Financing the NGDI
Development, in the economic sense, also consists of a list of services and amenities that many take for granted. These include an adequate public transportation system, good communications - radio, television, telephone, and, with the information revolution, internet services. The list also includes efficient public administration with a trained civil service. These are the elementary components of a developed society; they make its smooth running possible. (Udombana 2000, p.756)
Therefore an information infrastructure needs to be positioned within a wider strategy that understands how information will be used, what physical infrastructure is needed for effective access and use of data, and what information, knowledge and analytical skills are needed within the user communities.
The extent too which information underpins both social and economic development, and public participation in the democracy of development, is the subject of studies that concentrate on the information rather then the technology. Sheppard et al (Sheppard, Coucelis et al. 1999), in a review of spatial information infrastructures, take the view that data and information are essential ‘fuel’ for the research process:
Negative social consequences may also emerge from inequalities to access in spatial data. Data are the raw material to which intellect may be applied in order to create and learn, from which answers may be sought, and from which new intellectual work may arise. (Sheppard, Coucelis et al. 1999, p.808)
And the importance of good information in the health field is stated in a recent editorial in the British Medical Journal:
Might information flow be one of the most important factors for improving health and development in resource poor settings? Development organisations have not thought so. They have concentrated on infrastructural projects, increasing the number of health workers and clinics, and programmes to eradicate infections. But now we are at the start of the information age, and we understand better the importance of information. (Editorial 2000)
A criticism that is responded to in part by the World Health Organisation initiative, launched in December 1999, ‘to provide access to high quality scientific information, via the Internet, to research centres in countries in Africa, Central Asia and Eastern Europe’. (WHO 2000)
A challenge to any infrastructure development is to determine how it will encourage economic activity. If information is made available will economic and social improvements necessarily follow? In a 1995 presentation to TURBITAK, the Turkish IT development agency, Linda Garcia (Garcia 1995) reviewed the way that the Internet had developed in the USA. In 1995 the government of Turkey was developing a strategy for Internet and e-commerce development in Turkey. Garcia argued that the USA had a critical mass at the education level before the business model started, and much of this education and research development was founded on the existence of widely accessible federal data. Furthermore, the data were available at no cost and without copyright limitation.
Garcia further argued that countries that try to go directly to the business model might forego the educational benefits. Such a path may result in the flow line from academia of trained knowledge workers not being available, with the inevitable skill shortages and dependency on overseas ‘imported’ staff. The academic flow line itself is best underwritten by widespread availability of data, particularly data that are for their own country. There can be few things more demoralising than providing researchers with access to IT facilities, software and the Internet in a developing country, only to have those researchers trained on US federal statistical and geographic data that are available free on the Internet because national data are not available.
The provision of data therefore requires a clear strategy, with regulatory decisions regarding access, cost, and copyright. Stiglitz talks of ‘concept of global goods’
… global public goods provide a central rationale for international collective action. But today, governance at the international level entails voluntary, cooperative actions. These include agreements to support an international property regime which facilitates the private production of certain kinds of knowledge. (Stiglitz undated)
And more specifically Starr (Starr 2000) argues for the creation and maintenance of a ‘public commons’ for data, being concerned in particular at the potential loss to the public commons of data and information being viewed more in terms of commercial commodities:
The debate about intellectual property today is dominated by companies that fear that the new digital environment will prevent them from enjoying the full return on their investments … The new public domain is one of the most valuable, if almost accidental, consequences of the digital revolution. It needs its champions. I suggested earlier that the new technology can improve the transparency of government, but the pursuit of transparency should be seen as a more general goal. (Starr 2000)
So information is an essential component in the development of knowledge workers that then provide the national skill base for commercial and other sectors. At a macro level, information skills seem increasingly essential for any country, and their absence (or relative lack compared to more developed countries), along with inequalities in access to technology (Kiggen 2001) is a contributory factor to the ‘digital divide’. In a report from the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) conference on information technology in July 2000, World Bank President James Wolfensohn is quoted as saying:
“The globalisation of trade, finance, and information flows is intensifying competition, raising the possibility that the poorest countries and communities will fall behind even more rapidly than before.” (Olster 2000)