Cure for bandwidth arrogance
Cyberspace was a tantalizing new frontier in 1990 when Richard Fuchs, a rural development worker and a bit of a gadget freak, sent Labrador’s first email message. He was convinced that online communication offered remote communities an opportunity to leapfrog into the 21st century. Nobody was terribly impressed, Fuchs recalls. It took 45 minutes for the modem to connect. But the Newfoundland sociologist went on to become one of Canada’s digital pioneers, using information technology to deliver everything from health services to business intelligence to isolated outposts.
Fuchs was telling his email story to Venancio Massingue, Mozambique’s minister of science and technology, at a conference not long ago.
It turned out that Massingue, a computer engineer, had been doing exactly the same thing in his country — two years earlier. The lesson, says Fuchs, is that North Americans have to rethink their smug notions of advanced and backward societies, developed and developing nations, First and Third World economies.
“ We have bandwidth arrogance,” he says. “ But when mobile phones converge with the Internet, it will shape an entirely different type of information economy.”
Cellphones are already more pervasive in Uganda than in rural Canada, Fuchs says. In India, 3 million people sign up for cellphone service every month. That compares to 14 million subscribers in Canada.
“ We need to understand our niche rather than patting ourselves on the back.”
Fuchs, who now heads the information technology branch at Ottawa’s International Development Research Centre, believes Canada has a role to play in helping poorer nations “ climb the wireless ladder of social and economic transformation.” But it will take open-mindedness and respect for what they’ve already achieved. He intends to display both at the World Summit on the Information Society, which opens today in Tunis. The formal deliberations — in which Fuchs will not be participating — are designed to put in place legal and political protocols for the Internet. Government officials from 80 countries will be taking part. The informal purpose of the meeting is to give researchers a chance to brainstorm and showcase their work. That is what Fuchs and his colleagues from Ottawa’s most unconventional crown corporation plan to do. They will not, Fuchs stresses, promote Canadian technology or services in the African capital. “ We’re not going to sell anything. We’re there to transfer ideas.”
Fuchs has seen a lot of Africa since his Newfoundland days. In the mid ’ 90s, he parlayed his success in promoting rural development into an international business. As founder and president of Futureworks, he helped set up telecentres in Uganda, Tanzania, Benin, Ghana and Malawi. The more time he spent on the continent, the more impressed he became with the imaginative use of technology that he saw there. He watched a farmer in a cornfield in Senegal get price quotations from the market in Dakar. He watched a midwife in a remote Ugandan settlement, three hours south of Kampala, use distance medicine.
“ I’m not saying tear down hospitals and put up Internet cafés,” he says. “ I don’t want to suggest you’ll eat better if you get a cellphone.
“ But farmers’ incomes do go up when they’re connected and affordable technologies do improve health outcomes.”
Fuchs is reluctant to call Canada a world leader in applying information technology to the challenges of international development. He prefers the term innovator. As a country with far- flung communities that have moved from resource reliance to participation in the knowledge economy, it has learned what works and what doesn’t. As one of the first nations to connect its schools and libraries to the Internet, it has set a good example.
“ People are willing to work with us because they’ve heard we do good things,” he says. “ It’s surprising how much they know about Canada.” As Fuchs looks down the road, he can see the Internet being used to boost women’s participation in the African economy, deliver education to kids in bookless villages and give citizens a voice in the political process. He thinks laptops and cellphones will be instrumental in combating AIDS and averting other epidemics. He envisages African entrepreneurs using mobile telephony in ways most North Americans can’t even imagine. The prospect excites and humbles him. He wants to be part of it. He wants Canada to help make it happen. Carol Goar’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday.