Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-05-14-Speech-3-270"

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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I too would like to most warmly congratulate Mrs Ferrer on her report, which has quite rightly been adopted unanimously, and in which she also addresses the significance of the new technologies, especially of the Internet. It is this point that I wish to pick out particularly in order to deal with it in greater detail. Whilst we support all the good proposals made in this report with regard to the urgent necessity of building capacity, they will be only halfway useful if the developing countries do not acquire widely-available access to modern information and communication technology, thereby leaping over the digital gulf. There are still, in New York, more telephone lines than there are in the whole of Africa. On average, people in Africa are still 50 kilometres away from the nearest telephone, let alone from the Internet. You may perhaps have read that it took three days for a recent massacre on the border between Sierra Leone and Liberia to become public knowledge, those three days being the time it took to reach the nearest telephone. What this means, in both a positive and a negative sense, is that capacity-building requires that it be possible to transmit information for such purposes as the speedy provision of help in disaster situations, for the transmission of educational material enabling great advances in capacity-building, for enhancing the competitiveness of local, regional and national economies, for empowering civil society, especially women, to improve health service provision and eventually also the development of administrative capacity, to implement innovative techniques – if I had the chance, the list could go on forever. This is a necessary aspect of any capacity-building strategy, but there is a virtually total lack of any such strategy for Africa, where the need is greatest. In this respect, the Commission owes much to the ACP countries in particular, and I wish to urge most strongly that serious consideration be given, when examining all the concepts that have been set out so well in this report, as to how the communication gap can be closed, for it is demonstrable – there are calculations to prove it – that it results in economic failure for a very large number of people. To do so will be to the benefit of the capacity-building that Mrs Ferrer has described."@en1

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