OneWorld.net (U.S.)

Transcript from Ask the campaigner: Using the web to tackle poverty Interview with Peter Armstrong, Director, OneWorld International

BBC News World Edition, February 11, 2004

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/talking_point/default.stm# __________________________________________________________________

Filmmaker Lord Puttnam and television personality Jonathan Dimbleby are among leading figures from the world of media, film and politics helping to launch a new communications network using the internet, to help developing countries tackle poverty. The idea has come from the international organisation, OneWorld.

How can new technology help the fight against poverty? How big is the digital divide within the developing world?

You put your questions to OneWorld International Director, Peter Armstrong.

Newshost: Hello and welcome to the BBC interactive forum, I’m Jacky Rowland. The internet is a universal medium, used across the world primarily as a source of information. But aid agencies and relief workers believe it also has the potential quite literally to save lives. That’s the message the international organisation OneWorld wants to get across. The organisation has been a pioneer in using the internet to try to help eradicate poverty and human suffering. Now they’re setting up a communications network to raise funds and encourage the use of new technology in developing countries.

So how much potential does the Net have for dealing with global issues? Well I have in the studio with me today one of the directors of One World International, Peter Armstrong, and he’s going to answer your questions. Peter, welcome. I suppose the very first question would be: how does something like the internet – something out there in cyberspace – have any effect in the real world?

Peter Armstrong: It has an effect in the real world because people need information. An example struck me very recently; I was in southern India in a tiny little village by the sea and there is a project going called the Open Knowledge Network which is trying to transfer knowledge on a daily basis for ordinary people in these communities. We were walking around the village and a woman came up to the knowledge worker and said: I’ve got a real crisis, my daughter is due to have caesarean this week but she has a very rare blood type and there’s no blood available – what can I do?

He rushed back to a community access point, which means it’s open to the whole community, typed into his computer an appeal. It goes out as a kind of newsletter to all the surrounding villages and by the next day someone had come forward, a young student, who had the right blood type and was able to donate it. So quite possibly here daughter’s life was saved. So in a case like that it’s so clear that people need information – it might be information about market prices, it might be the weather, what’s going to be happening the next day, an opportunity to do better.

Newshost: That’s led me into the first question touching on particularly what you were talking about, having the network available. This question is from Adewale Adebayo, Lagos, Nigeria who says: I wonder how people in the developing world are going to benefit from this scheme as most people there are not conversant with internet technology?

You gave an example where there was the ability to send messages out but how can the internet help more broadly in eradicating poverty where people don’t necessarily have access or the knowledge to get this information?

Peter Armstrong: Well the first thing is public access points – this means a school or a library of something that the government or an NGO has set up – just usually one room with a couple of computers that anyone in the community can go into.

And when they go in there what they find is not a computer they have to learn how to use but hopefully a helpful group of people, very often it’s women, looking after it, who say now what would you like to know about, how can we help you, do you want to ask a question maybe of the community and they help them type it in.

What is important is that it must be in the local language. It is not good saying people should go on Web, all the information is there. It may be there but it probably isn’t going to be there in the local language that you use in these villages.

Secondly, it mustn’t be expensive. It is no good saying, go on line if it 50 cents or a dollar an hour to go on line and you are living on a dollar a day. So if you can solve the problems of cost, of local language and really supply appropriate information, not from outside, but from the surrounding communities, then it makes sense I think for ordinary people to go in.

Newshost: We’ve got a question here from Mark, London and he’s injecting an element of scepticism into our conversation already and he wants to know, he’s questioning the motives for introducing the internet into the developing world. He asks: is it really to improve communication and understanding or is it to open up new markets for multinational companies?

Peter Armstrong: I think if you were multinational company you probably wouldn’t put a high priority in getting public access points into villages, you’re not going to sell an awful lot of products that way. The reason people do it on the whole, is for the social benefit that it can bring.

But I’d like to widen this slightly. We keep talking about the internet but really this is about other forms of new communications as well and the one that is sweeping Africa is the mobile phone and that really isn’t so different. It is another way of being on line if you are having communication, getting text messages and what have you and we are trying to connect that so that the stuff that is on the internet is also available to people on mobile phones and there you’ve got an even wider population. The numbers are really staggering. I was in Kenya at the end of last year and they told me that whereas they’d been perhaps 160,000 fixed lines phones a year and it was very hard get one. Suddenly there were a million people with mobiles last autumn and then I asked somebody this month how many there are and they said it is now past 2 million. And this is not just in the towns, it is in surprisingly wide areas of villages.

Newshost: But you were talking about cost just earlier on – costs associated with the internet. But having mobile phones, that’s expensive as well isn’t it?

Peter Armstrong: It is if you want to own one yourself. But what very often happens is that in the village one person has one and they are not paying on the kind of contract that we have, they are paying on a pay per use and actually some of those cards are quite cheap to use. So if it is really going to save you a lot of money, it is going to be worth your while just to make one key call to maybe a family member in the nearby town or maybe to get information.

Newshost: We’ve got a question now touching on censorship and this comes from Denise in Singapore and she is saying that in many countries, such as China, the government tries to restrict the availability of information on the internet by banning sites that they don’t like and she’s wondering how you’re going to deal with this kind of a problem.

Peter Armstrong: But we faced that problem for nine years at One World where we have been banned in China and we’ve talked to the officials in Beijing about why this is and I think we, like many other international organisations, that have a human rights dimension to our work are faced with an absolute barrier in certain countries where they feel they’re not wanting to be open to those possibilities. I think the BBC was banned in China for quite a long time – I’m not sure if it is at the moment.

But what we believe is that in the long run countries will see the advantages of being open because the more you close down, the more you are also closing the opportunity for your people to get information for their voices to be heard to be part of an international community.

Newshost: We’re moving on beyond relief and aid work to questions of a more political nature which brings me on to an e-mail we’ve got here from Tyson in Denver, USA who asks: Are there implications for the spread of democracy and democratic institutions through your project?

Peter Armstrong: Absolutely, 100%, not just what we’re doing – we’re just a tiny part of a huge movement which we think is towards democracy – why because these new media gives people a voice. The great thing about the old media, which I’m afraid I include the BBC, is that is pretty much a one-way thing. It is marvellous that people are sending in questions now but people don’t actually have any control over this programme, it is being decided from here. Whereas the new media actually they can become programme makers, if you will, their pictures can be sent around the world, even their videos can be sent around the world.

We have a part of One World, called One World TV, where if you’re in Denver and you have a point of view that you can’t get out to the world, you can put that clip online, you can actually make it shareable. And so a people’s medium - the chance for people’s voices to be heard is crucial for democracy.

In the context of development that we’re talking about, for many, many years people have talked about participatory development – it is no good just doing good for people with ideas that seem a good idea from London or from Washington – what do people themselves want, what are their ideas for the development of their own lives. Now with this two-way medium, with the chance for their voices to be heard, we’ve got a chance to have real participatory development.

Newshost: I’ve got a question now about another website. One of our online users, Ben Miller from Cheltenham in the UK is asking about other websites. He mentions the thehungersite.com. Ben says that with this one apparently you click on it once a day and the idea is that you view advertising by companies who in return for using the site will then fund food aid. Do you think these kinds of websites really make much of a difference?

Peter Armstrong: I don’t know what the numbers are on how much difference that has made. I think it was quite popular when it first started, I’m not sure how far it has continued. I think we’re all learning what works in this medium. That was clever idea that people would go in and click and a small donation would be made.

There are though other sites including things like Comic Relief where huge sums have been raised by more straightforward donations where you put the issue up there and when people see it and they have the chance to immediately respond by making a donation or offering online volunteering time, they are prepared to do so. That’s another thing which One World is really stressing at the moment that you can volunteer from whatever country you are in, if you have time and you are online you can become a One World editor, you can contribute, you can put in your videos, your ideas and so on. That two-way nature which of course you are doing in the BBC, is a crucial way that the Net is developing.

Newshost: We were talking just before about the limitations of technology and know-how. Matt Wake in Geneva e-mails in on that subject. He’s asking if you can give us some examples of how you at One World, have tackled basic problems like poor telecoms infrastructure and poor skills base. Is there any country in which you have managed to overcome these problems?

Peter Armstrong: I certainly wouldn’t say we have – again I’d say we’re quite small. But the partners with work with have been doing amazing things. If you take India as an example, one shouldn’t think that you want to try and get across India the sort of broadband infrastructure that exists in the US or here. They’ve got much cleverer and much more cunning ways to get people connected. For example, YFI, the wireless system is really being pushed there to its limits. For example, here you expect to use it in your house and it might travel 10 metres or something like that – there they are putting it on masts and they’re managing to get it 20 kilometres. So within a radius, using YFI, you can actually get a lot of people connected.

They’ve then done one step beyond that which I think is very clever. They’ve put it in the back of motorcycle or on the back of a bus that’s going around the villages and as it comes into the village, say the bus comes into the village and stops and picks up passengers, all the time it is there, the YFI connection is made between the bus and the local computer, all the information is exchanged, all the files are updated in two directions and the bus drives on. So it is like being connected in an intermittent way without any of the wiring or any of the infrastructure. So I think it is a very clever example of what people can do when they are up against it.

When people say it is a problem wiring the world and so on and we have to do from here, we’ve got to come up with answers – that’s simply not true. People there have very, very imaginative ideas. You go into the tiniest of villages and you find that people have rigged up things with batteries, wires and radio connections and little dishes and goodness knows what in order to connect. People want to connect in this world.

Newshost: It does sound very enterprising and very ingenious. But I think that some of viewers will be asking a more fundamental question that shouldn’t we really be devoting these resources to more basic human needs, like clean water and sanitation rather than all this technical stuff.

Peter Armstrong: I don’t think it is an either or. The point is, all this technical stuff, as you say, is something that people also want. Communication is also a very important need. We gave the examples of medical help, the educational resources that can come through these connections - people want this but it isn’t an either or.

If you want to get clean water in your village that probably needs to be a campaign – you need to be in touch with the local authorities, you need to get enough support locally etc. So it is all about communication and traditionally that’s been done by meetings and going to town and having visits and so on. But now you can use the new technology to actually leverage that same campaign to get what you want. So we think it is a means towards all those important things that development needs – like water, food and so on.

Newshost: I just wanted to introduce another note of scepticism from Tania in Dublin, Ireland. She sounds like she’s been on your site because she says, given your mission statement, it has clearly defined social and political objectives. She asks how she and other online users could trust the news content of the One World website.

Peter Armstrong: You can trust it because it comes from our partners. We don’t write ourselves, we aggregate and collect the best of what comes from more than 1,600 organisations around the world – these are the Oxfams and Amnesty and the Unicef that you have heard of. But also the small NGOs in Africa and India you won’t have heard of but who are very close to the issues. And from them we gather together their view of the world which is very different from the view of the world that comes from the mainstream news agencies. So it is a different perspective and as a user, you should take them both and you should judge what seems to you to make sense. But it is not like the Web in that it is just anything, they are all partners who are vetted by One World. They are all people who are sincerely working towards a truer picture of the world.

Newshost: You have this big launch tonight and you’ve got some big names involved – people like Lord Puttnam – what difference is going to make for you and for your work to have the endorsement of these kinds of high profile people?

Peter Armstrong: Well we hope it is going to make a real difference. We’re delighted to have had support from a number of international advisers and friends over the years and someone like Jonathan Dimbleby who is speaking tonight has such a distinguished record in broadcasting and also in VSO – he spans across to the voluntary sector as well. Lord Puttnam, of course, such a pioneer in the media. We are not talking about the new media that’s entirely separate from the old but actually what is the right marriage that can bring the experience and the skills of those people and those industries.

So what we hope tonight is that we can broaden the circle of supporters of OneWorld, which traditionally has been volunteers from the voluntary sector, the traditional NGO-type people. We want to broaden that to people who have been working in television, who’ve been working in the IT industry who have felt the benefits of the information revolution and actually would like to give something back.

Newshost: Peter, finally what about people who are maybe listening to our conversation now on our website, what could they do, how could they click onto One World International and play a part in all of this?

Peter Armstrong: Well oneworld.net is a very easy URL to remember. So you just go to oneworld.net. In there you’ve got a choice of 17 languages, so depending on your language preference, you can then look at the different editions. If you’re interested in radio or video you can look at those things too. If you want to volunteer your time you can do that. If you want to donate money, there is button which will allow you do that or become a supporter in some other way. But above all, what we hope is that it will give you a richer picture of the world so that in your daily life, as it were, in the campaigner you want to do and the attitudes you take at school and the things you write at college, in the policies you’re involved with in the Civil Service – in whatever way you work – that you are informed by a bigger picture of the world.

Newshost: Thank you very much Peter Armstrong for joining us, it’s been a very interesting discussion. I wish you all the best with that launch tonight. That’s all we have time for now. Thank you for sending in your questions, from me, Jacky Rowland and the rest of the news interactive team in London, goodbye.