Indonesia wants Japan to explain IT aid pledge

JAKARTA (JP): Indonesia is seeking an explanation from the Japanese government about its pledge to provide aid to developing countries to narrow the information and technology (IT) gap.

Indonesian Telecommunications Society chairman Soekarno Abdulrachman said on Thursday that although Japan promised to provide US$15 billion for IT projects in developing countries during the Group of Eight (G-8) summit in Okinawa last year, the terms for securing the funding remained unknown.

"So far Japan is the only industrialized country to have promised help, but we still do not know the terms and conditions that have been set to receive this help," he said during a break in a media conference here on the digital divide.

Soekarno said for Indonesia to surmount the digital divide would require affordable telecommunications infrastructure such as personal computers in rural areas. But he acknowledged funding was a major obstacle to achieving this.

One of the agreements reached at the G-8 summit in July last year was to narrow the IT gap between rich and poor countries by fostering the spread of computer and telecommunications technology.

The leaders of the eight industrialized countries issued an IT charter that vowed to help developing countries reap the benefits of the Internet. They also established a task force that will report back with ideas on how to achieve this goal at this year's G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy.

At the media conference on Thursday, Moch. Slamet Hidayat of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs said the upcoming meeting of the G-15 developing countries in Jakarta on May 25 was crucial to the future development of IT in these countries.

"At the summit, we hope there will be the political will at the level of the heads of state to increase awareness of the importance of the information and communications technology revolution," he said.

Soekarno said he hoped that what was proposed at the G-8 meeting would be expanded on during the G-15 summit.

"We hope IT will not only be available to high-end customers, but also those in isolated areas," he said.

The G-15 summit will coincide with the Indonesian International Telecommunications, Media and Information Technology conference, which will showcase the latest technology available in Indonesia.

Hillman M. Sulaiman, the head of the IT department at the Indonesian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, said the conference also would exhibit the telecommunications and Internet kiosks that have sprung up across Indonesia.

"We have 187,000 telephone kiosks and 2,000 Internet kiosks across the country. We are hoping for a business collaboration to further develop these kiosks and help narrow the digital divide in Indonesia," he said. (tnt)