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New Possibilities in Information Technology and Knowledge for Development
in a Global Economy, King’s College, Cambridge




by
James D. Wolfensohn
President
The World Bank Group

Cambridge University, U.K., June 24, 2000

Let me thank you Tess and Emma for the invitation, and say how delighted
I am to be here as part of this celebration. To a certain degree, I am an
imposter in terms of talking about information technology and its impact
on the future because I have come to it very late. And we have with us
Esther Dyson who will no doubt make some comments after I have finished.

So let me suggest to you that you include both of our thinking in your
observations on information technology because had Esther not have been
here I would have stolen a speech I heard her make two weeks ago as my
own. But Esther will give it to you and she indeed is one of the great
experts on the subject in the world and I am glad that she is here and
you should be also.

My vantage point on information technology is one from the World Bank and
I should remind you that indeed my job is in part available to me because
of the intervention of Lord Keynes himself who was at the Bretton Woods
negotiations and who played a pivotal role on behalf of the United
Kingdom in those negotiations negotiations which led to the
establishment of the Bretton Woods Institutions the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund and which for the first time in history saw
the United States assuming an international role as it joined those
institutions, never before having been a member of any such international
body.

And so I am grateful to Keynes for his guidance and his participation in
those negotiations because it has created a job that I am now involved in
and so I want to thank you and my children want to thank you because of
the very large salary I receive.

We at the bank as you know, and let me talk from that vantage point, are
concerned with the issues of poverty in the world. Our focal point now is
different from the initial objectives of the Bretton Woods institutions
which, as you will recall, were to address the questions of the economic
state of the world after World War II and that job has developed as has
our institution. So that today our approach to the issue of development
entails looking at the world from the point of view of people broadly in
poverty or at least less well-off than most of us in the developed world.
Just to give you the parameters as a background of the challenge for
information technology the world that I deal with is a world of 4.8
billion people out of a globe of 6 billion people, and to give you some
quick numbers 3 billion people live under 2 dollars a day and a billion
two hundred million live under 1 dollar a day.

The other characteristic is that within countries the issue of equity or
equitable distribution of resources is getting worse. The relationship
between the richest percentiles and the poorest percentiles are diverging
such that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,
and that dynamic is what we are seeking to address, not as a question of
charity or of social conscience but of world peace. However, social
conscience I hope plays some role in it because if you have a world of
inequity and a world which is really divided between the developed and
the developing world, you have a world that is unstable, and which can in
fact lead to a non-peaceful world.

In this speech, I do not need to tell you of the impact of globalisation
in all its forms but we are linked in the most immediate of ways.
Certainly Keynes himself was conscious of the linkages of the world
economy but we are linked, as we have seen by the recent financial
crises, in ways that we probably did not expect, as we witnessed events
in Korea, Thailand, Indonesia impacting the markets in London and in
Frankfurt and in Egypt and in Brazil.

We are linked by drugs; we are linked by crime; we are linked by the air
we breathe; and we are linked by ideas; by waves of fundamentalism or
whatever be the global movements. And, more recently, we are linked by
communication in ways that were never dreamed of decades ago or even five
years ago, communicating through radio and television and telephone now
to the new age of internet technology and instant linkages around the
world.

So the first thing is that as we look at the world that I deal with, the
4.8 billion, let us not separate it from the world of the 1.2 billion,
because they are vitally interlinked in very many ways. But as I look at
that issue at a static issue I am forced to look forward as we do at
this millennium meeting and think of what is going to happen in the next
twenty five years. And in the next twenty five years, we will add 2
billion more people to the world. And of that 2 billion, 97% will go into
the developing world, increasing its population to 6.8 billion. By 2015,
1 billion people will be added to the developing world. And if you buy my
thesis that the developing world and the developed world is in fact
unified and so what happens in one place affects the other, then we are
all concerned with what happens in the developing world. And if you think
in terms of peace, if you think in terms of equity, if you think in terms
of social justice or if you think in terms of self interest, this
singular world is one where we are very dependent on what happens in the
developing world.

Now why do I say that in the context of talking about information
technology? Because I believe that one of the great potentials that we
have in terms of addressing the issue of development is the issue of the
usage of digital technology and communications. Beyond the fundamental
analysis of the problem, there have been many commentators and many
distinguished economists in this community, the most notable of them in
recent history being Amartya Sen. Not just due to the lectures that he
gave actually at the World Bank based on his book Development as Freedom,
but because also from his previous writings and thought it is made very
clear that development is not just an issue of macro economics or growth
but it is an issue which engages all aspects of societal development. You
need to look at, in his terms, freedom, and, in my terms, the structural
issues and the quality of the legal system, the justice system,
governments, the strength of governments, the economics, financial
supervisory systems, fighting corruption, longer term plans in terms of
education, of health, of rural strategy, urban strategy, environmental
strategy, and cultural strategy. All these things come together into a
mix of issues which alongside growth and macroeconomic policy determine
whether development will take place in an effective and equitable way.

And that remains the complexity of development. I am not seeking to
change that. But you have to have a balance between the necessary growth,
the functioning of markets and the so-called structural and social
aspects of development. So why then talk about information technology.
Does it replace all this? Is it a short cut? Is it something that
transforms the analysis? No, it does not. But what it does do is to give
you a tremendous opportunity of leveraging the notion of the transfer of
knowledge, of empowering people and allowing you to achieve your
objectives in terms of this development paradigm in ways that were
previously not possible.

And there the issue again breaks down into two elements: the technology
itself which today permits communication in many forms and, of course,
the knowledge that goes with it. This is the knowledge that is shaped,
that is available for transmission over this new system and here Esther
herself is an expert and had she not been here I would have told you
about all the charts she showed me the other day on the transmission of
normal knowledge into specially characterized knowledge for this purpose
but she is here so I cannot play it to your eyes quite as easily as I
normally do. But she might tell you something about that.

In any event, if you take the paradigm of which I spoke which is that in
the simplest terms, todays development needs to be conceived as a mixture
of money and growth policy and the human aspects that deal with
development the structure, the education, the health, the provision of
opportunity, the empowerment of people in poverty and the treating of
people in poverty not as objects of charity but as an asset which if
mobilized can, in fact, bring about the changes that we are all looking
for, and that clearly they are looking for. If you buy the idea which I
do, having been to over 100 countries, that the brightest people you meet
are typically the leaders in slums and villages rather than the
political leadership with the exception of course of Tessa, in countries
in which you tend to go then what you need to do is to have available
the potential of enfranchising people on a broad scale and giving them
knowledge and opportunity which they can adapt to bring about changes in
their environment.
It is here that information technology comes into its own in ways that
were previously not dreamed of, or if dreamed of, not possible. Where I
grew up in Australia we had pedal-radios in the country for people to
have a school on the air. We had medicine on the radio with flying
doctors. Today, when you think in terms of the conveyance of knowledge,
you have a whole array of things that you do which were not dreamt of
before.

I thought I might just tell you, not as a matter of theory, but as a
matter of practice, what we have done in the last five years since I have
had the privilege of running the Bank. Coming as I did, I was someone,
like many of you I suppose, who grew up without any facility for using
internet, or using a computer, but very conscious of the fact that this
was an extraordinary tool. Just let me give you a cameo of the last five
years in our own institution. The first thing I recognized is that it was
not just money that was important in development, and so I coined the
phrase that we should not just be a money bank but a knowledge bank.

I recognize this in terms of gathering knowledge because, when I arrived
at the institution, someone was writing the history of the first fifty
years and I asked the author, one of the authors, where do you get your
information? He said well at least 50% of it I get in the homes of
retired employees of the bank. I asked why in the homes? And he said they
had taken their files with them. I immediately, in anger, sent out an
epistle or whatever it is, I am feeling very high-church while I am here
sent out a message to the people in the bank saying dont steal your
papers - its not nice. What came back was, well if we dont steal them,
theyll be lost. Theyll go to the mountain where theyll be stored and
noone will ever see them again. I am very proud of my lifes work in
building dams or in helping in rural education or in high altitude
farming or whatever it is they were engaged in so let us take it because
then at least we will know or my kids will know what we have done.

I thought for Gods sake if we are supposed to have people with great
experience, surely we should try and find a way that when they walk out
the door we have got the benefit of their experience so that we do not
have to keep reinventing it. If we have made the mistakes and if we have
had the experience, let us start with building a knowledge bank. Well, we
immediately started to do that and here, of course, the computer comes
into its own because it is the perfect way to try and gather and make
accessible information. So that, at a primitive level, was the start.

The second thing which happened was that I went to Uganda on a trip and
then came back to the United States to Wyoming where I have a small
place. The local chamber of commerce had been after me to make a speech
for a long time. Finally I got up in front of the Chamber of Commerce and
someone asked whether there was something we could do in development.
With some sort of instinct, I said why dont we link the Jackson Hole High
School with the Uganda High School that I just saw, and we can do it by
internet and wouldnt it be fun for the kids of Jackson Hole to know
something about Uganda; but of course very few people in the audience
knew about Uganda, I might say, and I can assure you that none of the
kids in Uganda knew about Jackson Hole, Wyoming. But three weeks later we
had these two schools meet. We had the Headmaster of the Jackson High
School literally in Uganda and, six months later, was funding locally in
Uganda from the insurance money they had put together some month at
Jackson Hole.

These two schools were linked and that was the start of a program which
we call World Links which now has 35,000 kids linked in the south and the
north. Inuit kids from Canada are working with kids in Latin America;
kids in France dealing with French Colonies in the continent of Africa;
kids in Madrid dealing with Spanish speaking countries and so on. And we
have an objective in the coming years to broaden that enormously.

And there is, in fact, a bit of paper if any of you are interested, at
the back of the room, which you can take, which gives a very quick
outline of this. But what we have discovered is that this linkage between
teachers and teachers and kids and kids, has now developed into something
like 18 different subjects we have from kindergarten through grade 12 in
3 languages. Curricula, teachers guides the whole package that you could
want for teaching plus assistance to teachers is now possible from a very
simple idea, in ways with scope far beyond that old pedal-radio that I
remember in Australia.

By the way, we may not pedal-radio but in Africa we use wind-up radios
radios that you wind a little crank for two minutes and then you have two
hours of playing and we were using that for teaching as well.

So we started this as a sort of initiative and then we started to think a
little beyond that. And we thought well now we could bring together the
experience in a better way than we have done before and so we decided
that we would link together research organisations from the north and the
south in terms of a global development network. Hence, we have now
brought academic institutions and research institutions from around the
world into a global network which is linked by internet so that the
experience and the knowledge of people in technology becomes available
from the north to the south, from the south to the south, from the south
to the north etc. This is in the works.

We also concluded that in terms of the training of people, we should not
just stop at High Schools. And so we now have in Africa, in 14 sites,
what we call an African Virtual University where, from teaching sites in
North America, French Canada and in Ireland, we are giving degree courses
in Science, Technology and Engineering taught by satellite. This process
is both synchronous and asynchronous- synchronous enabling responsive
classes and also asynchronous meaning that the lecture is given and
people can look at it during the week and then correspond either by e-
mail or by fax. So that was another initiative all again developed in
the last several years.

And we did not limit it to that. We thought - you know - what is one of
the key functions in terms of knowledge and we came to the training of
administrators. So every Saturday morning now from the Virtual University
of the Monterrey Tech System we link up with 300 towns in Latin America
in 7 countries to teach various subjects from how to run a fire
department to how to construct a budget and the process in those towns
and villages again is synchronous or asynchronous but, most
significantly, they talk to each other as a community so that a Mayor in
Costa Rica might be working with a Mayor in Mexico City.

This interchange this dialogue and this coming together is facilitated
by technology. And every day we are learning new applications for the
latest technology.

We have discovered that it is impossible for us to try to dream up and
anticipate the whole future in terms of applications. But if you can get
out there and apply these innovations, things just flow and you cannot
stop them. And when I talk then about information technology, the new
millennium and the future, you should think in terms of how this tool can
give you leverage to a degree that you have not had before and how it can
change even the qualitative aspects of how this is done. It is no longer
a professor sending a message; it is no longer an official coming out
with great news on the modalities of high-altitude agriculture.

It becomes an interactive process; it becomes a real time process.

I have linked all my offices in the World Bank by voice mail and video by
dedicated satellite links. We have 100 offices now linked around the
world. We are carrying out something like 600 or 700 video-conferences a
month. I regularly speak with up to 12 offices each week, and I meet with
Presidents in distant countries, for one-on-one conversations, or with a
team or sometimes we link a group of presidents or prime-ministers or
finance ministers for discussion. This is becoming part of our daily
life.

Two days ago I opened, by satellite, a new system that we have got going
where we are setting up distance-learning centers in countries, where you
have a classroom capable of holding 30 people. Adjacent to it is a room
with 30 computers linked by satellite, and we had this meeting two days
ago where we all simultaneously opened the system with 13 participating
countries plus France and Madrid and Singapore, which are linked-up
stations for teaching. It went impeccably well. It began at 7 am and it
was supposed to conclude at 8.51, and at 8.51 we had had 15 speeches.
This is something that would have been impossible in person, I might tell
you. But by satellite somehow people kept to their brief time-span and we
were able to put this thing together.

I could go on and on. I could tell you of visits to the Ivory Coast where
I was meeting with cocoa and coffee farmers, literally in the jungle with
no water, no power, rough streets, and where I was made a Chief which,
since I cannot get an honorary degree from Cambridge, is the next best
thing. The robes are actually I am sure more beautiful. There is gold I
should have worn it today actually.

But in any event, I am sitting with my brother Chiefs and one of them it
is a brother chief not a sister chief I might tell you in most parts in
Africa said to me do you want to see the office? I said that yes, I
would love to see the office, I went into the office and there were two
young people sitting in front of two computers. One of them was there for
the weighing in and the recording of the quality of the coffee and cocoa.
But the other was linked to Reuters so that they could have daily prices
real-time prices on coffee and cocoa in order to deal with the traders.
So there they are getting the daily quotes on coffee and cocoa in this
village and, through the co-operatives in the morning sending out either
by cellular telephone or, since it is a very poor community, by pagers,
which is much cheaper the price of coffee and cocoa in Chicago and in
London.

I then return to my brother chiefs to discuss what they were talking
about which entailed forwards, contracts I mean more tough minded
traders you have never seen. This is all compared to 4 years ago when
they were completely at the mercy of the visiting trading community that
came round.

I have literally dozens of examples of the way that this is working. We
are at the beginning of a revolution: we are in a revolution. And I would
simply like to say to you because I would like to have time for
questions if there are any that the use of information technology does
not disturb the basic framework of the development paradigm. But it is
giving us opportunities to expand it to leverage it, and I must say we
are finding new ways of development and linkages that none of us have
ever considered.

This is all within the last five years in fact, and we have been recently
voted as one of the 10 top institutions in the world in terms of our
initiatives, and in terms of information technology. We were the only
non-commercial such institution. So we are very proud of what we are
doing and I would love you to ask me back in another five years because I
believe I will be talking to you then about things that none of us dream
of today. For me it is not just a technical tool; it may be the answer to
greater equity in the world, and a greater peace. Thank you very much.