Worldwide Access to ICT: The Digital Divide

The world is undergoing a revolution in information and communication technologies (ICT) that has momentous implications for the current and future social and economic situations of all countries of the world. In March 2000, an estimated 276 million persons worldwide were using the Internet with a growth rate of roughly 150,000 persons per day. 220 million devices were accessing the worldwide web, and almost 200,000 devices were being added daily. Web pages totaled 1.5 billion with almost 2 million pages being added each day. E-commerce, or business conducted over the Internet, totaled US $ 45 billion as recently as 1998. An estimate in January 2000 projected it could explode to over US $ 7 trillion as early as 2004. These are astonishing figures, unprecedented by any measure, but they reflect the activity of less than 5% of the world’s population. The gross disparity in the spread of the Internet and of the economic and social benefits derived from it is a matter of profound concern. There are more hosts in New York than in confinental Africa; there are more hosts in Finland than in Latin America and the Caribbean. Notwithstanding the remarkable progress in the application of ICT in India, many of its villages still lack a working telephone.