IT industry urged to fix digital divide

The IT industry must do more to bridge the digital divide in the UK, according to campaigners responding to a global initiative announced by world leaders at the Group of Eight (G8) summit in Japan.

To address the technology chasm between richer and poorer nations, the G8 leading industrial nations this week announced the formation of the Digital Opportunity Task Force, known as Dotforce, to tackle the gap between the technology haves and have-nots with a $15bn budget.

The summit confirmed that 90 per cent of internet hosts are in high-income countries which contain only 16 per cent of the world's population. There are more internet hosts in New York than in the whole of Africa, for instance.

"You could vaccinate 2000 children against six killer diseases for the price of a computer," claimed pressure group Jubilee 2000, which symbolically burned a laptop PC in protest outside the meeting.

The G8 initiative has been welcomed in the UK, but with a warning not to ignore local problems. A report from the Office of National Statistics published on 10 July showed that 48 per cent of the most affluent UK households have access to the internet, compared with fewer than six per cent of the poorest.

Chris Yapp, fellow of lifelong learning at Imperial College London, said: "If the internet is tied to education and health, it can be used to underpin the economic development of poorer countries. However, the skills divide is growing within countries, too. We need to avoid exacerbating the divide within the UK."

In March 1999, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced a £252m plan to set up a thousand internet learning centres in deprived areas. In September, he will announce the first successful applicants to receive funding. Brown has also said that UK internet access will be as cheap as in the US by the end of 2002.

Campaigners believe the IT industry needs to respond to these initiatives.

Stephen Farrell, director at Business in the Community, a charity that works with businesses to help improve society, said: "Government projects will help tackle the IT skills gap, but I'm not sure UK business is fully engaged with government and communities; it should be doing a lot more. Apart from some notable exceptions, the IT industry is behind in getting involved with communities."

Nigel Hickson, head of the Confederation of British Industry's ebusiness group, said: "It is in the interest of businesses to bridge the divide, or the market will be constrained."

"There is a lot of work going on in partnership with the government; for example, the Information Age Partnership which looks at addressing the skills shortage. There is always more work to be done," he added.

First published in Computing