Executive Secretary of the Global Digital Solidarity Fund

“1% digital solidarity” principle for a fairer information society

The transition from the industrial society to the information society involves a major change, which has many hidden implications both at the macro-economic level and in our daily lives.

Profound changes such as these are disturbing, many citizens who are wondering where their place is in this new world and where it is taking them. At the same time, they offer new opportunities to balance out the relations between the industrialized and the developing countries.

The digital divide presents the threat of one more fracture in North-South relations, with the risk of seriously marginalizing millions of men and of women. In a world where dialogue and the transmission of knowledge depends on access to information and communication technologies (ICT), populations that are deprived on such access lose all chance of being heard and taken into account. This is tantamount to a denial of their existence, and it is easy to understand why thousands of young people are ready to leave their villages, their family, their way of life and their culture in order to travel to countries that offer them new prospects for personal development.

And the figures bear them out. In effect, ICTs represent almost 5% of the GNP of the countries of Europe (and as much as 8% in the United States), engendering 40% of their economic growth.

We thus need to respond to this challenge, to find the necessary resources to provide close on 80% of the world population with access to the society of knowledge on an equal footing, and so establish the basis for an information society that is less unjust than was the industrial society.

This is the principal objective of the Global Digital Solidarity Fund (DSF). Such an initiative is all the more necessary given that the information society is dedicated to the circulation of information and cannot remain limited to just 20% of the world’s population.

It has become clear that public financing and traditional aid to development are today no longer sufficient to achieve this objective, and that innovative financial mechanisms need to be devised to reduce the digital divide. The sums required are enormous, and demand considerable political will. For all these reasons, the DSF has proposed the adoption of the “1% digital solidarity” principle.

The principle is as simple as it is effective. It is the only way through which we can envisage coherent international action. It has the advantage of being universally applicable, engaging all partners in development – the private sector, public authorities and civil society alike. Let us take a brief look at how it works.

The “1% digital solidarity” principle calls upon all public or private entities purchasing digital products or services to include a digital solidarity clause in their calls for bids, under the terms of which the vendor of such products or services shall pay to the DSF one percent of the total sum of the transaction, drawn on its profit margin. In other words, it is the company providing the product or service that makes the contribution of one percent.

This in no way implies a loss for the companies of the ICT sector, for the Global Digital Solidarity Fund will buy equipment or services back from them for the same amount, to be immediately reinvested in insolvent markets which today are excluded from such transactions. Thus, through this transaction of solidarity, businesses will be able to develop new markets and increase their profit margin. At the same time they will be participating concretely in the development of a fairer and more egalitarian information society.

This “Marshall Plan” of the digital world can work if everyone involved plays the game of solidarity with a sincere commitment. The “1% digital solidarity” principle has a further advantage, in that it introduces new public stakeholders into the process of cooperation in development, such as local communities that until now have hardly been involved in international cooperation, if at all. It is right that they should be involved, because the information society is not limited to the nation States, but concerns all public players from the smallest to the largest. Paris, Rome, Moscow, New York, Shanghai, Bilbao can make the same commitment as the tiniest village of the Urals or the Rocky Mountains. One day, the map of the world will be full of little blinking lights powered by solidarity and an information society that offers equal opportunity to one and all.

The Geneva Secretariat of the Global Digital Solidarity Fund is particularly aware of how much is at stake. In both its routine everyday work and its commitments and ethical principles, it will continue to be guided by the need for solidarity, at the service of all, and most especially of those in the direst need.

Alain Clerc
Executive Secretary, Global Digital Solidarity Fund