“Maitland+20 - Fixing the Missing Link”

Excerpt: Introduction

It is the job of the writer of the introduction to a collection of essays to act in the manner of the Fool in a Shakespearian drama - bid welcome to the audience, titillate their imagination with some tidbits of what is to come, encourage their commitment to stay the course, and to prepare them for a period of comedy, tragedy and all the emotions that lie between.

For the Maitland Commission, all the world was their stage in 1984 as they set out to map the state of the telecommunications world as it was between rich and poor, industrial and subsistence economy, developed and developing.

The purpose behind this collection of essays is to take the opportunity provided by WSIS and the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting (which has taken networking as its theme) to pause and reflect on some of the issues raised by Maitland. Nor should they be read without also reflecting on the events leading up to the 2005 G8 meeting in Gleneagles (notably the extraordinarily well written and presented report from the Commission for Africa) and the material produced during the past year assessing progress towards attainment of the Millennium Development Goals.

The contributors to this volume have all been involved for many years in telecommunications development - indeed, some were involved as advisers to the Maitland Commission. They share a passion for communications and they have committed their professional lives to its enhancement. They have been progressing on their own journeys over the past 20 years, alongside the introduction of technologies that have been as, or more, disruptive as the invention of the plough, the steam engine or the factory production line.

We start with some reflections on then and now. David Souter asks what a modern-day Maitland Commission would consider as its brief? He concludes that it would inject some much-needed new thinking into the development debate, just as it did 20 years ago. Tim Kelly looks at some of the statistics relating to the missing link - and brackets his comments between the work of the Maitland Commission (when the industry was still largely run by state-owned telephone monopolies) and the rise of voice over IP - what The Economist heralds as the “death” of the phone business.

Heather Hudson (who drafted some of the original Maitland Commission material) provides a thorough review of progress in the past 20 years, with particular emphasis on accessibility and capacity to use. James Deane argues that we need to focus more closely on the information and voice needs of the poor, rather than on the technology.

Victor Ayeni and Devindra Ramnarine explain how the Commonwealth Action Programme on the Digital Divide (CAPDD) is following some of the same logic - and seeking to help those still marginalised by lack of access to information. A similar tack is taken by Robin Mansell, who stresses that “people’s livelihoods do not change because of technology: they change in the light of the way technology becomes embedded in the overall context of the local and the global”.

Moving into the actualities of “the local”, Yasuhiko Kawasumi (another Maitland veteran) concentrates on rural connectivity, reflecting his role as rapporteur for the ITU’s work in this area. And the focus on needs continues with Gillian Marcelle’s powerful analysis of one of the poorer regions of the world that can all too easily be forgotten - the Caribbean. She echoes the call of others for development work to be directed at what she evocatively describes as “self expression for the world’s majority”.

Astrid Dufborg takes the argument further into the detail of our lives, with a concise assessment of the progress being made by GeSCI - the Global eSchools & Communities Initiative. The theme is followed by Shafika Isaacs, who concentrates on the vital issue of empowering women to benefit from the information society, and by Chetan Sharma, whose Datamation Foundation Trust is making an extraordinary difference to women’s lives in a north-eastern corner of Delhi. Tim Unwin also looks at those who suffer from the missing link, in particular the disabled - reflecting the success of his Imfundo project, run under the auspices of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID).

And so we change focus again, back from the particular to the more general, with Nii Quaynor’s assessment of governance issues, with Jean-Francois Soupizet’s complex but forthright analysis of the need for greater accessibility. Returning to the early part of the book’s reflection on the legacy of Maitland, we hear from Leonid Varakin - one of the original members of the Maitland Commission - and conclude with a powerful examination of what lies ahead from David Cleevely, another one of Maitland’s advisers. He provides a pitch-perfect conclusion to this pot-pourri of thoughts and passions from some of the world’s foremost thinkers on the subject.

And so this diversion is complete. At the end of Shakespeare’s plays, the Fool returns to draw together the strands of what people have seen and heard. In thanking those who have so generously contributed to this mark of respect for what the Maitland Commission achieved, I would say no more than that the work started by Maitland is not yet ended, but it has begun, and it will succeed.

Gerald Milward-Oliver
Bradford on Avon, October 2005.