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Dr Hamadoun Touré
Put communications at the heart of development
Dr Hamadoun Touré is an ideas man and when he is in full flow, they come out thick and fast. The secretary general of the International Telecommunications Union of the United Nations is endowed with a genuine belief that at the heart of all solutions to the world’s development challenges is information and communication technology; from the Millennium Development Goals to climate change.
“If people do not have the ability to communicate, how can they achieve their goals in the health sector, education? You can’t do it without e-health, e-education, e-government, e-commerce.” The ability to access, use, create and share information are “the four priorities of the human being,” Mr Touré says. “And information technology is at the centre of it.”
Aside from reducing material waste – most ITU conferences strive to be paperless, and the group is pushing for the adoption of universal chargers for electronic devices – the monitoring of environmental information will need decentralised ICT services, putting it at the heart of the climate change debate, Mr Touré insists. Even the food security question is solvable when viewed as a technical challenge – the problem is simply distribution, not supply, he says.
Driving access to technology services in the developing world will come down to a mixture of the public and private sectors, Mr Touré explains. He is encouraged by the recent rekindling of interest in the African telecoms sector, with rumours circulating around major players, including Zain Africa, the ongoing negotiations over the merger of MTN with India’s Bharti
Airtel, and by a commitment from private sector players earlier this year at the ITU’s Connect Africa event in Kigali to invest $55bn in telecoms projects.
“For five years in a row, Africa has been number one in the world in terms of growth in mobile. Why is that? Because of the policy that has been put in place to attract the industry. All the private sector needs is confidence in policy. Policy that is clear and predictable. The referee on the game needs to be fair on all players. He needs to not change the rules of the game while the game is being played. It’s as simple as that.”
Setting the right policies can encourage private sector growth, even in areas which have less obvious commercial benefits, such as providing services to remote rural communities. In this instance, Mr Touré says: “We encourage the regulatory authorities not to create licenses that are linked to any particular technology. You put as an objective a license for specific services, and you leave the choice of technology to the private sector. They will find the best solution.
“The danger that we’re facing is that we’ll have access to mobile, to telephony, everywhere. But that’s not enough… the broadband divide is the most dangerous divide that’s coming up. We need to start thinking of it now, which is why we have put in place a number of frameworks that put in place broadband access through wireless.” Broadband enables the full range of social services, Mr Touré says, and acts as a catalyst for development.
“It gives developing countries the ability to access the same information as MIT in the US, instantly. This is what we are looking for, and this is why we are saying that broadband will be key. Governments will be able to provide all services, in a much more democratised and transparent way.” Failing to address the broadband gap will mean that delivering ICT could increase inequality.
As states push for growth in broadband, however, there is another emerging global threat that they need to be aware of, Dr Touré says. “The key challenge will be security: cyber-security. We have to be sure that we have not only technical preparedness at all levels, but also a good legal and regulatory framework. Because criminals are no longer at the crime scene, they may no longer be in the country where the crime is being perpetrated… we need to be sure that laws are harmonised.”
“Everyone thinks he’s the most protected, and doesn’t want to talk about it. We have to be very frank about this, cyberspace is very dangerous. There’s the same crimes and dangers that you have in the conventional world, magnified thousands of times, at the speed of light. We need to be sure that no one will create botnets that will be sent to countries. That’s the problem. No one will harbour terrorists who will attack other countries from their territory. Those are the risks, and governments should look at it objectively.” Those risks are high in states still finding their feet in cyberspace.
Mr Touré is cognisant of the potential dangers of state control over information networks. “While we are doing security, we have to be aware that there is a very fine line between security and privacy. The right to access information is a fundamental human right. It shouldn’t be violated,” he says. “The right to access it safely is also equally important,” he muses.
“We are not talking about control. We are talking about safety. You can give safety without invading citizens’ privacy. You can manage the network without taking away freedoms.”
One of Mr Touré’s mantras is the power of the human brain to innovate, but, he says, combined with modern technology, that power is a double-edged sword. “We should not fool ourselves. You have 6.5bn inhabitants on this planet. It is 6.5bn potential superpowers. Everyone, with the power of his brain, can be very destructive. How we use it to have global cooperation, to work together for the good – that is our challenge.”
