Stabroek News
April 27, 2001

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) is to look again at Guyana's request for funding a US$50 million project for the development of information technology and to provide access to the Internet across the country.

The IDB, according to President Bharrat Jagdeo, had proposed that a smaller project be pursued and was willing to provide a greater sum for the construction of a number of roads, on which he believed that the long-term return would be ten times less than on the Internet project.

President Jagdeo told reporters yesterday at the Office of the President that he had raised the issue at the just concluded Summit of the Americas to illustrate the need for regional institutions to be more responsive to the needs of the smaller countries if they were to be able to be part of the information age. "They have to change their lending policies", President Jagdeo observed.

The project he had proposed, President Jagdeo said, would have established 100 Internet centres around the country, provided access for some 50,000 families to the Internet and a computer for every school. "I think that would have had a transforming effect not just in integrating us greater with the world and creating greater opportunities but also in the development of people."

But President Jagdeo said that the IDB, in its wisdom, wanted a much smaller project and to lend a larger sum for building roads. "If I put the money in roads or the same amount in information technology the return on information technology in developing people's capacity would be ten times greater than on the investment in roads."

He disclosed that the IDB president Enrique Iglesias had been very unhappy about the matter and was prepared to review the issue when he visited Washington DC next month to speak to the multilateral financial institutions.

President Jagdeo said that an area discussed at the summit, in the context of connecting the Americas, was the need for the creation of an enabling environment.

"It is not just putting the computers down. It is creating the right policies to develop connectivity and it is also important that we have access to telephone lines [which] is very important for our people to integrate with the rest of the world."

The President observed that since there was this strong emphasis on interlinking he hoped that "a policy conducive to the development of connectivity in the Americas would be developed in relation to the continuation of monopolies in the telecommunications sector in some countries.

"There must be a liberalisation; there must be competition so that more people could have access to phones at a cheaper rate," President Jagdeo emphasised.