Internet and digital divide: Prospects and Challenges.

In 2005, civil Society groups in Africa continued their role on ICT as the World Summit on Information Society kicked off in Tunis, Tunisia. As digital Divide continue to cripple millions in the South many still believe that the Information Highway is coming to Africa. Challenges remain high, so as possibilities grow with risks.

James Curren, in his chapter Rethinking Media and Democracy in Media and Society, argues that New Times calls for New Thinking. It is time to rethink the role of technology on the people in the developing world. Globalisation has created opportunities and threats; you have seen more prospects and challenges, innovations and shortcomings. In Africa, the past ten years have seen a growing inequality of access to ICTs. Even though the UN Millennium Declaration Goal and Article 19 of the UN Declaration of Human Rights both regard access to information as a fundamental human right, many people in the developing world are still denied such a basic right. Some reasons are that people are not taking a good advantage of the potential of the Web, while some reasons are rooted in history. In the next few weeks, you will find interesting yet topical issues about the digital divide, the internet revolution and the prospects for Online Marketing.

The idea behind this is that, over the past years, the Internet has revolutionised the lives of millions of people across the world. This radical change has seen some come out as losers (information poor) and while some benefited from this digital revolution (information rich). This is the time to evaluate the impact of the Internet and make the good out of it, and it is within the same token that I chose to focus my writing on these. These will feature current statistics about the digital divide in the developing world, the role of civil society, the evaluation of forums such as the Bill and Gates Microsoft Government leaders forum, the role of governments in bridging the digital divide through NEPAD, the World Summit on Information Society and others. The future is contested; we may predict and cannot tell the exact results, but the impact of ICT on the lives of millions in the next hundred years looks promising if something is done right now.