The Commonwealth Business Forum will be held in Melbourne on the eve of the Brisbane meeting of Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, from 3 to 5 October. The overall theme of the forum is The 21st Century: New Economy, New Challenges, New Opportunities.
Hewlett-Packard Australia is a primary sponsor of the event, and local HP business unit district manager Patrick Kuwana discusses HP`s association in the Commonwealth Business Council (CBC).
"Our involvement with the CBC stems from our worldwide CEO, Carly Fiorina. She has a lot of personal interest in what`s happening with the digital divide, and that`s filtering through to all the HP operations worldwide. And I think us as HP South Africa, being on the African continent, and being the main HP office in Africa, we`ve taken this whole digital divide quite seriously."
Top-down approach
"The biggest challenge that we face, and what we`re really trying to drive forward is a model where we pose the question of how private businesses, government, multi-nationals, etc, get involved on a common base, and have a common goal towards their projects."
Patrick Kuwana, district manager, HP
Kuwana says the company`s involvement with the CBC began earlier this year, when HP sponsored the Johannesburg event.
"We`re looking at participation from a largely marketing perspective, but from another perspective, the question then is how we can raise the profile of the actual conference, and get other business executives to look at this seriously, and participate."
HP`s local initiatives in addressing the digital divide fall squarely in the company`s World E-inclusion Programme, Kuwana says, and is indicative of HP`s aim of helping previously disadvantaged countries or communities around the world.
"If we look at the Commonwealth countries, typically those Third World countries that we`re talking about fall within the Commonwealth of Nations. The other thing from a more local perspective is what we`ve also been looking at is the whole telecommunications regulation that`s happening at the moment and looking at some of the things that government is doing from a telecommunications perspective."
Key concerns
"The key aspects until now have been telephone access to previously disadvantaged communities. Now, with this new deregulation coming on board, and government expecting 5% from the operators to contribute toward this social upliftment, plus also the e-rate they`re offering schools for Internet access - we see the government beginning to set the framework to enable some of these things to happen. If they open up the telecommunications market to that extent, offer special privileges to previously disadvantaged communities, we can bring in opportunities that make sense.
"The biggest challenge that we face, and what we`re really trying to drive forward is a model where we pose the question of how private businesses, government, multi-nationals, etc, get involved on a common base, and have a common goal towards their projects."
Kuwana believes an obstacle to social responsibility programmes in SA is that while everybody tries to contribute towards society, they all do so in isolation, and therefore the projects never become big enough to be meaningful to the community.
The secret to success, he says, is in government engaging private companies in a non-competitive environment to contribute to the social upliftment frameworks it has already set in place.
"At the same time, government needs to open up a lot more in terms of telling people what it really wants to do, and what its objectives are. One of the other things that we find, is that government comes up with all these ideas, and they make great announcements about what they`re going to do, and that`s it - it sort of dies down and you never hear about it again, or they keep it very quiet, or they take the route where they partner with one specific person and exclude the rest.
"We need to have that engagement with government, to know what they`re doing. From an HP perspective, we`re already doing this elsewhere in the world. But if government had one plan that they opened to all major IT companies, it would work."
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