation has been unable to achieve is fast becoming reality thanks largely to technology and free markets.
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