We live in a divided world: between rich and poor, healthy and sick, literate and ignorant,
democratic and authoritarian, and between empowered and deprived. All the technologies
that we developed in the past centuries and all the policies we enacted for enhancing
human development have not wiped out these glaring disparities. The numbers are
depressing: more than 2 million people (1.5 million in Africa alone) die of tuberculosis
annually, for which medical treatment exists; about 2.8 billion people live on less than $2 a
day; life expectancy in Sierra Leone is 37, a level not seen for centuries in the West, and, in
spite of its protestation of hi-tech, India remains the home for the world’s largest number of
adult illiterates. We can extract such dismal statistics in many areas of human development,
infrastructure availability, economic well-being, environment and empowerment. While
many categorizations of countries have been proffered (such as developing, emerging
economies, economies in transition, etc.), a new label—a sign of the times—is the “digital
divide,” which describes the development of countries (and groups within countries) in
terms of their capacity to harness the power of Information and Communications
Technology (ICT).
Numerous organizations, governmental and non-governmental, public and private, global
and very local are working to remove the glaring disparities in development. Some of their
efforts are already showing results. The poverty rate, for instance, based on a real income
level of $1 per day declined from 29 percent to 23 percent in about twenty years. Infant
mortality, due in large part to water-borne diseases and poor hygiene, has fallen from 4.6
million in 1980 to 1.7 million in 1999. It is unnecessary to emphasize that much more needs
to be done in all areas of sustainable development, especially in specific areas such as
Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia
In the following section we discuss the targets for sustainable development (SD) projected
at various Global Forums and endorsed either unanimously or by a majority of the nations.
While every country has its own set of priorities and targets, and some have appropriated
the UN promoted targets as their national ones, we shall base our discussions on the UN
promoted ones, for they provide a common template for sustainable development missions.
Most sweeping and specific are the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which span
most facets of human development.
The Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002) also drew out some
of the targets of the Millennium Declaration. However, the scope of the Johannesburg
Declaration was more extensive and included many areas of deprivation and action points.
For instance, the 19th article states “We reaffirm our pledge to place particular focus on, and
give priority attention to, the fight against worldwide conditions that pose severe threats to
sustainable development of our people, which include chronic hunger, malnutrition, foreign
occupation, armed conflict; illicit drug problems; organized crime; corruption; natural
disasters, illicit arms trafficking; trafficking in persons; terrorism; intolerance and incitement
to racial, ethnic, religious and other hatreds; xenophobia; and endemic, communicable and
chronic diseases, in particular HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.”
This summit chose to focus on five particular areas, Water, Energy, Health, Agriculture and
Biodiversity, known as the WEHAB framework. The Summit also underlined the importance
of technology for development such as cost-effective desalination of seawater recycling and
renewable energy resources, diversification of energy supplies, advanced energy
technologies and even phasing out of subsidies. There was an explicit reference to
Information and Communications Technologies for development in Johannesburg. The
importance of ICT culminated in the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS),
Phase I of which was held in Geneva in December 2003.
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