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MISTICA: Africans Excluded From IT Benefits

From: Yacine Khelladi ([email protected])
Date: Mon Dec 04 2000 - 08:10:03 AST

ya vamos por el impacto negativo de las TICs!

Yacine

Kenyan Rights Activist Says Africans Excluded From IT Benefits [PANA]
http://www.allafrica.com/stories/200011120031.html
November 12, 2000
Dakar, Senegal

A Kenyan civil society specialist, Maria Nzomo, has observed that
globalisation alongside the new and expanding information technology
tend to have more negative impact on Africa in the context of pervasive
poverty
on the continent.

"They connect only the 'connected' and exclude the rest from the loop of
globalisation," said Nzomo, co-ordinator of a just-ended UNDP-supported
Dakar-based programme on "Civil Society Empowerment."

According to her, "the 'connected' in Africa, are the few wealthy and
literate with the capacity to utilise IT (information technology)."

In the latest edition of "Civic Agenda," a component of the programme
supported by the UNDP and co-ordinated by the Dakar- based Council for
the Development of Social Science Research (CODESRIA), Nzomo said the
situation, "has raised a major controversy over the merits and demerits of
globalisation, over the issues of access, control, power inequalities
and the governance question."

She said the globalisation process is closely linked to the Bretton
Woods' Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs), blamed for "rising
unemployment, deterioration of social services, acceleration in the cost of
living,
and escalating levels of corruption."

Nzomo further explained that globalisation has "fully opened African
economies to foreign commercial interests that have entered into
'corrupt' lucrative partnerships with Africa's political and economic elite."

A leadership that had presided over national economic collapse, she
argued, should not be expected "to manage reforms and be guardians of good
governance that it had avoided throughout its political career."

She noted that since Africa "cannot wish away its problems by engaging
in self-denial and shifting responsibility to external forces as it
recognises that external domination and exploitation has contributed to
some of the
current problems, Africans must now take charge of their destiny and
seek solutions from within."

Although, Nzomo conceded that the globalisation process may have
increased opportunities for civil society to become an effective partner of
State
institutions and market actors, "this remains an unfinished project as
institutional capacity-building is still needed to make civil society an
effective as well as a legitimate partner in governance..."

She challenged African countries to pool their resources together and
invest in collective technologies to "reduce increasing technological
marginalisation while avoiding the copy- cat tendency of incorporating
every technological innovation that appears on the world market, even when it
is totally irrelevant to their needs."

African intellectuals, she said, should also critically examine the
phenomena of globalisation and governance with the view of defining an
alternative ideological and institutional framework, within which the
various stakeholders around the continent could construct and implement
viable development paradigms.

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