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October 4, 1999

Help the World Connect

By Robert B. Reich, a former secretary of labor. He is a professor of economic and social policy at Brandeis University and national editor of The American Prospect.

If you want to make a dent in the real problems of poor people around the world, don't fund another panel of experts to do a major report on global hunger, overpopulation, global poverty, global illiteracy, child labor or ethnic strife. Don't create a program, institute or project staffed by earnest young political scientists and economics postdocs. Don't convene a forum of leading thinkers, CEOs, journalists, and statesmen at a conference center in Aspen, Jackson Hole, Vale, Davos, Geneva or any other beautiful locale. This has all been done, sometimes usefully, but it's not what's most needed now.

Instead, work from the bottom up. Do the 21st-century equivalent of what Andrew Carnegie did a century ago: Build public libraries for the world's digital have-nots. I don't mean giant marble-edificed, intimidating Greek-columned places downtown, housing millions of tomes. I mean small, quiet, safe, pocket-sized places in poor neighborhoods and communities like Bridgeport, Conn., Pauso Alegre, Brazil, and Kankan, Guinea, where digital have-nots can gain access to the accumulated knowledge of mankind.

Over the past three decades the income gap between the world's richest fifth and its poorest fifth has more than doubled, to 74 to 1. The digital gap threatens to widen it considerably more. Less than 1% of the globe's Internet users are in South Asia, where 23% of the world's population resides. The cost of a single computer is more than what the average Bangladeshi earns in eight years. In several African nations, the monthly charge for an Internet connection approaches $100. Even in the U.S., which has the greatest density of Internet users, the number of users in poor neighborhoods is 1/20th that of richer neighborhoods.

Imagine thousands of small libraries replete with computers and satellite uplinks to the Internet. First and foremost, the libraries could help overcome illiteracy, the single greatest impediment to upward mobility, which now condemns almost 30% of the world's adults to ignorance and isolation. The libraries would contain educational software for reading and writing, and teachers to explain how to use the software and to offer further guidance. The libraries would house real books, but even more books on CD-ROM, and all the rest of the world's books would be available via the Internet, to be downloaded into personal-reading devices that people could take home with them.

The libraries would also be places where people could learn the rudiments of good health, hygiene and safety. Most of the world's poor are far-removed from doctors and teachers. But through computers and the Internet, local residents could converse with doctors and teachers beamed onto screens from hundreds or thousands of miles away. They could discuss best practices for improving child health and nutrition, avoiding unwanted pregnancies and the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. They could learn how to make drinking water safe and how best to irrigate their land. They could learn the best techniques for mediating ethnic conflicts and peacefully resolving territorial disputes.

Thus linked to software and teachers, the poor could also gain marketable skills. They could learn how to start their own business, and get access to the lowest-cost financing and other resources. They might even do certain work for pay right there at the library's computer, such as routine software coding for global enterprises.

If this sounds far-fetched, it's not. There's already a tiny scattering of such libraries around the world. In Pondicherry, India, the M.S. Swaminthan Research Foundation and a staff of teachers have put together some secondhand computers and an Internet uplink to create a learning center for literacy, health care, and new skills. In Egypt, where there's only one Internet user for every 1,600 people, an Internet-linked library has been established in the governorate of Sharkeya, offering distance learning in a broad range of subjects including Web page design and desktop publishing. Local residents are beginning to sell their skills on the Web.

Most people who are poor do not want to be poor, but they do not know the route out of poverty. They need knowledge. Good schools are a necessity for the young. But libraries that link human minds with the wisdom of humankind can show the way for everyone. Rather than widening the gap between the global haves and have-nots, the Internet could begin to narrow it.

For this to work requires not only money but also vision, and a subtle understanding of how technology is best used in different cultures. In the new digital age, this should be feasible. What more appropriate goal for a foundation funded by Bill Gates?

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