A summit for whom ?

The World Summit on the Information Society is taking place in Geneva from 10 to 12 December. Its aim is to reduce the ‘digital divide’ between the world’s richest and poorest people.

G, 14 years old, has worked in a factory for the last three years. He makes shoes on a production line. He earns 30 cents per day. It is hardly enough to buy food and to pay a share of the rent for the room he shares with his six brothers and sisters. If he stopped buying food and lived on the street, he would still need between 25 and 30 years to buy himself a computer.

Y, 11 years old, walks 18 kilometres a day to fetch water. She helps her mother and her aunts to prepare meals. She does not know how to read or write. She has no idea what the Internet is.

S, 8 years old, lives in the street. Every day he begs in order to feed himself. He does not know how to read or write either. He watches television through shop windows. The problem is that there is no sound. It doesn’t really matter, as it is the only way that he gets to watch football matches. If he begged for 38 years, he would ‘earn’ the equivalent of a television set.

B, 48 years old, writes computer software. Last year, he earned 3 billion dollars. It would take more than 4 million years for G, Y and S to get such an amount together.

There are four to five billion people in the world who will never have a computer.
Happy Christmas!

Editor-in-Chief, Jean Michel Jakobowicz