Transport and Communication: UNESCO’s past activities (i.e. pre-January 2005)

If our present era is one of a revolution in information technology and networks, then communication systems are of special importance to island societies – for informing and educating, for catalysing and monitoring, for generating income and reinforcing self-reliance.

Indeed, new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have considerably increased people’s capacity to access information and to share experience and practices with others in almost any part of the world, owing to their potential to break down social and geographic obstacles to an efficient and time- and cost-effective communication.

The potential of new ICTs to foster economic growth, facilitate capacity-building and knowledge-sharing is particularly important in the case of small-island communities, where development is hampered by dispersed populations, lack of resources and isolation. Already, ICTs actively contribute to:

• Opening up government, making it more transparent and accountable, and thereby increasing public trust in government, reducing overall corruption and promoting core democratic values;


• Facilitating the creation of community networks and reinforcing participatory approaches and good governance;


• Strengthening cooperation between stakeholders to ensure good governance, to develop the private sector and to improve service delivery;


• Developing new forms of citizen participation, with online forums, use net groups and web-based chat sites facilitating open political discussion that would be difficult to sustain in print media.

Furthermore, in respect to one of the core problems in many small islands (that of migration and brain drain), ICTs can play a major role in binding the transnational diaspora communities with their countries of origin, facilitating new and efficient economic networks in both host and home countries and increasing the sense of identity and belonging to a greater ‘transnational’ community. However, to use technologies wisely, communication infrastructures must be adapted to the needs and aspirations of the islanders and to the objectives as defined by them.

Within UNESCO, ICTs for development represented a major programme area as well as a priority cross-cutting theme during the period 2002-2003. In all the fields of competence of UNESCO, ICTs have opened up new horizons for progress and the exchange of knowledge, education and training, and for the promotion of creativity and intercultural dialogue. Within this framework, four strategic objectives were pursued:

• Agreeing on common principles for the construction of knowledge societies;


• Enhancing learning opportunities through access to diversified contents and delivery systems;


• Strengthening capacities for scientific research, information-sharing and cultural exchanges;


• Promoting the use of ICTs for capacity-building, empowerment, governance and social participation.

Not surprisingly, examples of the application of ICTs to small-island challenges can be found throughout this report as well as featuring centrally in the section on communication and information. The following paragraphs present a handful of illustrations of how ICTs are transforming the opportunities for small-island development and essentially act as a ‘trailer’ for more extensive and additional examples later on.

In flagging some aspects of UNESCO’s past work in the field of Communications and Information related to small islands, it should be stressed that activities are continuing in many of these domains.