GESAC, SCD, FUST, XPTO...and digital inclusion?

In this piece, Carlos Afonso outlines a few of the digital inclusion opportunities and initiatives being carried out in Brazil. He claims that, despite the flurry of acronyms being created as a result of these initiatives (reflected in the title of this piece), Brazil still does not have a national strategy for digital inclusion - a means of uniting civil entities, governments, businesses, and the research community to address the fact that less than 8% of the population have effective local means of accessing the Internet. Afonso points out that those citizens who do have access are concentrated in the South East and in the large cities. (Preliminary data from the 2001 census indicated that approximately 52% of the Brazilian population lives in cities of 100,000 inhabitants or more).

To cite one example of an initiative described in this piece, "Governo Eletrônico - Serviço de Atendimento ao Cidadão" (Electronic Government - Citizens' Support Service - GESAC) was an effort to set up thousands of public access terminals so that, through the use of tickets, citizens could have access to the services being offered by the government via the Internet. Although the author claims that the 1,200 community telecentres have not, to date, been implemented, he indicates that the federal government has decided that GESAC, in its new form, should continue, and possibly expand, to reach more schools and community telecentres in regions without adequate local connectivity. Unfortunately, Afonso says, the business in charge of the Eletronet fibre optic network (currently using less than 3% of its capacity) went bankrupt. For this reason, he indicates that "we can only hope to initiate a digital inclusion strategy in the country from 2006".

In this context, Afonso advocates short-term strategies, while stressing that key questions have yet to be answered: how many telecentres, in partnership with whom, and exactly where? He believes that it is crucial for the Brazilan government to get involved in the set-up of community telecentres and computers in schools and public libraries - what he characterises as the cheapest and most efficient way of democratising access to information and communication technologies (ICTs).

Click here to read the full piece on the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) site. [Opinion originally published in Portuguese by RITS and translated into English by APC]