[DDN] 'Digital Divide' Narrowing Fast, World Bank Says

[Cedar Pruitt]

GENEVA (Reuters) - The "digital divide" between rich and poor nations is 
narrowing fast, the World Bank said on Thursday, calling into question a 
costly United Nations campaign to bring hi-tech telecommunications to the 
developing world. 

As some 1,700 international experts gathered in Geneva to prepare for the 
U.N.'s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), the World Bank said 
in a report that telecommunications services to poor countries were 
growing at an explosive rate. 

"The digital divide is rapidly closing," the report said. 

"People in the developing world are getting more access at an incredible 
rate -- far faster than they got access to new technologies in the past." 

Half the world's population now enjoys access to a fixed-line telephone, 
the report said, and 77 percent to a mobile network -- surpassing a WSIS 
campaign goal that calls for 50 percent access by 2015. 

The report said there were 59 million fixed-line or mobile phones in 
Africa in 2002 -- contradicting Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade's 
claim at a U.N. news conference last year that there were more telephones 
in Manhattan than in all of Africa. 

"Unless New Yorkers and their commuter friends have 12 phones each, Africa 
now has many more telephones than Manhattan," the World Bank report said. 
[...]
http://olympics.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=technologyNews&storyID=7731166

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Cedar Pruitt
Online Content Manager
EDC Center for Media & Community
http://cmc.edc.org
cpruitt @ edc.org
(617) 618-2185
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