TITLE: South African Groups Say No to World Bank Internet Plan

AUTHOR: Lauren Fok, & George Dor,

PUB: SANGONeT & Jubilee South Africa

DATE: March 8, 2001

Mr James Wolfensohn President, The World Bank On 15 February 2001, South African civil society organisations met to discuss the recent offer of collaboration with the World Bank Global Development Gateway together with two World Bank representatives, Monica Quigley and Happy Nkhoma. A report-back session was held on the 28 February 2001, attended by representatives from, amongst others, SANGONeT, Jubilee South Africa, COSATU, SANGOCO (representing 4,000 NGOs), the Community Radio sector and the Churches. The participants took a unanimous decision to discourage any collaboration with the World Bank's GDG initiative and to work towards a more appropriate development network in its place. We want to firmly and unequivocally state our intention not to participate in the World Bank Development Gateway project. That while the Development Gateway purports to promote local community organisations and their information initiatives, its true intention is to control the development information discourse to promote its own particular perpectives. A growing number of organisations in South Africa are expressing opposition to World Bank interventions in South Africa as a result of several decades of experience of the institution in our country and the Southern African region. There are many specific reasons why the Development Gateway is already repeating the Bank's legacy of interference and domination. We will spell these out in an Open Letter to the Bank in coming days. Meantime, one telling reflection can be found on the Development Gateway's own website and its recent Newsletter: "The Gateway Team participated in a consultation meeting hosted by the South African NGO Network (SANGONET) in Johannesburg on February 15. The meeting was attended by some 20 community service organisations, and was characterized by a lively and substantive discussion on the merits, challenges, and potential of the Information and Communication Technology field and the Gateway." The World Bank's use of the words "lively, substantive, merits, challenges and potential" suggests that the organisations present broadly agreed with the initiative. This fails to reflect the frank words of criticism and condemnation of the World Bank and the Gateway project expressed in the meeting. This represents yet another experience of World Bank misrepresentation of the content of meetings with civil society organisations and reinforces the growing perspective of the alleged information dissemination project as the Global Development "Information Gatekeepers". We want nothing to do with systematic development misinformation of the sort we have come to associate with the World Bank. Sincerely, Lauren Fok, SANGONeT & George Dor, Jubilee South Africa on behalf of the participants at the report-back meeting. END top