According to the report released by the Third World Institute, otherwise known by its Spanish acronym, ITeM and Association for Progressive Communications (APC), pointed out that more citizen involvement in policy-making is key in increasing access to ICTs.
The report, however, said that this increase in ICT access would not reduce poverty, the two organisations stated in their introduction to the 2007 report.
Equally, the report, which spotlight was on the state of ICT policies at local and global levels, particularly focused on how policy impacted on the lives of people living in developing countries.
Karen Bank of APC informed that the studies were conducted in 22 countries from four regions of the world.
He noted that the four regions comprised of Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe.
In Africa, Bank said the report was carried out in Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Uganda, while the Asia region was made up of Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and the Philippines, the Latin America region covered Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico and Peru and Eastern Europe via Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia and Romania, where accommodating one report from West-European country of Spain.
The report wrapped up by saying that when it comes to ICTs for development, there were some conspicuous similarities between countries in the 21 countries where the research was carried out except Spain.
“The other 21 countries each showed obvious evidence of the digital divide which impacted on the majority of people negatively,” the authors were quoted as saying in its introduction.
According to Brazilian authors RITS, the absence of a people-orientated policy framework in Brazil runs the risk of condemning the vast majority of people to “eternal disconnection.”
The report also includes provocative, analytical essays on five international institutions, namely on the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), questioning the extent to which they allowed all stakeholders to participate in their processes. There is a special section on how to measure progress.
Commenting on the report, Executive Coordinator of the Secretariat of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF), Dr. Markus Kummer, said it is an important effort at a critical time of ICT evolution globally.
“It is of utmost importance to know the extent to which the people affected have a voice in the policy-making organisations,” he declared, stressing that participation of all stakeholders in policy processes is a key element of good global governance.
He emphasised that the report will also be good input to the IGF in its continuing work on a development agenda for Internet governance and the special emphasis being placed on capacity building for all stakeholders.
In addition, he noted that while so much attention is being put on the effort to overcome the inequities in global information access it is important to make sure that the people who need this access are actually served by those efforts.
Senior adviser, Danish Institute for Human Rights, Mr. Rikke Frank JÃrgensen noted that currently, there is lack of ICT indexes on policy decisions.
“There is a lack of ICT-oriented indexes which focus on inclusion and exclusion in ICT policy decisions. Global Information Society Watch is a serious attempt to bridge this gap.”
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