Bridging the Digital Divide: the Role of the United Nations

摘要

On 22 December 1999 the General Assembly adopted an otherwise little noticed resolution numbered 54/231 and entitled "Role of the United Nations in promoting development in the context of globalization and interdependence". This somewhat opaque-titled resolution held within it, however, a seed that almost one-and-one-half year later has germinated into a full-bloomed engagement of the United Nations in harnessing the potential of information and communications technologies, or, in short, ICT, for development. This paper describes the road travelled by the United Nations in asserting itself in the ICT field from this small beginning in the General Assembly to the recently established ICT Task Force under the auspices of the Economic and Social Council. A road leading from a high-level panel of experts, via the Secretary-General's Millennium Report "We the Peoples", a Ministerial Declaration adopted at the Economic and Social Council, the Millennium Summit and its Declaration by Heads of State, a high-level advisory group on ICT to the Secretary-General to ultimately the ICT Task Force itself.