Dear GKD Colleagues, The first question is : * Week 1: What activities are bringing connectivity to under-served communities? (10/27 - 10/31)
The bottom line ..... looking at the question from the point of view of underserved communities is simply that essentially NO ACTIVITIES ARE BRINGING CONNECTIVITY TO UNDERSERVED COMMUNITIES. Almost everyone that lives in an underserved community is as lacking in connectivity today as they were one year ago and five years ago and 10 years ago. The REAL penetration of connectivity FROM THE VIEW OF THE THE SOUTH is almost NOTHING. The sad tragedy is that this is NOT the way it looks from the NORTH. While a few years ago there were no connectivity projects to visit and write about, now there are hundreds, maybe thousands. So we get the IMPRESSION that there has been significant progress. This is B*** S***. Almost everyone in the poor and hungry world (about 3 billion people at last count) is as poor and unconnected now as they were before ICT became fashionable. And will be for the foreseeable future. There can be activities to bring connectivity to the underserved, but it will never be done with the organizational and funding framework that dominates development space today. The technology is available. The people are available. But the business model and value chain being used does not optimize what is available and use it to support development, but organizes to reward investors and corporate management OR government and the repayment of WB/IMF debt. The big corporate world has actually created a connectivity monster ... with $zillions of investment that now is unbelievably surplus to their needs and obsolete as well. To some extent we have a replay of the AT&T fiasco of the early 1980s when they suffered from an earlier version of the corporate obsolescence crisis. If anyone wants to invest in solutions that use best technology and can deliver affordable connectivity in the SOUTH, I would like to hear from them. It is clearly obscene that connectivity costs so much in the SOUTH when the use of modern technology is so low cost. I would like to ask the development expert analysts to wake up and do the numbers. And then change the policy framework and funding allocations. Sincerely Peter Burgess ____________ Peter Burgess ATCnet in New York Tel: 212 772 6918 Fax: 707 371 7805 [EMAIL PROTECTED] for secure messages ------------ This DOT-COM Discussion is funded by the dot-ORG USAID Cooperative Agreement, and hosted by GKD. http://www.dot-com-alliance.org provides more information. To post a message, send it to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To subscribe or unsubscribe, send a message to: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>. In the 1st line of the message type: subscribe gkd OR type: unsubscribe gkd For the GKD database, with past messages: http://www.GKDknowledge.org
