UN Photo/M. Grant (ITU 010018)
The advent of the Internet is considered by some to be as significant in its effect on society as that of the telephone or even the printing press. While it took the telephone nearly three-quarters of a century to reach 50 million users, the World Wide Web (WWW) achieved the same feat in only four years. In fact, from the Internet's humble beginning in 1981, when it supported a mere 213 hosts, the individual computer systems used to connect to the Internet, and only a few thousand users, it had grown, by 1999, to over 56 million hosts with more than 190 million users.
These figures are certainly impressive, but a closer look reveals that there are great disparities in Internet access across geographic regions. Today, there are almost as many hosts in France as in all of Latin America and the Caribbean, and there are more hosts in Australia, Japan, and New Zealand than in all of the other countries in the Asia-Pacific region combined. Perhaps most telling, there are more hosts in New York than in all of Africa.
This year's World Telecommunication Day highlights the emergence of this "digital divide". While people all over the world do access the Internet, Internet users still account for only five per cent of the world's population. Furthermore, 85 per cent of all Internet users live in developed countries, where 90 per cent of all Internet hosts are located.
The benefits of the Internet to developing nations are clear. It can allow businesses to sell goods and services directly to customers across national boundaries and facilitate the delivery of basic services, such as health care and education, that are unevenly distributed among the world's population.
Yet, in order for developing countries to reap these benefits, there are some things we must first ensure. The content of the Internet must be available in many different languages, and not just a privileged few. All nations must have the requisite infrastructure, most notably telephone lines. The price of Internet access must be brought within the reach of all people.
Knowledge has long been synonymous with power, but with the advent of the Internet, access to knowledge is quickly becoming a requirement for power — whether social, political, or economic. In our increasingly interconnected world, we must work together to see that all people have access to the knowledge the Internet has to offer. On this day, let us commit ourselves to that task, and let us make our efforts a bridge that spans the "digital divide".
Picture this. A young child in a poor, rural town, playing football by the side of a busy road, runs out on the street to chase the ball and is hit by a car. The frightened parents take the unconscious child to the nearest medical centre for emergency aid. The doctor, a young, eager but inexperienced practitioner fresh out of medical school, takes an X-ray of the child's skull to determine the extent of the injuries. Although the child is stable, the doctor faces the difficult dilemma of either providing treatment locally, based on his or her own diagnosis, or sending the child on a long, arduous and perhaps dangerous journey to the capital for treatment at the country's better-equipped hospital. It is a choice which could have life or death consequences.
Now picture the same scenario, but with a different ending. The injured child is brought to the rural doctor. The doctor takes an X-ray of the skull, but instead of making the diagnosis, he or she sends the image via the Internet to the hospital in the capital so that more experienced doctors can make the call. The image is sent via low-cost teleradiology equipment, which not only allows X-rays to be sent in a digital format clear enough for experts to identify the extent of injury, but also allows the experts to send advice back to the doctor for treatment. The doctor successfully treats the child, who soon returns home and continues to play football with friends, well away from the busy road.
A vision of the future? No! A snapshot of reality in countries such as Mozambique shows that "telemedicine" is making a real impact on the availability of health care and health care information in the developing world. Telemedicine is a term which has emerged to describe the provision of medical services and health care via telecommunications-based systems such as the Internet, either by terrestrial, wireless or satellite links. Mozambique is being viewed as perhaps one of the most successful examples of telemedicine in action. In cooperation with the International Telecommunication Union, through its Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT), the Government of Mozambique has established a telemedicine link between the central hospitals of Maputo, the capital, and Beira, the country's second-largest city some 1000 km away from the capital. The link allows the hospitals to exchange messages regarding laboratory results and treatments, as well as radiographs.
As a result, doctors in Beira can refer cases to the central hospital in Maputo for primary or secondary opinions and to send medical records to the capital so that experts there can determine whether patients facing more serious problems can be treated locally or transferred to Maputo. The project was especially important for the hospital in Beira since it had no radiologist when the telemedicine link was established. "They were handling roughly ten thousand X-ray films per year," noted Leonid Androuchko, a Geneva-based professor of telecommunications who formerly headed an ITU telemedicine programme. "On simpler cases it was easy to interpret the image locally, but for more complex cases they had to refer to the capital. That was not only frustrating but very costly."
For developing countries, such telemedicine projects tend to be relatively inexpensive to implement. Mr Androuchko also said that the approximate cost in hooking up Maputo and Beira was around USD 50 000, with the main cost being the digitalization of the X-ray images. The Government of Mozambique is so satisfied with the results that its Prime Minister has written to the ITU to ask for help in establishing additional telemedicine links with a hospital in Nampula, the country's third-largest city, with part of the cost to be covered by the government.
A similar project is being implemented in Senegal, where a telemedicine link will be established between the country's main hospital in Dakar Fann and regional hospitals in the towns of St Louis, Diourbel and beyond. The link will not only allow for the transmission of medical images and medical information, but will also allow doctors to discuss cases in detail via videoconferencing. Like in Mozambique, the telemedicine connection is especially important for the regional hospitals in interpreting X-ray images as neither hospital has a staff radiologist.
Additional telemedicine projects have been set up with ITU assistance in countries such as Bhutan,
Georgia, Malta, Uganda and Ukraine.
When opinions countThe Research Institute of Radiology and Interventional Diagnostics in Tbilisi, Georgia, provides a number of sophisticated medical services using modern technology. From time to time, however, doctors at the Institute seek to verify some difficult cases with colleagues from other medical centres within Georgia and abroad. The telecommunications link connecting the Institute with other medical centres not only allows doctors to obtain a second opinion quickly and efficiently, but also provides enhanced access to medical information within the nation and abroad. In September 1998 the first medical file, including an X-ray film, was sent over the Internet to Switzerland for a second opinion. Specialists from the Centre of Imaging Diagnostic in Lausanne studied the case, and within 48 hours the Institute of Radiology in Georgia had received an opinion with recommendations for treatment. During September and October of 1998, high-level medical professionals in Switzerland analysed more than 10 cases from Georgia, several of which were of professional interest to doctors at both ends of the line.
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In Georgia, the project is relatively simple and involves transtelephonic electrocardiogram (ECG) monitoring systems. With this simple system, a cardiovascular patient holds a small, box-shaped ECG device that transmits information to a hospital-based cardiologist. The remote monitoring allows cardiologists to monitor their patients' progress after they are discharged from the hospital, cutting out the time and expense of frequent return visits.
Petko Kantchev, the coordinator of ITU's telemedicine projects, says the benefits of telemedicine are not only the ability to bring rural areas into the net of the national health care service at relatively low cost, but also the ability to better utilize the intellectual resources within a country. "The typical rule in a developing country is the concentration of the mostable intellectuals and professionals in the capital," he noted. "These people, who tend to be very few in number, have extremely important know-how and experience which is pertinent to the local environment. They are more familiar with the diseases and illnesses which can be handled locally rather than consulting with doctors in Canada, Russia, Germany or the United States."
Dermatological diseases are an example of a type of illness which is prevalent in developing countries and where telemedicine can facilitate treatment. A telemedicine project, now being considered in Ethiopia, would allow digital and video images of patients in rural areas suffering from skin disorders to be sent, via the Internet, to doctors in the capital. These doctors would then consult among themselves and forward advice on treatment. The project has become more feasible thanks to the widespread availability of digital cameras. "There are a lot of skin disorders in these countries which rural medical staff don't know how to deal with," Mr Kantchev remarked.
An area in which the Internet can instead make a difference is in the support of medical research and the training of health professionals. After all, the Internet was until recently a purely academic/research network — a function which still holds a strong and solid presence among academics and researchers in developing countries.
The possibility to gain access to a vast source of medical information and professionals on a global scale provides unique learning opportunities for medical students and other health professionals. Distance-education opportunities are not new, but the Internet and its unique communication features provide a new and unprecedented medium for gaining access to educational services worldwide. Distance education in the health sciences was hampered — as in other disciplines — by some of the traditional problems from which all non face-to-face education suffered: poor interaction with tutors and no interaction with other students, a slow response rate, a sense of isolation and lack of incentives to continue, therefore, a high drop-out rate. Furthermore, in the medical sciences there were considerable problems in sharing images and explaining hands-on procedures.
With the Internet, most of these problems are gone. Even with a slow Internet connection, the educational experience can be dramatically different.
Another way in which the Internet is making a difference is in the easy, fast, and almost free distribution of high-quality educational material to support the activities of health workers working on the ground at the community level. An example of this is the launch of the Tools for Life Kit, a versatile health communication kit that includes Activity Cards and Information Cards designed to enhance community health workers' education and counselling skills. The Tools for Life Activity Cards can assist in engaging communities in relevant health issues, such as safe motherhood, nutrition and infant health, diarrhoea, prevention of common illnesses and reproductive health. The Tool Kit has been posted on the Web for comments and improvement. The open and collaborative nature of the Internet has, in the first three months of the pre-test, attracted more than 5000 visitors from 29 countries to the "Tools for Life" website, many of whom have provided valuable comments and contributions to the design of the material.
Advocates of telemedicine are quick to note that it is not a panacea for a nation's health care woes. In fact, a number of telemedicine projects introduced in the late 1960s and early 1970s failed for reasons such as inadequate medical regulations in force, the high cost of equipment, lack of suitably trained staff and administration and, in the case of teleradiology, poor image quality. "To make it work, you need a good telephone line, a good ISDN connection or a VSAT (very small aperture terminal) link," noted Kantchev. "You also need good local leadership to ensure proper implementation and follow-up." Many developing countries are setting up national committees or task forces comprising representatives from both the telecommunication and health care sectors. These groups play a very important role in enlisting support from all stakeholders in the country and in formulating viable telemedicine projects.
Most telemedicine projects call upon a mix of delivery paths. High-precision remote surgical interventions, for example, or remote access to very complex imagery such as brain scans, dictate the use of high-speed broadband telecommunication links. However, in many cases, the public Internet offers huge possibilities. It provides fast access to medical data and expertise nationally, regionally or globally, thus bringing medical care to patients, who would have been otherwise unattended to. Whether for seeking advice on standardized symptoms or real physiological data, including a patient's vital signs from on-line doctors that can be anywhere on the planet, the Internet is increasingly being exploited. The improving quality of videoconferencing and audio tools on the Internet are also providing a valuable resource for live, remote consultation and diagnosis.
The continuing decline in the cost of telecommunications and information technology, as well as great leaps in digital imaging and compression techniques have spurred a new wave of enthusiasm for telemedicine, particularly in developing countries. It is in these countries where telemedicine's greatest asset — allowing specialist medical expertise to be delivered to regions and locations where doctors are few on the ground — shows the best prospects for success. For governments struggling with limited health care budgets, a shortage of doctors and other health care professionals, dispersed rural hospitals and poor transportation infrastructure, telemedicine may help them overcome some of these difficult challenges in meeting the health care needs of their citizens.
Next to driving a Formula 1 racing car or bungee-jumping off the side of a cliff, nothing is probably more hazardous than predicting the future of commercial trading over the Internet. The recent shake-out of the so-called "dot.com" companies, which have included the collapse of noted names such as eToys, boo.com and pets.com, have the experts re-evaluating their forecasts for e-commerce. But few can deny that the Internet revolution has led to a fundamental review of business planning strategies in corporate boardrooms around the world. It is now unthinkable for a major company not have its own website extolling its virtues and peddling its wares. Even for small companies, establishing an on-line presence has become a business necessity.
The frontiers of the Internet revolution do not stop at Silicon Valley. Take for example the Câmara dos Dirigentes Lojistas de Belo Horizonte (CDL/BH), an association of local retailers and exporters in the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte, some 300 km inland from Rio de Janeiro. Originally set up in 1960 to share information among shopkeepers on credit purchases of customers, CDL/BH has now moved into the world of cyber-selling. Thanks to assistance provided through the International Telecommunication Union's Electronic Commerce for Developing Countries project (EC-DC), the association's 10 000 members have established a Business Exchange Service for business-to-business (B2B) transactions. Web purchasers can now click on the CDL/BH website to make electronic payments, access their commercial page listing of local businesses, learn about the association's services such as telemarketing, electronic transfer of funds, or even find out how to book space at the city's convention centre.
Despite CDL/BH's success in getting its members on-line, the rise of e-commerce, like the Internet itself, is still largely confined to the rich. In 1999, the United States accounted for more than 70 per cent of commercial websites around the world, with owners of those websites garnering over 90 per cent of global e-commerce revenues. In contrast, e-commerce revenues in Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region accounted for just over two per cent of the total in the same year.
One example of this disparity is in the Asia-Pacific region. The research firm eMarketer said in a recent study that, in the year 2000, the region's share of e-commerce jumped to 13.8 per cent of global on-line transactions. However, nearly 70 per cent of this commerce was centred in Japan. China and India, the world's two most populous nations, account for only a fraction of the region's total e-commerce.
Even where e-commerce is picking up, the trade tends to be a North-South affair rather than between developing countries themselves. While eMarketer predicts that Latin American e-commerce will leap to USD 15 billion by 2003, it also noted that nearly 75 per cent of current on-line buying in the region is done through United States-based Internet sites.
Part of the problem for businesses in the developing world is the cost of setting up an e-commerce platform on the Internet. ITU notes that the average cost for a company is around USD 250 000 while for major international firms the cost can run anywhere from USD 500 000 to 2 million. Then there is the cost of Internet access. Internet service providers (ISP) in developing countries must cover both circuit and traffic costs to connect to a point of presence on the Internet backbone (usually in the United States), which makes the service more expensive for end-users. Users in the developing world must also contend with additional hurdles such as the high cost of Internet hardware/software, Internet access provision and telephone service charges, and the shortage of infrastructure, notably of telephone lines.
Ironically, the costs to get connected to the Internet are much higher, in relative terms, in developing countries than in advanced economies. While in the United States, the average professional could very well afford to buy three computers with his or her monthly salary, in Tanzania, a computer costs three times the average monthly salary of a professional. For lower middle-income countries, the cost of a PC represents 289 per cent of GDP per capita compared with 28 per cent as the world average. In high-income countries, this drops to only 5 per cent of GDP per capita! Then there is the cost of accessing the Internet. Because of the low number of Internet users in developing countries, ISPs must set higher prices to cover their costs, let alone making a profit. As a result, while an America Online account in the United States may cost USD 22 a month — or less than one per cent of average US monthly income — an Africa Online account in Ghana costs around USD 50 per month, nearly twice the monthly income of most Ghanaians.
In addition, many operators in developing countries are under global pressure to "rebalance" their telephone charges, or to raise local call rates in order to compensate for reduced long-distance and international call income as accounting rates fall. Internet users with local dial-up access are, therefore, obliged to reduce their on-line time in order to avoid hefty telephone bills. When it comes to connecting to the Internet backbone, developing countries generally have to pay connections to the United States where most backbone providers are located.
Furthermore, whereas the settlements system is based on a "half-circuit" regime, where the operator in the country at either end of the link is responsible for providing and paying for a half-circuit, in the Internet peering model, the operator in the foreign country must normally pay for both half-circuits (i.e. the whole circuit) to the United States. Thus developing country operators end up paying twice — first for the circuit, then for the traffic — even though traffic flows in both directions once the circuit is established. While these costs can be recouped from the customers of the ISP in the developing country, the net result is still that Internet service is more expensive for consumers in developing countries. All together, it makes it very difficult, if not impossible, for buyers and sellers in these countries to get online and utilize the electronic market-place.
The pooling of resources can however help developing countries surmount some of the negative effects of higher costs of Internet connection. ITU has become involved in a number of projects designed to bring the benefits of e-commerce to the developing world. For example, the EC-DC project allows firms in developing countries to access secure e-commerce portals through local banks and World Trade Centres, thus providing them with digital certification and secure electronic payment facilities which they would not have the technical or financial capacity to create themselves.
In addition, banking services are not often extensive and network infrastructure for financial services which plays the essential role of intermediary between the seller and the buyer (banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions) is not frequently interconnected to the communications and data processing Web underlying virtually every deal. For many developing countries, this represents the only cost-effective way to access e-commerce. Through this project, and in cooperation with its private sector partners, ITU is now helping to roll out e-commerce infrastructure in more than 100 countries.
In Africa, ITU is working with the government of Japan to provide technical and financial assistance to the Association pour le Soutien et l'Appui à la Femme Entrepreneur (ASAFE) based in Cameroon. ASAFE, which groups together 3500 women entrepreneurs in various countries of Western Africa, provides training, research and financing through its Femme Epargne Crédit (women's credit/loan) programme.
The ITU project will help ASAFE set up an e-commerce infrastructure to be run and operated by the association for its members. One beneficiary of this programme may be Raphaëlle Assiga, an ASAFE member who runs Ralph Creation, a small gallery in the Cameroonian town of Douala. The gallery sells sandals, necklaces, armchairs and jewellery accessories made from local materials, all handcrafted by Ms Assiga and two helpers. Most of the handiworks are sold to tourists visiting Cameroon, but ASAFE's new e-commerce service — set to come on-line this year — may help her to reach out to new markets and customers which would have previously been unthinkable.
In Asia, ITU has helped to establish the Viet Nam Electronic Commerce Portal. This project is being implemented in partnership with the Vietnamese Government as part of an effort by the ITU in association with the Geneva-based World Trade Centre and the World Internet Secure Key (WISeKey SA) to establish a Global Electronic Commerce Network for developing countries. Through the portal, users can access the latest trade news from Viet Nam, legal documents, information about that country's businesses and economy, and details about import and export tariffs. The portal also allows Vietnamese firms to receive information about Global Electronic Trading Opportunities through the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's (UNCTAD) Trade Point Development Centre, a service that is particularly useful for small- and medium-sized businesses looking for buyers and sellers abroad.
Admittedly, these projects are but a drop in the bucket. A lot more needs to be done by governments and the private sector to ensure that the fruits of the Internet are spread widely, and that the prospects of boosting trade and development through e-commerce can become a reality. Indeed, the biggest obstacle to expanding access to the Internet in developing countries may well be complacency, the idea that the Internet has thrived on its own without government involvement and that the "digital divide" will eventually right itself on its own.
There are some grounds for hope, however. An increasing number of developing countries are building new infrastructure to connect to the global electronic market-place, allowing them in effect to "leap-frog" from antiquated networks to the latest state-of-the-art technology or to take advantage of cost-effective technologies to expand their network outside the main capital city and bring access to rural or underserved areas. China for example is expected to spend USD 24 billion by 2005 to develop its broadband infrastructure. It may not be too much to hope that entrepreneurs and innovators in these countries may set an example for Silicon Valley by helping to kindle the flames of the next dot.com revolution.
A dusty,
one-room schoolhouse on the edge of a village. An overworked teacher trying to manage a room full of boisterous
children. Students sharing schoolbooks that are in perpetual short supply, crammed in rows of battered desks. Children
worn out after long treks to school, stomachs rumbling with hunger. Others who vanish for weeks on end, helping their
parents with the year-end harvest. Still others who never come back, lacking the money to pay for school uniforms and
school supplies. Such is the daily dilemma faced by many young people in the developing world as they seek to obtain
that most precious of all commodities, an education.
With the global economy relying more than ever on brainpower and innovation rather than raw materials and manual labour as generators of wealth, a good education has become the key factor determining who will succeed and who will be left behind. With countries in the developing world stretching their budgets to the limit, and with education ranking low on some governments' list of spending priorities, the odds seem to be stacked against their favour. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) estimates that there will be more people to educate in the next thirty years than have ever been educated up to this point in history.
Figures for 1995 show the sad effect educational neglect is having on the poor. While 70 per cent of children in low-income countries were enrolled in primary education, the enrollment figure for secondary education was only 17 per cent. In comparison, industrialized countries retained nearly 100 per cent enrollment in both primary and secondary schools. The erosion continues in higher education, where only 6 per cent of students in low-income countries continued their education compared to 57 per cent in the industrialized world. The result? Entire generations of children and young people that are not able to enjoy face-to-face education are condemned to poverty if conventional education remains the only avenue of bringing knowledge and skills.
One way in which governments have tried to expand educational opportunities to as many people as possible while keeping down costs is through distance learning. For those too far away from schools or universities, too busy helping out at home to attend school on a regular basis, or too poor to pay tuition, distance learning has proven to be an attractive alternative.
With the rise of the Internet, the distance-learning experience has been completely transformed. In the past, distance learning was largely a lonely experience, in which the student was confronted with a pile of mailed learning material and sporadic and structured interaction with an elusive and remote tutor. In this kind of world, the student not only had to overcome a number of difficulties to interact with the tutor, but he/she also faced extended periods of time between the sending of a request and receiving a reply. Furthermore, interaction was restricted to that between individual students and their tutor, since no type of communication existed with other students.
In contrast, the Internet is a virtual classroom in which intense interactivity and the sharing of resources and information constitute its essence. This is not to say that there were no virtual classes before the rise of the Internet. For some years, a number of educational institutions struggled to develop and sustain distance-education programmes that were designed for teleconferencing systems. The extremely high cost of the service, however, constrained its growth. For most developing countries, the technology was far beyond their reach. A selected few were able to implement the system in a limited fashion for a small elite. Furthermore, the need of real-time presence made the system quite rigid and not very adequate for a time in which flexible education hours are crucial.
Education officials in countries such as Canada, the United States, France, Germany and Italy have already made commitments to wire all or most of their schools up to the Internet. In the developing world, South Africa launched its SchoolNet project in 1997 designed to pool expertise and resources in developing partnerships in areas such as Internet connectivity and curriculum development in order to build a national educational network. In 1999, SchoolNet partnered with Telkom Foundation to train over 2000 teachers in 1035 schools throughout South Africa. The Catholic University in Chile launched the "Enlaces" programme in 1992, which started out connecting a half-dozen schools in remote, indigenous areas with two computers each equipped with 2400 bit/s modems utilizing wireless technology.
The International Telecommunication Union, through its Telecommunication Development Bureau in partnership with UNESCO, has also become involved in long-distance learning projects. One of the objectives of these projects is to tackle a phenomenon common in the developing world — school teachers who have been on the job for years, even decades, and whose skills have eroded because they have been left to fend for themselves. Distance learning and the use of the Internet offer great opportunities to improve the quality of teaching, and therefore learning. For example, statistics from the Education Foundation Trust, a non-profit trust based in South Africa, show that, in 1991, forty per cent of all teachers in that country were under-qualified. But through a number of energetic measures adopted by the Government, including the implementation of distance-learning projects in partnership with private organizations, the situation has improved dramatically and the number of under-qualified teachers dropped to 25 per cent in 1999 — despite an overall increase of seven per cent in the number of teachers since 1991. Two such projects, planned for India and Morocco, will focus on retraining primary school teachers in order to bring them up to date on new teaching practices and methodologies. The pilot projects will lead to the establishment, in the two countries, of fifteen to twenty learning centres in classrooms that can handle up to forty teacher-students. Each of these learning centres will be connected to the main training centre, where the studio facilities and instruction staff are based, using a very small aperture terminal (VSAT) hookup.
In Morocco, each learning centre will be equipped with a screen and simplified telephone terminal allowing the student-teachers to see and follow the lessons of the instructors and enter information on a keyboard, identify themselves or respond to questions and answers. In India, the project will be more advanced. A full video-conferencing facility will be established using a VSAT hookup with a 2 Mbit/s outbound and a 384 kbit/s return transmission speeds, thus allowing for more interactive, real-time exchanges between the instructors and the teacher-students at the learning centres.
In the initial stage, both projects will rely on VSAT technology, with limited use of Internet capabilities. The decision to limit the scope of available Internet capabilities is based on economics. With less than fifty learning centres, the most cost-effective approach is to limit some of the capabilities offered by the Internet (for example through the collective use of only one personal computer per learning centre, no browsing capability, etc). "With so few centres involved, full Internet capabilities would be prohibitively high and would be a deterring factor to the deployment of Internet-based teleeducation solutions", says ITU's Petko Kantchev. "The cost of the hub is very costly if all Internet capabilities are enabled. What is important is first to demonstrate the benefits of such applications to create the demand and then expand the functionalities", he said.
The expectation is that once the projects are expanded to around 100 to 150 learning centres, the switch will be made to Internet Protocol-based VSAT networks. "As the number grows to over 100 learning centres, the investment cost per centre decreases and greatly offsets the required investment in the hub. When this threshold is reached, the economies of scale make an IP-based VSAT system financially attractive in addition to enabling the full range of Internet capabilities and allowing the number of learning centres to grow rapidly. Cybercafés for use by the population in underserved areas can even be envisaged at little incremental costs", Kantchev explains.
For both projects in India and Morocco, hundreds or even thousands of learning centres are expected to be established after the two-year pilot phase.
The projects are expensive — approximately USD 50 000 for each learning centre and around USD 800 000 to 900 000 for each main centre, including studio facilities and information management systems. But the cost looks reasonable when compared to the alternative — bringing in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of teachers to regional or national capitals for retraining, or allowing the educational rot to continue. In the case of Morocco, most of the cost for the pilot projects will be covered by a World Bank development loan. In India, most of the cost will be covered by the Department of Elementary Education, the Ministry of Human Resource Development and the Department of Telecommunication. UNESCO, for its part, is responsible for the supervision of all education-related aspects of both pilot projects. ITU contributed USD 250 000 to help get the programmes of each pilot project off the ground. India's project is already in the implementation stage, while, in Morocco, an ITU technical team is currently working to help set up the design of the system architecture and its implementation.
It is perhaps at the higher education levels where the Internet may be most effective. Obtaining a university degree through distance learning is already an established practice, with possibly the most well-known example being the Open University in the United Kingdom, which has more than 200 000 students. In Mexico, the Monterrey's Institute of Technology and Higher Studies (ITESM) established a Virtual University that started offering courses via satellite in 1997 and which is now moving towards Internet-based instruction. In Thailand, Sukhothai Thammathirat Open University has launched a pilot Virtual Campus programme which offers distance learning over the Internet. The African Virtual University project, which counts two dozen universities throughout Africa as participants, has offered distance-learning courses through the INTELSAT network but is now moving most of its learning activities into cyberspace.
Education via the Internet still faces considerable hurdles in many parts of the developing world, the first and foremost being the poor state of the internal telecommunication infrastructure and the prohibitively high cost of telephone and Internet access charges. Educators also face the challenge of designing and supplying suitable instruction materials, which can be adapted to the Internet. Most educational content now available online was designed in Europe or North America, and is therefore not altogether appropriate or suitable for students elsewhere. But the fact that many universities are now shifting their existing distance-learning programmes to the Internet shows its potential as a tool for expanding educational opportunities. With strong backing from both the public and private sectors, Internet education can contribute to the fight against one of the greatest threats facing the developing world today, that of educational neglect.