-says it’s ‘a project for everyone…from the child to the grandmother’
PRESIDENT Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday rolled out his One Laptop per Family initiative to a packed Guyana International Conference Centre as hundreds came to hear how they could benefit from the initiative designed to be a part of Guyana’s thrust into the age of information technology on which much of the economy will be reliant. In his address to the gathering of mostly mothers and schoolchildren, President Jagdeo said the 90,000 laptop computers would go to the least fortunate families in Guyana. The President said the project is meant to benefit “from the child to the grandmother…it is for everyone.”

“I don’t want other kids not to benefit too, but I am prepared to use a tax credit system or any other system to ensure that they too could have access at a cheaper rate. But we want the poor kids to have these instruments,” he said.

“[The laptop] has to be earned…not that you have to pay for it, but it has to be earned by effort and commitment. People who collect these laptops are not getting them free. You don’t have to pay for them but it requires commitment and effort and a promise to help others once you learn,” President Jagdeo explained.

“This is a national project; this is a project that allows you to help others too, inasmuch as you help yourselves. This is the Guyanese family working together to help each other,” he said.

Explaining the rationale behind the project, the President said he decided it would be one laptop per family, rather than per child.
“First of all, it is cost consideration. However, we think that with this instrument placed in the family, with collective ownership of this instrument, that we can achieve a number of things. First, we can achieve greater connection between the classroom and the home. Secondly, we can get the parents much more involved in the work of the children in a very interactive way. Thirdly, it enhances educational access and information available to the entire family. They can access information and communicate with people across the world using this method,” he said.

PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT
“The parents become much more involved in their children’s education,” he said. The President noted also that the programme would promote a more self-directed kind of learning by the children. “The most successful people in the world are those who learn by themselves,” he said.

“We are looking at two years to get the 90,000 computers that we have identified in families deployed across the country and a large number of our households already have computers. So if we can get 90,000 computers,that would be 50 percent of our households and with what I know is already there we will be approaching the type of connectivity that some developed countries have,” he said.
He said, too, that the Government along with other stakeholders have to work to ensure that lack of access to the internet does not stymie access to the computer and its promise. “This is going to be a big challenge,” said President Jagdeo.

He spoke of the several companies in Guyana that are stepping up and trying to fill the gap, citing E-Networks as one of them, with that company launching its 4-G service some weeks ago.

OUR FUTURE – OUR NEW PROSPERITY
He said Guyana must constantly explore, storm and develop new frontiers for creating wealth and opportunities. “We have all agreed that the traditional sectors in our country will continue to be there but they cannot generate the kind of wealth that would allow for persons to get the kinds of jobs at the income levels allowing them to have a lifestyle comparable to the developed world,” he posited.

“It is incumbent upon all of us…policymakers as well as citizens to identify those frontiers,” he charged.
“If we succeed through this project and many others in the sector, we will set that basis for creating the jobs,” he said.

“If you look at our budget this year you would see that we have set aside $1.8 billion for this project (US$9 million). We have a grant from the Chinese government for which we are trying to use to acquire some additional computers [and we] are working through the specifications of the computers (such as) costings with them.
“But the allocation of the budget reflects our intense desire to see this project implemented at a scale and to have it implemented swiftly. We cannot waste another day in the implementation of this project. Why is it so? It is so because the world is moving forward. ICT is creating opportunities for many people across the world and we don’t want our people to be left behind,” the President declared.

The President made the point that any literature on ICT and development has discussions on the digital gap between the developed world and the developing world.

“Almost the entire developed world is moving to a new generation of technology, very advanced technologies, large bandwidth and high speed. In addition, one country in the developed world has made this a fundamental right, it is so important – I think it is Finland – because of its possible impact on peoples lives. Therefore, there is a big race across the developed world to advance technology and to give access to their citizens. But unfortunately in the developing world, we are still focused on existential issues – trying to get the traditional sectors going, trying to build the roads and the other type of infrastructure that have traditionally supported the productive sectors,” he said.

KNOWLEDGE GAP
He observed that in many countries – particularly in this region – “I don’t think that we have evolved in our policy-making to see ICT and the infrastructure that would roll out an ICT strategy as being as important as any other infrastructure for development, if not more important.”

President Jagdeo said across the Caribbean, “we need to quickly come to this realization…because what will happen is that we will widen this gap in knowledge and access between developing and developed world and also the gap in income levels. People in those countries will be more prepared to succeed in a knowledge-based economy. In addition, if we are not careful within countries, we will widen this gap between rich and poor.
“And so it is this consideration that led the government to see this as a priority sector and as a priority project for implementation,” he said.
According to the President, when Government and various stakeholders developed the National Development Strategy in the 1990s, the first draft of that document did not even include a section on ICT.

“Because at that time, the potential and the promise of this technology were just evolving. But from the 1990s to now, if you see the massive development across the world in ICT and how that development has transformed those countries and also sectors by making them more productive and by itself generating ICT-related jobs, then we have to correct this deficiency,” he said.

He pointed out that the greatest market capitalization on the stock exchanges around the world is held by companies in the ICT sector. “The largest companies in the world today are those that exist only in virtual reality – Google, Yahoo! Twitter – they do not produce goods and services. They just allow the flow of information, yet they are the most valuable and create the most wealth for their shareholders,” said President Jagdeo.

“We cannot be left out of that wealth creation and the future that we are evolving into. So there is strong justification for us to allocate large sums of money in this sector because of what I mentioned,” he said.
He added that for the programme to be a success, many pieces of the puzzle must be put in place and this is just one component of a successful strategy, “because access to a computer alone does not allow you to enter the world of promise that it offers as an instrument. It is an interface with the rest of the world. To fulfil that promise you have to have the means by which you connect to the rest of the world and that is access to the internet.”

The President said that for some time now Government has been trying to expand the backbone infrastructure that would deliver access to the internet across Guyana. “The efforts have not been successful as we wished. We had hoped to be much further along the path to its implementation than we are today,” he said.

NEW INVESTMENTS
The President noted that the monopoly, which Guyana Telephone and Telegraph Company (GT&T) holds, has been one of the impediments plaguing the sector.

“Nevertheless, we have seen some major attempts recently to correct this deficiency. GT&T’s investment in a new fibre-optic cable and now we have capacity in Guyana that has led to an immediate drop in the cost of bandwidth. Our new fibre-optic cable that we are bringing from Brazil will allow us to double that capacity. Not only will we have redundancy in fibre-optic connectivity with the rest of the world but also we are going to have significant capacity on which we can build a nationwide internet access for all our citizens. Without these cables it would have been significantly harder to connect our people because of the cost of satellite bandwidth, rather than fibre-optic bandwidth,” he said.

He spoke of Government’s contracting of a Chinese firm to build a network that will see significant public access to bandwidth. “It would lay fibre-optic cables from Crabwood Creek all the way to Charity and this cable will connect with our cable coming from Brazil. [It will come along] the main corridors of our country and from there through WIFI and [other] systems we would be able to supply internet capability to many people,” he said. He added that even if this were not high speed bandwidth, people would have
internet connectivity.
He said the public access system that the Chinese contractor will develop would allow the government to develop a completely new strategy for e-governance, which is also vital for the laptop project, since it helps to bring into being content and services that the State can provide for easy access by citizens.
“This will be done in the health sector, education, enhancing security efforts and bringing a ton of other services that the State currently provides where people have to walk distances to access. This project will bring these services right into their homes,” the President stated.

EDUCATION CHANNEL BY APRIL
President Jagdeo also alluded to monies being allocated in the 2011 budget for the Government’s all-education channel, which will be launched by April this year. He said this channel would allow almost every home on the coast and through satellite to the hinterland, access to learning. He said the programmes would supplement what is taught in the schools.
“But this is just a stepping stone to what we will then deliver through the computers. The possibilities will be enormously greater when this project is fully implemented, when we have a computer in every home in Guyana. This is just one part of the big picture,” he said.

During the opening, students of four pilot communities received a number of computers. These are Abrams Zuil Secondary School on the Essequibo Coast, the Volunteer Youth Corps of Durban Backlands, St. Francis Community Developers of Berbice and the Hinterland Scholarship Students of the Amerindian Hostel.