Let Them Eat Cyberspace: Africa, the G8 and the digital divide

The G8's announcement at the Okinawa Summit of 2000 that it would be promoting a new programme aimed at `bridging the digital divide' between the industrialised North and South, with Africa as a particular focus, was touted as a new development strategy that would enable Africa to `leapfrog' into modernity. Not only was this approach grounded in some dubious assumptions as well as a misreading of the antecedents for ICT growth in a developing country, more fundamentally, it served to distort development priorities away from core issues like debt and poverty alleviation towards the pursuit of a `virtual panacea' for Africa's deep-rooted problems. In so doing, it exposed — yet again — the structural inequities that underlie the relationship between the North and the South and the concomitant shortcomings of established mechanisms of global governance.