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| Simputer is a low cost portable alternative to PCs, by which the benefits of IT can reach the common man. | The digital revolution has not only brought fundamental changes in the communications and information industry but also created a new type of poverty, the "information poverty". While more than 80 per cent of the world population has never used the Internet, the digital divide—the information and technology gap between industrialized and developing nations—keeps widening with 91 per cent of Internet users representing 19 per cent of the world population.
In Western countries, information and communication technology (ICT) has become an integral part of daily lives. However, the 100 million computers connected by the Internet throughout the world only represent 2 per cent of the world population. With the immense benefits ICT has demonstrated in the North, such a divide is simply unacceptable. In addition to facilitating access to information, ICT can have a crucial impact in reaching the Millennium Development Goals adopted by the United Nations General Assembly in 2000. By providing knowledge, ICT can reduce poverty, give a voice to the less empowered, and make a real change in diverse fields, ranging from education to health and culture, for example, by promoting the history and traditions of the most marginalized people. As Secretary-General Kofi Annan explained at "Telecom 99", the global telecommunications forum held in 1999 in Geneva, Switzerland, "being cut from basic telecommunications services is a hardship almost as acute as deprivations of jobs, shelter, food, health care and drinkable water".
Granting every citizen access to telecommunications services has become an imperative to universalize the scope of ICT benefits. Scientists in India and Brazil have recently developed two projects aimed to offer the poor access to the Internet Age. In Brazil, academics have created the "Computador Popular", a desktop whose sole purpose is to connect to the Internet. Lacking a floppy disk drive or a hard drive, which are unnecessary to surf the Internet, the computer and the monitor are relatively affordable, at an estimated price of $250. The project was requested by the Government, which has shown a strong commitment to reduce the digital divide that prevents 95 per cent of Brazilians from having access to the Internet. The Government also plans to set up a loan programme that would enable low-income citizens to borrow funds to buy the machines with loans they could repay at about $15 a month. It has also started screening proposals from manufacturers and will introduce incentives to kick-start production.
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Members of the Simputer Trusteeship, the Brain behind the Simputer.
| In India, the "Simputer" project was initiated and carried out by a charitable trust founded in 1999, after the Global Village, an international seminar on information technology for developing countries, the previous year stressed the need for a low-cost mass access device that would bring local language information to the masses. Conceived by academics and businessmen from Bangalore, the Simputer—an acronym for SIMple compUTER—is a pocket computer that gives illiterate people the possibility to handle a computer and use the Internet; with its touch-sensitive screen, modem and text-to-speech capabilities, this mini-equipment reads information aloud in local languages.
The Simputer was specifically designed to reach out all socially and geographically marginalized segments of society. By using the free, "open-source" Linux operating system, it saves licensing fees. Moreover, because its estimated cost of $200 could still be too expensive for certain people, it features a "Smart Card", which allows individual management of information and thus enables the sharing of one Simputer by an unlimited number of people. In addition to being affordable to all social sections of India, where the median income in rural areas is as low as $30 a month, the Simputer gives Internet access to the most remote populations, made possible by its running on AAA batteries, independent of electricity, wires and personal computer stations.
Envisioned by its creators as an "evolving platform for social change", the Simputer can further enhance low-cost IT projects. In Southern Africa, for example, it has already been used for collecting data for new HIV vaccines; by giving each participant a way to enter his or her data in the system, it avoided mistakes often made in copying data by hand. The Simputer presents other advantages for detecting health problems; for example, since it runs on AAA batteries, a doctor equipped with the machine could collect data in the field and then evaluate it in his laboratory in order to spot an epidemic. These are only a few examples of the amazing tasks the "Computador Popular" and the "Simputer" can perform in developing countries. The distribution of such ICT tools by India and Brazil to other countries could also benefit developing and least developed countries by boosting the network of South-South cooperation. As was urged at the Seoul Forum on South-South Cooperation in Science and Technology in February 2000, such cooperation is crucial for the development of the poorest countries. By encouraging countries to find their own solutions to development problems, it could foster their self-reliance and increase their participation in international economic activity and world trade.
By breaking two of the major barriers to universal access to the Internet, namely cost and illiteracy, the "Computador Popular" and the "Simputer" are extraordinary projects that promise to have a great impact on narrowing the digital divide. However, the success of such enterprises rests on whether the international community will give enough support to encouraging companies to manufacture these computers in sufficiently large volumes to make them truly cost-effective. Triggering the cooperation of the private sector and civil society will precisely be one of the objectives of the World Summit on Information Society, which will be held in December 2003 in Geneva. This Summit will, for the first time, bring together Governments, civil society and the private sector to address the urgent challenge of the digital divide—a challenge that "can—and will—be bridged", as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan declared in his Millennium Report in 2000.
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