Digital Solidarity
And the Digital Gap

by
Abdoulaye Wade¹ 

Question : "How will developing countries join developed countries into the information society ?"

Answer : "By simply jumping into the snake's belly !" Abdoulaye WADE, President of Senegal, says.

The digital gap which dangerously separates the countries of the North from those of the South has led the United Nations Secretary General to ask the ITU to prepare a World Summit on the Information Society, to be held in Geneva in December 2003. But even if this issue is keeping experts awake at night and many concerned people very active on the ground, no viable and definitive solution has yet been found.

Now, because of this, a voice comes from the South, proposing a solution which has surprised the experts with its conceptual relevance and its viability.

We have asked the author, Abdoulaye Wade, to explain to our readers his idea of digital solidarity.

I do not know if Adam and Eve arrived in this world as babies or as adults as the story was told to us, but I am sure that their first achievement was to communicate. Perhaps with a look, then a gesture, then--or at the same time--the spoken word. 

As a result, communications was born within the group, starting with two people. Then groups created ways and means of communication: words with their different inflections, body language, conventional language, a hollowed out log, music made with a wide variety of instruments. This is intra-group communications. 

Then someone in one group noticed that in order to communicate with someone in another group, one has to learn the language of the other.  

As long as these systems governed relations between people "speaking the same language"², as they say, people could easily communicate because the means of communications of some people were accessible to others.  

Thus over time, persons and peoples have sent messages, some of which have never been decoded, because of a lack of communications. This is the case with cave paintings, megaliths, the pyramids, and more recently, Mona Lisa's smile. The message has always been the means for transmission of knowledge. This is the communications/knowledge link.  

But then groups invented new ways to transmit messages over long distances: the stagecoach, the postal service, and the train. Then with the use of electricity, which gave birth to even quicker ways to transmit messages: wireless telegraphy, the telephone, followed by electronic mail which introduced the digital age. And now hard drives look down from the height of their megabits on the largest libraries, the voluminous contents of which they can send over long distances at the speed of light. Digital technology is creating a new man in a new civilization--the information society--in which not just anyone can enter, like in the early days of humankind. Now one needs to pay to use complicated and expensive equipment, or remain isolated.  

I believe the great magic about information  and communication technologies has been to suggest the measurement of distances in megabit per second instead of miles. Our journey in the quest for the other and for knowledge now comes down to our capacity in acquiring these technologies.

Because of the large time lag between economic and technological evolution, society has begun to divide into two groups, the North and the South, separated by an electronic gap. In the North, people have the equipment and the money to pay for access. If one does not own the equipment, then one can pay the price of renting, access and use. In the South, are those who are excluded. The North and South communicate less and less, with a risk of no longer being able to communicate at all. 

The opulence of technologies in many northern countries has favored the emergence of the fascinating e-economy. The latter has lately accepted to submit itself to the rigor of scientific analysis therefore leading to the end of the internet bubble. This warning is quite interesting for the economist that I am : the principle of a bursting volume relates to an excessive quantity of gas in a given quantified volume. If the volume had been made larger, the bursting would not have occurred. This very simple economic principle is mentioned in the Old Testament : "And the land was insufficient for them to stay together, because they had so much wealth that they couldn't remain together".  This perspective is in line with Bill Gates' premonition that Africa will be the next technology market.  

The digital gap brings with it a danger of isolating certain peoples, those in Africa in particular. It is paradoxical and ironical that the continent which invented writing would--at the end of a process which it initiated--be excluded from universal knowledge.

The concept of digital solidarity is proposed as a strategy with the goal of closing the digital gap through "painless" individual contributions. 

Two lines can be defined as the digital margins. ³ Societies which are de facto excluded from information, e.g. the South, fall below the lower margin. The upper margin would ideally be found at the level of countries which have reached or are on the verge of reaching saturation, such as the United States, although it is preferable to set this upper margin at a realistic level. Between these margins lies a band defined as the standard information society, which could be reasonably accessible to all societies, if the most developed countries are motivated by a spirit of solidarity.  

The goal is to lift up those at the bottom toward and into the information society, which is defined in the communications space by the presence of a certain number of measurable quantitative indicators, as well as qualitative indicators, which are the attributes of the information society. 

The band between the margins is called the digital snake⁴. It is called a snake because this band grows and changes scale over time and with progress in accessibility to communications. 

These indicators could be the number of computers per inhabitant, number of websites, the cost of Internet access, the penetration rate of telecommunications in a society, etc. 

The digital solidarity actors are the civil society, the international private sector and governments. They would act within a framework of a Digital Solidarity Charter ⁵. 

 As for Financing, a Digital Solidarity Fund⁶ would be created from voluntary contributions through yet to be established procedures. 

For illustrative purposes, and given the above caveats, the following contributions could be considered:

• 1 U.S. penny per international communication,
• $1 per purchase of a personal computer,
• $1 per purchase of a software
• $1 per piece of network equipment, etc.
• Voluntary contributions from the private sector.

Digital Solidarity could thus be achieved by raising large amounts of money collected painlessly because the contributions are so small. They would be used to finance the entry and maintenance of a large number of nations from the South in the digital snake. This is how the digital gap gradually would be closed, on the road to e-civilization.

In closing, one notes that the societal division which is occurring is the fault of mankind's lack of wisdom. Mankind is too proud of its scientific achievements but it is totally ignorant of their larger consequences, even though world religions have already warned us of the dangers of societal divisions. So much the better if--conscious of the dangers of the digital gap--mankind would feel committed to digital solidarity. Then, soon the bytes would laugh at distance, leaving Mombasa⁷ at the speed of light to travel to Paris, Oslo, London or New York, full of sound, color, knowledge, wisdom and joy. And society will have rewarded the patience of great libraries of the world, which have waited patiently over 2000 years for digital technology to send their immense wealth, saved from the vagaries of history, to every corner of the earth, in the North as well as in the South.

¹ President of Senegal, Former Dean of the Dakar University School of Economics, Associate (Agregation) Professor of Law and Economics, CES (Certificate of Advanced Studies) in General Mathematics, CES in Mathematics, Physics and Chemistry, CES in Rational Mechanics.
² Languages, Binary or Cobol languages, for example.
³ Inspired by the concept of monetary fluctuation margins, and the monetary snake agreed upon between two or several countries which seek to bring about a relatively stable convergence of currency exchange rates.
⁴ Same reference as Footnote 3.
⁵ To be written, perhaps by the United Nations, which would propose it to the actors. ⁶Note that these painlessly raised funds would go primarily to buy ITC equipment from the North.
⁷ City in Kenya, the termination point for a proposed railroad called the Horizontal, which is planned for NEPAD, and which crosses Africa from Dakar in the west to Mombasa on the shores of the Indian Ocean.