Giving Villages the Technology They Want
Analysis by Kalinga Seneviratne

BANGKOK, Dec 27 2013 (IPS) - Mobile broadband services are seen as a key tool of development communication the world over, but people in rural Asia and Africa say telecom companies should cater to their needs and not simply impose technology on them.
Experts say spreading the benefits of the digital revolution to rural areas poses a huge challenge for telecom companies, which have so far focused on urban markets.

“The telecom industry has had an easy ride so far. It hasn’t seen what’s coming to them,” Mark Summers, co-founder of Inveneo, a non-profit company promoting broadband connection in Africa warned at the Telecom World 2013 conference here last month.

He was immediately challenged by a Zimbabwean in the audience who said he lived in a rural area and didn’t need the technology they had all been talking about. He wondered if telecom companies ever asked people like him what they wanted before trying to connect them to the technology.
Similar debates had taken place in the 1970s and 1980s when radio was promoted as a development communication tool, mainly by western consultants.
“They talk of us as if we are uneducated,” Reuben Gwatidzo of the Information Society Initiative Trust of Zimbabwe told IPS.

Gwatidzo said it wasn’t necessary to learn someone else’s language or to have high literacy to be a good carpenter, farmer or build one’s own house.
“The education they want to bring is education that will draw a wedge between me and my way of life,” he said. He said he was not against new technology but rural people must be allowed to choose what they want, and not have some “international strategy” imposed on them.

The telecom meet was organised by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) in the Thai capital. The meet picked up on longstanding issues.

ITU estimates there will be over 6.8 billion mobile phone subscribers around the world by the end of 2013, but points out that there are 1.1 billion people who do not have access to the Internet, with 90 percent of them in the developing world.

Telecom companies – which target urban markets – have increased their revenue by 12 percent between 2007 and 2011. The industry is largely driven by private operators.

Many argue that private companies are not interested in rural markets because of low purchasing power and high cost of connectivity and that is why governments should step in to provide connections.

“The real challenge is how to structure spectrum allocation to attract carriers to both urban and rural sectors,” said Safroadu Yeboah-Amankwah, a Ghanaian telecom sector analyst.

“The truth is rural markets are not attractive, but there are mechanisms to address them, including government intervention through which you can tax the urban markets to subsidise the rural markets,” he told IPS.

But not everyone is convinced about the role of the government.

Dhaka-based Abu Saeed Khan, senior policy fellow at LIRNEasia, an ICT policy and regulation think tank, argues that governments can create problems too.
“In Bangladesh, the government has auctioned this bandwidth. It is not cheap, so private operators load the price on the package,” he told IPS.

“When it comes to Internet bandwidth, operators don’t have direct access because the government has erected a barrier – a middleman – so the cost of Internet bandwidth is too high for consumers,” he said.

ITU’s report, ‘Measuring Information Society 2013’, argues that people living outside major cities in developing countries are the ones for whom information and communication technology (ICT) can have the greatest development impact.

In many countries across Asia and Africa, schools and health centres are connected to mobile and broadband technology and farmers are provided information on crop protection and marketing.

For instance, the International Fertiliser Development Centre provides information via mobile phones to farmers in five African countries to protect them from counterfeit fertilisers.

In Malaysia, seaweed farmer Kabila Hassan has set up a successful business – also providing employment to half her village – by using the Internet to market products in China, Japan and the U.S. She received the ITU’s Transformational Power of Broadband Digital Icon Award 2013 here in Bangkok for it.
Brahima Sanou, who is from Burkina Faso and is director of the Telecom Development Bureau at ITU, believes mobile phones can be the new development anchor.

He pointed out several examples of this – such as Senegal where fishermen use mobile phones to find out the price of fish before they come ashore; Rwanda where it is used to follow government services in rural areas; and Costa Rica where it is used to combat non-communicable diseases.

“People who never had access to any technology are now using mobile phones. We have to develop (services) for people (through) what they own already, not bring new tools,” he said.

Dr Rohan Samarajiva, a Sri Lankan telecom expert who is the founding chair of LIRNEasia, told IPS that the findings of a six-country sample survey on how poor people were revealing.

“It is very clear that they are accessing more than voice services through wireless platforms,” he said.

“We were surprised when, while doing research with poor people in Java (Indonesia), they clearly stated they were not using the Internet, but later they started talking about Facebook and various other activities.”

“This shows that they are using mobile phones without necessarily going through the steps they think are necessary to use the Internet,” Dr Samarajiva noted.

He said their sister organisation in Africa had the same findings.

“So it’s a different conception of the Internet,” he said. “The whole world is moving towards mobile devices. We will see an explosion of its use.”
As phones are transforming from merely voice communicators to what is called 3G or 4G, which transmits voice, visuals and data, a large chunk of humanity in rural Asia and Africa is waiting for a transformation in their lives but with technology that is relevant to their needs. 

Sri Lanka: Navi Pillay Visit Fails To Dispel Perceptions Of Bias

By Kalinga Seneviratne

Giving a press conference at the end of her week-long visit to Sri Lanka, United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) head Mrs Navi Pillay, A South African, said that she was highly offended by comments in the Sri Lankan media accusing her of bias because of her Indian Tamil ethnicity.

“Some media, ministers, bloggers and various propagandists in Sri Lanka have, for several years now, on the basis of my Indian Tamil heritage, described me as a tool of the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam). They have claimed I was in their pay, the ‘Tamil Tigress in the UN’. This is not only wildly incorrect, it is deeply offensive,” said Mrs Pillay at the beginning of the press conference.

In the same vein, she also added, “the LTTE was a murderous organization that committed numerous crimes and destroyed many lives ….. those in the diaspora who continue to revere the memory of the LTTE must recognize that there should be no place for the glorification of such a ruthless organization”.

These comments have not stopped the Sri Lankan media and the blogsphere continuing their attacks on the perceived bias of both UNHRC and its head for overstepping her mandate to attack the Sri Lankan government from its own soil.

In a hard-hitting editorial in the government-owned Daily News the day after she left Sri Lanka, it said that “the UN High Commissioner’s prejudices have long been clear, but they have never been clearer than after her recent visit to this country”.

The editorial went on to argue that  the reaction at the end of her tour was so expected and in fact, President Mahinda Rajapakse himself  predicted it the day before. “He told her at Temple Trees (President’s official residence) that the people of this country think that her report to the U.N at the end of her tour of duty will reflect her prejudice” the paper disclosed.

Welcoming her comments on the ruthlessness of the LTTE, the Daily News said “we may very well be able take her at her word that she has no truck with the Tamil Tigers, but if anybody on the streets gets that impression she has only herself to blame for it”. It pointed out that without informing the government in advance she had tried to lay a wreath in Nandikadal, the location of the final battle in which the LTTE was annihilated. The army officials on the location have stopped her from doing it.

During her meeting with President Rajaakse, Mrs Pillay was reported to have told him that it was good she was able to come to see the developments in the country and it was “very visible” to her that the government has invested a lot in reconstruction work in the North. Yet, the pro-LTTE TamilNet said that according to informed sources in Jaffna when the Northern Province Governor Major General (retd) G.A. Chandrasiri was showcasing the development work in the area, she’s told him that she was more interested in witnessing what had been achieved on the human rights front. She also questioned whether the people on the ground had been consulted in designing the ‘development’ projects that were being displayed to her.

In addition to her perceived ethnic Tamil bias, a lot of criticism in the Sri Lankan media and websites have focused on her double standards in demanding an independent  war crimes investigation on the final days of the war against the LTTE in Sri Lanka, while being silent on US and NATO actions in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and currently in Syria.

Writing in LankaWeb, veteral journalist  M.L.D Mahindapala argued that Mrs Pillay has worked hand in glove with the European Union to accuse Sri Lanka of war crimes.  “As early as May 2009 she has fired a broadside with regards to human rights violation which ran on parallel lines to the EU resolution tabled at UNHRC” he pointed out.

“On what criteria did she confine her condemnation of Sri Lanka to the last five months of war, leaving out selectively 32 years and 7 months of the longest war in Asia in which the Tamil Tiger terrorists used every conceivable weapons of war, including chemical warfare?” asked Mahindapala.

The independent Island newspaper reported that the Defense Secretary Gotabaya Rajapakse has told Mrs Pillay that the United States had no moral right to move a resolution targeting Sri Lanka at the UNHRC.  He has questioned Mrs Pillay’s silence and argued that it reflected the difficulties experienced by the UNHRC in dealing with atrocities committed by US-led Western powers.

When Mrs Pillay was asked this question at the press conference, she merely said that UNHRC release a country report on every country each year and last year the US had to respond to 19 queries. But, she avoided saying anything more about these queries or why she has not articulated it publicly as she’s done with Sri Lanka.

“The bottom line was that Mrs Pillay would remain as UN rights chief as long as she didn’t antagonise the US” Defense Secretary has told the Island.

Sri Lanka’s Foreign Minister Prof G.L Peiris has reiterated during a meeting with Mrs Pillay in Colombo that it is important to have an objective approach and extend equal treatment to all countries when fulfilling the assigned mandate of the UNHRC. The Minister added that Sri Lanka accepts constructive and justified criticism, but resents vicious and baseless positions, which are incessantly repeated.

He had explained to her the difficulties encountered in identifying the perpetrators of human rights violations due to the conditions prevailing at the time of incidence, with regard to a number of cases UNHRC has raised that occurred during the war. He drew a parallel with the case of the assassination of the former Foreign Minister late Lakshman Kadirgamar (by the LTTE), where conviction has not been possible due to the lack of evidence. In cases of missing persons, he outlined the difficulties in identifying the missing due to instances involving persons having migrated to other countries holding multiple identities, and those host governments not divulging their details.

It was indicated to Mrs Pillay that the repeated use of baseless and arbitrary figures in respect of disappearances, eventually acquire authenticity in the face of the massive propaganda that is being carried out against the Government of Sri Lanka. Regarding comments made by the High Commissioner on the PTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act), the Minister had stated that some of the countries that criticize, have provisions in their domestic legislation far beyond those of the Sri Lankan PTA.

He had advised Mrs Pillay to look at the human rights situation in Sri Lanka from a more broader perspective and pointed out the impressive development indicators in the country since the war ended in 2009.  He gave her information on the enormous amount of resources being channeled to the North, which has resulted in a 27% growth rate in that region, as against corresponding national figure of 7%. In this context the Minister had also informed her that there are 225 bank branches and 76 finance and leasing companies that have been established in the Northern Province since 2009.

Mrs Pillay is due to make a report to the next UNHRC sessions in October on Sri Lanka, but, many commentators in Colombo tend to believe that it will not be fair to the country.

However, political columnist  D.B.S Jeyaraj of the Daily Mirror newspaper warns against using the “ethnic bias” argument to discredit Mrs Pillay’s report. “The proponents of this ethnic bias argument are in effect playing into the hands of those seeking an impartial international investigation into charges against Sri Lanka” he argues.

“The line pursued by those who desire an international investigation into alleged war crimes during the final phase of the war against the LTTE is that Sri Lanka would not be able to conduct an impartial investigation into those matters because of the ethnic factor. The predominantly Sinhala Govt. would not conduct a free and unfettered probe into allegations against the predominantly Sinhala armed forces is the crux of the argument”, notes Jeyaraj. “Colombo however, invokes the concept of sovereignty and counters such demands by saying that Sri Lanka as a nation is above ethnic considerations and is capable of conducting an impartial probe”.

“What the denigrators of Navi Pillay on grounds of ethnicity fail to take note of is that their campaign against the UN High Commissioner is strengthening the hand of those seeking an international investigation into Sri Lankan affairs” he warns. “If Navi Pillay is deemed unsuitable because of alleged partiality due to ethnicity then the same argument would be applicable to Colombo too”. 

(END)