One more divide to cross for Africa

The Human Development Report 2001 from the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) deals with the challenge of making new technologies work for human development. It provides a timely analysis of the trends and dynamics behind the new information technologies and global knowledge networks. It is an important contribution to better understanding the achievement levels and the geographical patterns of creating and using technology to improve people's lives. In a note of encouragement the report states upfront;the technology divide does not have to follow the income divide. Unfortunately, income remains a dominant access criteria to new technologies and already marginalized regions in the global economy as in wide parts of Africa remain as detached from hand-held palm IVs as news about life there is absent from CNN.

The UNDP report recognizes this problem clearly: technology is unevenly diffused within and between countries; it is created in response to market pressures; not the needs of poor people who have little purchasing power. It would come as no surprise to discover that the age group of 12 to 17 year-olds in the USA probably commands more hard-drive space and computing capacity to power their game-boys and other virtual gadgets than the entire African continent. Apart from the exception of South Africa, the vast sub-Saharan part of the continent is barely touched by waves of technological innovation that spurned the growth of technology hubs throughout many other parts of the world. The long list of socio-economic and political problems that continue to shackle development in Africa severely inhibits dynamic adaptation of new technologies; the pressures of poverty, frequently low levels of industrial productivity alongside slow or severely constrained democratization processes do not make for conducive conditions for new technologies to quickly establish footholds. The widespread absence of such footholds has left much of Africa again marginalized. The UNDP report illustrates this point through an index of technological achievement. It consists of four central achievement categories: 1. technology creation 2. diffusion of recent innovations 3. diffusion of old innovations 4. human skills.

Unsurprisingly, among the 72 countries that have so far been ranked not a single African country appears as a leader or potential leader, South Africa qualifies as a dynamic adapter (position 39) as do Tunisia (51), Egypt (57), Algeria ( 58), all non-sub-Saharan Africa, and at the time of ranking, still Zimbabwe (at position 59). Among the category countries indexed as marginalized, six of the nine countries are sub-Saharan.

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