>From the Netaid site:
World Wide Web Helps
War on Poverty
"Wealth is the blanket we wear. Poverty is to have
that blanket taken away." These simple yet
powerful words come from an African activist in
Botswana. But what's that blanket made of? Before
1990, it was woven with food, shelter, clinics, and
schools. Now, if you're not on the Net, you're out in
the cold.
The Net's the new frontier: the Wild West has
become the World Wide Web. Research shows
that if you're logged on, you're likely to be young,
white, male, and making good money. Women,
poor people, ethnic groups are likely to be
excluded.
Why is access to the Net so important? Will it put
food in the mouths of starving children, or raise a
roof over a homeless family? When you have no
clean water to drink or can't read and write, why do
computers matter? Here are just a few examples of
how the Internet works for poor people.
Saving lives. When the Internet was used, it took
hours instead of weeks to link groups managing
relief supplies in Washington DC to needy
communities in remote Honduras after Hurricane
Mitch hit in 1998. In Gambia the grandparents of
AIDS orphans can visit electronic workshops to find
out how to organize their neighborhood to care for
the sick. Global networks are as important as
national ones: when former Zaire suffered a deadly
outbreak of Ebola in 1995, local doctors used
HealthNet to both alert neighbors and communicate
with the outside world.
Creating jobs. In just one Egyptian town (Zagazig),
119,000 graduates are unemployed; young men and
women are now getting trained at technology
access community centers on new skills that will
help find jobs. In Asia, students can start young,
thanks to a program (APDIP) that's bringing the Net
to schools in mobile units. All over the world,
PEOPLink helps bridge the gap between traditional
artisans and their ultimate consumers by training
and equipping them to use digital cameras and the
Internet to market their crafts and showcase their
rich cultural heritage.
Through an innovative partnership with educational
institutions across the world, Cisco Systems is
preparing students for the demands and enormous
opportunities of the information economy while
creating a qualified talent pool for building and
maintaining networks.
Assisting Farmers. The arrival of Internet to the
remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan is expected
to transform the lives of its people dramatically.
With links to the Internet, extension workers now
have access to the rapidly expanding knowledge
that could help farmers raise their production
immensely. Believing that food security is as
fundamental as the right to vote, FAO has
developed the Virtual extension and research
Communication Network (VERCON) to link
agricultural institutions to extension stations in the
field through the Internet.
Saving the environment. In Jamaica, farmers and
students can now go to community cyber-centers
to access information about new
environment-friendly technologies, as can women's'
groups in Cameroon and in Gambia - all for the cost
of a local call. In rural Sri Lanka, a community radio
team browses the Net for information requested by
the audience, translates it into local languages and
then broadcasts it in a daily program.
In fact, the Net is so valued in new countries that in
Estonia, where one in 10 people is already on line,
there is talk of making Internet access itself a
human right; And walk-in Internet posts are
mushrooming in one of the newest on-line
countries, Mongolia.
This is the aim of the NetAid partnership - backed
by the United Nations Development Programme
(UNDP), Cisco, and others - to make access to
information a right rather than a privilege, and help
win the war on poverty.
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