Bdt: Templates

3 Local content and empowerment

“Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.”

Article 19, Universal Declaration of Human Rights²⁸⁸

“(1) Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”

“(2) Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.”

Article 27, Universal Declaration of Human Rights

The above fundamental rights can only be ensured by the empowerment of citizens to produce and access information content. As one author recently observed: “The technology is only a tool, and only as useful as the information it carries. Thus we must continually be aware of the need for content.”²⁸⁹

Local content on the Internet refers to applications and content that are relevant to local needs and produced by local people, local NGOs or community groups, or other representative institutions. Local content can also be foreign content that has been validated and adapted for local use. Local content on the Internet is both a heritage for social, cultural and intellectual development at the local and national levels and the information capital for new national content production industries. Local content is thus also linked to the global context of the development of the information society and especially to its social, political, educational and cultural challenges. Since the development of the information society should support global development, local content production should help to bridge the gap between the “haves” and the "have-nots” in a global information society.

There is a great diversity in the types of local content: literary, artistic, administrative, scientific and technical, including indigenous knowledge in all these domains. The potential producers are also extremely diverse: the press and publishers, governmental institutions, researchers, universities and other educational institutions, NGOs and other civil society organizations, and individual citizens.

As far as the users are concerned, their capacity to exploit local content on the Internet and to take part in its production depends on their levels of literacy, education and mastery of the technologies concerned. Another important element is the cultural sensitivities that influence the level and the need for local content. The definition of local content and the content itself can thus vary according to the target group or public.

Is the content that exists on the Internet useful and relevant to the local end-users? To answer this, several elements should be considered: availability and quality of the content, its social and cultural acceptability, cost-effectiveness and sustainability of content production, and fair access to the Internet.

The scope of local content is often wider than the local community and may well refer to content used or produced by institutions working at the sub-national or national levels. The designation of local content may even be applied to international groupings sharing a common cultural, linguistic or geographic context, for example the Francophone community²⁹⁰ which has organized international consultations at the highest level and a wide range of assistance programmes for developing countries to promote and ensure the presence of the French language and French speaking cultures on the Internet. The internationalization of the concept of local content may also have a strong economic motivation when content produced in one developing country can be made available more economically to others than content imported from the industrialized world. Thus, educational content produced in South Africa and available on line is adopted in neighbouring countries, while the Indira Gandhi National Open University is currently offering its programmes in several countries in the Middle East and has proposed to offer them to other developing countries.²⁹¹ An expansion of Internet use could allow better co-operation on the production and delivery of locally relevant content at the national and international levels, provided that the view of the individual citizen and community remains the basic reference frame.

3.1 Production of local content

The production of local content refers to both the production of new content and the digitization of existing content. It covers a diversity of forms ranging from individual contributions to electronic discussion groups to electronic publications, databases and multimedia applications.

The constraints and barriers to content production are well known and can be economic, political, administrative, social, cultural and technical in nature. Barriers to use of local content are also barriers to production because without a local market production is impossible. Some of the most important barriers are technical ones, since access to the Internet is limited, and national expertise in informatics and telematics is scarce in developing countries. Telecommunication tariffs and Internet access charges can also be important economic constraints, as can be high customs duties or taxes on the telecommunications and computer equipment necessary to produce or use local content. Legal and social barriers can apply to local content production, likewise preventing users in developing countries from benefiting fully from Internet access. Illiteracy and media illiteracy also constitute important barriers to the production and the dissemination of local content in the developing countries.

Motivations to create local content on the Internet correspond to a large variety of situations, target audiences and needs. Nevertheless, two main major technical advantages can be cited: i) to make needed information available to a larger public, and ii) to take advantage of new attractive possibilities of the Internet as a medium (faster, cheaper and more versatile than the traditional media). These advantages can equally well provide motivation for public service and commercial content creation. In addition, local content published by Government and civil society organizations on the Internet is a stimulus to democratization, both as an empowerment for informed action and as a stimulus for expression and dialogue. For small economic actors in the developing countries, putting their content on the Internet can also mean a role in the global marketplace.

Since the production and enrichment of local content are closely linked to its preservation and to its accessibility to producers and users alike, one important stimulus and motivation for these activities is the existence of a viable and identifiable national electronic public domain – encompassing classical and traditional literature and information and data produced with public funds, to which can be assimilated other information made freely available without cost by its authors.

Another major consideration is training and capacity building – a pre-requisite for the effective adoption of the Internet as a tool by local content producers and also a first step in the emergence of new high value added local content industries. The capacity building programme for public and private environmental actors in Central America discussed in the last chapter under “environment and disaster management” is an example of an activity responding to this particular professional need. Some existing industries, like those involved in the traditional cultural production, could easily expand their activities to multimedia and the Internet; in Burkina Faso, the cinema industry is particularly dynamic and it is expanding its presence on the Internet with the CINE NET AFRIK website and that of the biennial FESPACO festival. In India, the active and successful software industry has been important in ensuring generic support solutions, capacity building and training for production of local multimedia and Internet content, notably regarding content adapted to different local and national languages.

From the above, it is clear that the Internet is an information medium that can facilitate the production and dissemination of more and of better quality content in the developing countries. But it is also seen that the quality of content on the Internet not only depends on its producers – whether individual, institutional, or corporate – but also reflects the general enabling environment which presents substantial difficulties in many developing countries.

To encourage the production of quality local content, a variety of stimulating initiatives are possible at the national and international levels. Among these are Web competitions which can be very effective in promoting the idea of local content in developing countries, for example the UNESCO Web Prize²⁹² and the TOP50 Web competition in Africa.²⁹³