The "digital divide"...is a reflection of the significant, ongoing problems already faced by a huge part of modern society, including poverty, hunger, illiteracy and inadequate health care.

In the past few years, our society has gained much from the use of ICTs -- but unfortunately, only a small part of this society has been able to take advantage of them. Millions have been designated as among the "digital divided," because they lack the means to take part in the information revolution. These millions of people -- billions, as a matter of fact -- have not achieved a level of technological sophistication to get a good job, a better education, or to improve the lives.

According to UNESCO, there are less Internet connections in Africa than in Manhattan. But why does this really matter? How does the digital divide impact on our ordinary lives? What should it mean to us?

Obviously, the expression "digital divide" represents a concept created during the midst of the information revolution, but it is a reflection of the significant, ongoing problems already faced by a huge part of modern society, including poverty, hunger, illiteracy and inadequate health care. Therefore, all efforts to shrink the digital divide ought to consider these issues first.

According to UNESCO, there are less Internet connections in Africa than in Manhattan.

I coordinate an association known as Faculdade Sumaré Empresa Júnior (FASEJ), or the Sumaré College Junior Enterprise, created by students in São Paulo, Brazil. A junior enterprise is a nonprofit association entirely managed by students, integrating state-of-the-art knowledge from universities with practical business experience by running consulting projects for companies in various sectors. Due to the particularity of junior enterprise work, the students distinguish themselves by exercising soft skills such as entrepreneurial spirit, team-working, creativity, presentation skills, public speaking, networking and intercultural understanding. Members of junior enterprises perform business and technical studies for companies. Thanks to students from different backgrounds, junior enterprises operate in an extensive field of services, in all sectors and in different kinds of companies.

In order to address the digital divide, FASEJ created a program that puts human needs in first place ahead of technical needs. Merely showing people how to operate ICT tools is not enough. Our task -- and challenge -- is to teach people to learn how to learn.

São Paulo City Hall has created a series of telecentros, or telecentres -- institutions equipped with 20 computers connected by broadband to the Internet, allowing any citizen to learn how to use ICTs by providing basic computing courses. The Telecentros Project forecasts that 300,000 people will use 100 telecentres by the end of this year. The goal is to achieve even more, expanding telecentres all over São Paulo -- a city with around 10 million people -- reaching 1,000 telecentres in three years. The Telecentros Project represents the first step in bridging São Paulo's digital divide; our task at FASEJ is taking the second step, by showing these 300,000 people how to improve their learning abilities continuously.

Since bridging the digital divide is about achieving sustainable development, it must go beyond teaching the most basic technology skills.

It's easy to assume that it's enough to teach those 300,000 people basic computer tasks, such as understanding how an operating system works, how to use a mouse, the keyboard and simple operations like writing a letter or résumé. But unfortunately, this is not enough. Since bridging the digital divide is about achieving sustainable development, it must go beyond teaching the most basic technology skills. This next step is building citizens' professionalism and aiming their future on applying the skills they acquired.

Based on this idea, FASEJ represents a group of people (entrepreneurs, students, businessmen, professors and citizens) lead by the will to make this next step a reality. We are developing two projects: the first one is focused on citizens who take part in our telecentres project, and the second one is conceived to help small enterprises with management systems including digital support, training, education and modern IT tools.

FASEJ will work with São Paulo City Hall in a partnership to provide courses to people attending our telecentres. FASEJ will aspire that these recently trained people will be able to take advantages of IT skills throughout their lives, in a practical way. Those people should be able to merge their recently acquired knowledge within their daily experiences, and apply it to new building new futures for themselves.

"The Internet market in Latin America is sharply divided. While Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have highly developed Internet markets with 85 percent of all paid dial-up accounts in the region between them, the rest of the region is trailing behind."

According to Yankee Group, "the Internet market in Latin America is sharply divided. While Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Mexico have highly developed Internet markets with 85 percent of all paid dial-up accounts in the region between them, the rest of the region is trailing behind." São Paulo City is the most important economic region in Brazil, responsible for almost 50% of Brazilian GNP -- therefore, it certainly is a good place to start up this project. Yankee Group also reveals that industry growth potential in São Paulo is huge -- giving FASEJ further evidence on why it's important to work with both citizens and small companies.

Our second project, Small Enterprise Resource Planning (SERP) is based on the premise that there is a precarious lack of support for small companies -- not only technological support, but particularly managerial support for their day-by-day routines and operations, such as cash flow, investments analysis and so forth. The first step for this project will be to research what variety of services could be improved in small companies. FASEJ will then develop a managerial system based on Linux, reflecting our concern on low costs. We will then teach these small companies owners how to enhance their professionalism with advanced technology after training their employees to use the system accurately.




Contributed by Carlos Eduardo Machado Munhoz, president of FASEJ.

To read another Global Envision article about education and digital technology see Cornell University's Distance-Learning Course Makes Global Connections.