I. Principles of action:
“In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications.”
II. Criticisms:
Following his mindset and theoretical alignment that underlies his analysis, Samir Amin once again posits that the partnership with the private sector empties the target of any concrete meaning. As regarding previous targets is perspective does not seem unreasonable at all, considering that communication technologies continue to develop, lead by research and economic aims of companies based in developed countries. This means that given these circumstances, as in most of the other areas, developing countries are dependent on the action of developed countries and companies to have access to these services.
III. Progress:
Some progresses have been reported in this field, in the years leading to the recent economic crisis, concerning worldwide access to Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), namely to cellular mobile phones. Nevertheless, the gap between general access between developed and developing countries remains quite evident, despite a slight reduction in the course of the last decade. The existing delay in the concretization of access to technologies is difficult to measure due to the lack of quantifiable aims included in the MDGs framework. We can, notwithstanding, try to draw some conclusions from the comparison of data from both developing and developed countries in this subject. If we take the percentage of population (in 2007) subscribing mobile cellular service, this is of 39% in developing countries, compared to a total of 100% in the developed world. It is somehow astonishing, but not as much as the price of broadband internet services (in terms of purchase power parity) which in the same year corresponded to $289 in developing countries, while developed countries’ populations would face a cost of $28. These figures can be used to exemplify the still too broad gap separating peoples living in different parts of the world.