General Statement LDC III conference
Dr Michel Loots, MD
World Information Transfer, Regional Director
Europe and
Human Info NGO, President and Director
Information vaccination for Poverty Alleviation
and
It is
possible to bridge the digital divide between richer and poorer countries by
providing the tenthousands of essential UN publications covering all fields of
development freely or at extremely low cost to every development actor in the
LDC countries.
This is
possible via CD-ROMS which each contain up to 1000 full-text books and costs 1
US$ to multiply.
Just like
every child can be vaccinated against polio, every development actor in the
developing countrues can be vaccinated against ignorance and for
capacity building by providing all the appropriate solutions and a mix of the
thousand most essential publications he needs in his situation. This will
create a truly global participatory movement of millions of people cooperating
with their government and with the UN to solve poverty by applying the best ,
globally agreed strategies and solutions combined with local solutions. This
will ensure a sustainable development where health and preservation environment
can be included.
Yes, the UN
is increasingly making its information available digitally, mostly via
Internet. But this still does not meet the demand in developing countries. There is a need for cooperation of UN
agencies with civil society to make these publications truly universally
accessible.
UN
organisations as vertical information and quality pillars need to pool all
their development information into a non-profit digital public domain pool, so
that all these solutions from different agencies can be recombined for
non-profit redistribution. These agencies can be strengthened in their
distribution capacity by creating horizontal distribution links with civil
society, mutipliers and local government in order to saturate local information
needs tailored to users needs .
This way,
for 1 US$ per CD of thousands of books, it is possible to empower milions of
humanitarian and social entrepreneurs with an adapted digital library to meet
their mulitidisciplinary information needs
For
Example: Medical Doctors should each receive a digital library with the 1000
most essential books they need to help care for the local health situation:
clinical info about malaria and TBC treatment, hospital organisation, about how
to train their nurses, AIDS prevention help etc, Once they have the first
library, they can be empowerd with low cost multimedia CD-ROMs containing video
to train them or their health personnel
Example:
Small businesses should have access to all those management books and thousands
of enterprise ideas and plans they need to start and expand their enterprise
and produce soap or run a poultry farm more efficiently
Example:
Country Development Libraries could be created containing relevant
international organisations and country information
The
technical solutions are there and available to all
The UNESCO
and FAO sponsored Greenstone software we have co-developed with the New Zealand
Digital Library Project is totally public domain, and each CD-ROM can become an
intranet or Internet server
1 CD-ROM
can contain up to 1200 full-text books or 150.000 pages, including the images.
20.000 Us$ worth of publications on one CD of 1 US$
This
material can be freely recombined and extracted or adapted to local needs.
Translating
all essential UN information into local languages via a Computers for
Translations deal with local universities
Finally,
there is a need and an opportunity to translate all these essential technical
UN publications into local languages. For logistic and budgetary reasons, 75 %
of all UN publications are in English.
These publications could be translated by last year students in the
universities by a “Computers for Translations” arrangment with the donor
countries.
Every
university or university department in a developing country could get 10
computers, on condition they would translate 5 UN books per donated computer
into the local language. The translation would be done by two or three
graduating students per book doing this as part of their master thesis
assignment. Each book would be validated and checked by the professors. This
way, several capacity building objectives are met at once and a digital library
with thousands of books can be created into local languages.
The result
will be an empowerment of all citizens of that country with a digital library
with all the information and knowledge they need to participate, in the
millions, with their government and with the UN agencies, to the sustainable
reconstruction of their countries, the eradication of poverty, the respect,
preservation and rescue of the environment, and meeting basic needs and health
for all.
Thanking
you
Dr Michel
Loots