African leaders will launch a global fund to help people in poor countries buy mobile phones and Internet access as a step out of poverty and into economic growth, the president of Senegal said yesterday.
"There are more telephones in Manhattan than in all Africa," president Abdoulaye Wade said at a news conference held on the sidelines of a UN General Assembly meeting.
Information and communications technologies play an important role in promoting economic growth and fighting poverty and disease in the developing world.
But the so-called digital divide between rich and poor countries has persisted due to the cost of the new technologies and a lack of resources in developing nations.
The new fund, pooling voluntary contributions solicited from buyers of high-tech goods in wealthy nations, will be launched in Geneva on 17 November, Wade said.
While the fund will primarily help poorer countries, wealthy nations also have a stake in its success as the fund will bring in "millions and millions of dollars" that will be used to buy equipment from the industrialised world, he said.
Poorer countries, particularly from Africa, have long been pushing for a solidarity fund to help finance the infrastructure they say is needed to close the technological gap.
But rich countries rejected the idea at a world information summit in Geneva in December 2003.
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