The main international initiatives related to universal access and service (UAS) are the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) objectives, and the Millennium Development Goals (MDG).
The WSIS objectives (reviewed in
Section 1.5.1) raised the political profile of ICT development and recognized that access to communications is necessary to achieve basic human rights. The WSIS objectives also recognize the need for special action (i.e., a UA policy and its implementation) to provide such access to all, especially disadvantaged groups. They also prompted commitments to provide a large amount of funding for connecting communities globally by 2015.
The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), discussed in
Section 1.5.2, include a global partnership for development whose target is to provide citizens with all the benefits of new technologies, especially information and communications, in cooperation with the private sector. There is some debate around whether and how ICT deployment assists in reaching the MDGs, but the following points seem clear:
- ICTs can help in implementing many initiatives that contribute directly to reaching development goals even when they do not necessarily contribute directly themselves;
- ICTs have impacts that depend on the technical, economic, administrative and social environment, so general assessments of their contributions without considering the local context are difficult; and
- ICTs are increasingly understood to be complementary to other development imperatives and not to be traded off against them.