From poverty to power - Oxfam-Québec

FROM POVERTY TO POWERDespite the hype surrounding the Internet, as of late 2007 Africaand South Asia still had only five Internet users per 100 people. 59Beyond personal face-to-face and telephonic communication, poorpeople remain largely reliant on government- or corporate-dominatedbroadcast media for access to information. As many as 45 countriesblock content in a manner that reduces transparency and responsiveness. 60Governments use bribery to control the media. One revealing studyfound that Peru’s notorious Fujimori government in the 1990s paidtelevision channel owners bribes about 100 times larger than those itpaid to judges and politicians. The strongest potential check on thegovernment’s power, warranting the largest bribe, were the news media. 61In radio, often the main source of information for poor people, thelow cost of entry for new stations has diluted state or corporatecontrol. Community broadcasters are now well established acrossmost of Latin America, reaching otherwise excluded groups, and arespreading rapidly across Africa. Radio provides one of the few sourcesof information in unofficial languages – a major issue when it comesto empowering poor communities, given that most people living on$1 a day do not speak their country’s official language. 62 Quechua, alanguage spoken by some ten million people in Bolivia, Ecuador, andPeru, is rarely heard on television and is completely absent from theInternet. By contrast, 180 radio stations offer programmes in Quechua.The forces driving greater access to information are strong, thanksto a combination of demand (improved literacy, more assertivecitizens, the spread of elected government) and supply (technologiesthat make knowledge more widely and cheaply available). Despite theconcentration of media ownership in the hands of a few global titans,the coming years should see poor people gain greater access toknowledge and information, through an increasingly diverse set oftraditional and new channels.Access to information can help poor people influence decisionsthat affect their lives. In the Pacific, the Solomon Islands NaturalResources and Rights Coalition helps local communities gain accessto logging agreements and other government documents so that theycan fight for their rights over forests. Public access to information canalso prompt the state to become more effective, as evidenced in theIndian example cited above.54