Progress on the Global Digital Divide: An ethical perspective based on Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Model

Abstract

This paper examines evolving technological capabilities in developing countries. Counts of web sites indicate that some progress is being made in some of the world’s poorest countries, but the numbers show even with this progress, the gap between developed and developing countries is actually growing. So has there been progress in closing the global digital divide? The significance of web sites to provide access to necessary medical information, local cultural information, and the general visibility of the developing world is described and the current environment evaluated. The moral situation created by the current status is reviewed using ethical theories proposed by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen. By reviewing one vehicle for information transfer – the web site – the author hopes to highlight the importance of this vehicle and to present a general overview of the progress that is being made around the world. (NOTE: Several points raised in this article are related to points raised in a book chapter published in 2007 (Wresch, 2007)).

Keywords

Human Development Report, World Wide Web, Amartya Sen, cultural imperialism, international comparisons, ICT, medical information, cultural information, capability justice, Millennium Development Goals

Introduction

In September 2000, at the United Nations Millennium Summit, world leaders agreed to a set of measurable goals and targets for combating poverty, hunger, disease, illiteracy, environmental degradation and discrimination against women. These goals are now called the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Among the goals is a call for improved access to information and communication technologies. Measurable targets include the number of telephone lines per 1000 population, number of personal computers, and the number of internet users per 1000 population.

In a world filled with war, AIDS, and grinding poverty, internet access and phone lines would seem to be the last thing to worry about. So how did they make the list of Millennium Development Goals? The United Nations Development Programme 2007 Annual Report explains the importance of technology in development efforts:

Many developing countries, and particularly the LDCs [Least Developed Countries], suffer from a lack of integration with the rest of the world that might otherwise help them progress. Over 80 percent of foreign direct investments in developing countries flows into about 12 better performing nations… While more than half the people in high-income nations have access to the Internet, a basic tool of globalization, only 8 or every 1,000 people in the LDCs enjoy the same access. (Making Globalization Work for All, 2007, p13)

The important place of technology in national development has been a consistent position taken by the United Nations Development Programme which began emphasizing this point in their 1999 Human Development Report. That report predicted a number of improvements for developing countries of the world including the hope distance learning would bring information to poor hospitals, NGOs would have an increased ability to supply information to needy clients, small businesses would find new markets for their products and services, countries could build businesses around telecommunications jobs, and government censorship would become more difficult. It was a lengthy list of significant improvements in the capabilities of developing countries. Hopes were high.

Unfortunately, progress for many countries has not been as rapid as hoped, leading some to describe a “Digital Divide” the separates the countries that have excellent – even routine – access to the internet and its resources, from countries where access is still spotty. For instance, Table 1 presents the more extreme internet access rates and cell phone availability rates for selected countries. The disparity between countries is quickly evident.

Table 1 – Internet Users per 1000 population in 2005

Country	Internet Users per 1000	Cell phone users per 1000
Sweden	764	935
Canada	520	514
Japan	668	742
United States	630	680
Korea	684	794
Niger	2	21
Ethiopia	2	6
Malawi	4	33
Rwanda	6	32
Guinea	5	20
Bangladesh	3	63

Source: Human Development Report 2007/2008. Statistics are from 2005

Clearly huge differences in Internet access rates exist between countries. This global “digital divide” seems particularly persistent for the world’s poorest countries, although some progress has been made in other developing countries such as Egypt, Bolivia, and Guatemala which have internet access rates in the range of 50 to 80 per 1000. Access rates there and elsewhere are growing slowly, but they are growing. Nevertheless, they are still dramatically lower than access rates found in the most developed countries. Cell phone access rates confirm the general lack of communication technologies available in the poorest countries.

An additional measure of information access can be found in the number of web sites registered in each country. Here the numbers are also widely divergent, although again, some progress is being made.

Table 2 - Web sites per country

Country	Population	Cell phones per 1000	Income per Capita	Site Count 2005	Site Count 2007
Algeria	32,129,324	416	$1,890	119,000	691,000
Angola	10,978,552	69	$740	20,600	195,000
Benin	7,250,033	89	$440	5,350	55,000
Botswana	1,561,973	466	$3,430	84,900	300,000
Burkina Faso	13,574,820	43	$300	81,100	357,000
Burundi	6,231,221	20	$100	28,400	68,800
Cameroon	16,063,678	138	$640	51,100	413,000
Cape Verde	415,294	161	$1,490	21,100	151,000
Central African Rep	3,742,482	25	$260	646	9
Chad	9,538,544	22	$250	1,300	3
Comoros	766,153	27	$450	245	162
Cote d'Ivoire	17,327,724	121	$660	97,700	115,000
Democratic Rep of the Congo	58,317,930	48	$100	151,000	231,000
Djibouti	466,900	56	$910	134,000	178,000
Egypt	76,117,421	184	$1,390	365,000	1,910,000
Equatorial Guinea	523,051	192	$930	27	35,500
Eritrea	4,447,307	9	$190	1,470	563
Ethiopia	67,851,281	6	$90	42,300	78,800
Gabon	1,355,246	470	$3,060	2,490	22,900
Gambia	1,546,848	163	$310	14,900	142,000
Ghana	20,757,032	129	$320	36,500	207,000
Guinea	9,246,462	20	$430	2,680	549
Guinea-Bissau	1,388,363	42	$140	48	69
Kenya	32,021,856	135	$390	77,500	617,000
Lesotho	1,865,040	137	$590	18,000	90,100
Liberia	3,390,635		$130	141	952
Libya	5,631,585	41	$3,036	157,000	182,000
Madagascar	17,501,871	27	$290	91,300	461,000
Malawi	11,906,855	33	$170	33,400	79,900
Mali	11,956,788	64	$290	19,000	202,000
Mauritania	2,998,563	243	$430	69,100	312,000
Mauritius	1,220,481	574	$4,090	172,000	647,000
Morocco	32,209,101	411	$1,320	265,000	1,680,000
Mozambique	18,811,731	62	$210	98,200	831,000
Namibia	1,954,033	244	$1,870	226,000	313,000
Niger	11,360,538	21	$200	53,900	20,800
Nigeria	137,253,133	141	$320	22,400	451,000
Rep. of the Congo	2,998,040	123	$640	1,680	11,300
Rwanda	7,954,013	32	$220	27,800	204,000
Senegal	10,852,147	148	$550	155,000	595,000
Sierra Leone	5,883,889	22	$150	3	10,900
Somalia	8,304,601		$765	378	2
South Africa	42,718,530	724	$2,780	6,660,000	1,670,000
Sudan	39,148,162	50	$460	2,180	118,000
Swaziland	1,169,241	177	$1,350	20,700	69,700
Tanzania	36,588,255	52	$290	94,500	795,000
Togo	5,556,812	72	$310	11,600	33,600
Tunisia	9,974,722	566	$2,240	192,000	1,340,000
Uganda	26,404,543	53	$240	115,000	313,000
Zambia	10,462,436	81	$380	110,000	157,000
Zimbabwe	12,671,860	54	$480	153,000	232,000
Totals	872,367,100			10,108,638	16,589,609
United States Population	293,027,571	680			56,100,000
		.com		328,000,000	1,090,000,000
		.edu		51,500,000	90,900,000
		.gov		33,400,000	49,000,000
		.org		109,000,000	415,000,000
		Total Sites		521,900,000	1,701,000,000
all population figures based on 2004 estimates from CIA factbook
all site counts obtained from google.com
income per capita figures obtained from 2003 worldbank.org
Cellular phone subscribers based on Human Development Report 2007/2008

These numbers were obtained by using the Google search engine focused on national domain names. The search can be conducted by going to Google’s Advanced Search tool, and using “search within a site or domain.” One enters the two-letter domain name for each country of interest, and Google returns with the number of sites registered for that domain. Two counts were made, one in February 2005 and a second in November 2007. It should be noted that this is a very blunt tool. Web sites can be registered from anywhere, and they can be of any kind, from simple sales sites, to pornography, to a government ministry site. The 33,000 sites that Togo had registered in 2007, for example, may not actually contain any more useful local information than the 11,000 sites it had in early 2005. We can only assume that an increase in quantity has some bearing on a general increase in value.

Accepting all those caveats about the validity of these numbers, the numbers themselves lead us to at least two general conclusions. First, in a space of just over 33 months, the nations of Africa registered 60% more web sites. A few countries showed a decline, but the overwhelming majority had significant increases. Second, while the number of web sites registered to African nations grew by 60%, the number of sites registered in the US grew by over 200%.

So is the digital divide opening, or closing? A consideration of that question will be approached in two parts: a consideration of the value of local web sites, and a review of Amarta Sen’s writings on comparable topics.

The Value of Local Web Sites

It can be argued that local web sites have no special value. After all, we reference the current technology for downloading information as the “World Wide Web” precisely because we are able to gather data from any place in the world without geographical barriers. What difference does it make whether information I need is located in Chicago or Cape Town? There are three reasons why location might still matter in the information age.

Medical Information

First, some information will always be local because the need is local. Consider the situation faced by medical colleges in Africa. “A US medical library subscribes to around 5,000 journals, but the Nairobi University Medical School Library, long regarded as a flagship centre in east Africa, now receives just 20 journals, compared with 300 a decade ago. In Brazzaville, Congo, the university only has 40 medical books and a dozen journals, all from before 1993.” (HDR, 1999, p.59). These unfortunate trends indicate a need for help. One hopes new technologies like the World Wide Web would give these medical students access to information that they clearly no longer have in printed form in their local libraries.

The assumption is that stockpiles of research excellence are available in the “north” and information technology is a simple and relatively cheap way to transfer copies of that information to the needy “south.” It can be envisioned as another form of foreign aid, except it requires less of developed countries. A shareable resource, medical schools in developed nations could host copies of their research on their web sites and allow it to be freely accessed by the needy. Such medical information is useful in developing countries and is gratefully accepted. A number of medical systems have been set up under this model in the past decade, and many would attest to their value.

Since such flows bring information into developing countries, they can occur without local web sites, and so would seem to obviate any concern for web sites. After all, what might it matter that Liberia has just 952 web sites for its three million people, as long as web sites are available in the US and Europe for African doctors to access? It would appear there is no problem, certainly no reduction in capabilities of African people or African physicians, since they can gain information from out of the country.

Unfortunately, the 2001 Human Development Report describes significant limitations to the medical research being conducted and published in developed countries – “the north.” To cite the report’s numbers, “In 1995 more than 95,000 therapy-relevant scientific articles were published but only 182 - 0.2% of the total – addressed tropical diseases. And of 1,223 new drugs marketed worldwide between 1975 and 1996, only 13 were developed to treat tropical diseases – and only 4 were the direct result of pharmaceutical industry research.” (HDR, 2001, pp. 109 -110). So it would appear valuable information is lacking. The World Wide Web might allow information to flow to medical practitioners all over the world, but it cannot flow if it does not exist. As we have already seen, the limited presence of web sites in the south implies physicians are not creating or posting needed information there either. While it would appear the huge number of medical web sites in “the north” obviate any shortage of medical information in “the south,” the UNDP asserts that medical studies of great value to developing countries are not being performed. So needed medical information is being neither created nor communicated.

Cultural Information

The 2004 Human Development Report addresses the problem of cultural information from several angles, but begins with world trade figures that illustrate one aspect of the problem. “World trade in cultural goods – cinema, photography, radio and television, printed matter, literature, music and visual arts – quadrupled, from $95 billion in 1980 to more than $380 billion in 1998. About four-fifths of these flows originate in 13 countries. Hollywood reaches 2.6 billion people around the world, and Bollywood 3.6 billion.” (HDR, 2004, p.86)

The data from UNESCO, while unfortunately very dated, captures the international trade in printed material. Table 3 details the startling difference in information flows in books and printed matter.

Table 3- International Trade in Printed Materials

	Trade in Printed Materials (UNESCO 2000)
Nation	Imports	Exports
Algeria - 1997	$9,717,000	$17,000
Chad - 1995	$994,000	$0
Congo - 1995	$2,435,000	$27,000
Egypt – 1997	$13,358,000	$4,588,000
Ethiopia – 1995	$4,598,000	$0
Kenya – 1996	$12,220,000	$1,888,000
Malawi -- 1995	$4,399,000	$12,000
Morocco -- 1997	$21,542,000	$860,000
Nigeria – 1991	$31,217,000	$7,000
South Africa – 1996	$133,653,000	$13,406,000
Zimbabwe – 1997	$13,703,000	$1,310,000

One hopes that when UNESCO collects more current data on book purchases, these numbers may be somewhat less one-sided, but then again, given the situation in Zimbabwe and elsewhere, the numbers may actually have become worse.

In the meantime, the book world has been changed by the process of text digitization. In 2004 the US Company, Google, began to digitize a large number of library books and make them available on-line through its web site. Selecting potentially millions of books from the libraries of Harvard University, the University of Michigan, the New York Public Library, and the Bodleian library at Oxford, the company no doubt believed it was contributing to a major public service.

While some applauded their public spiritedness, the President of the European Union, Jean-Claude Juncker, saw free, digital books available to anyone in the world as an attack on his culture. He advocated a special EU appropriation to launch a European digital library to counter efforts by Google because he says “Europe must not submit in the face of virulent attacks from others.”(EU Leader, 2005) It is unclear if Google thought it was launching a “virulent attack” but France’s National Library President certainly did, saying “The real issue is elsewhere. And it is immense. It is confirmation of the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations view the world.”

One might cringe at any national leader referring to free books as “a virulent attack,” but the French are not alone in this general concern over cultural materials. The 2004 Human Development Report contains a major section of cultural concerns. As they see it, many people in developing countries “fear that their country is being fragmented, their values lost as growing numbers of immigrants bring new customs and international trade and modern communications media invade every corner of the world, displacing local culture.” (HDR, 2004, p.85)

In this context, the numerical dominance of web sites in developed countries, all hosting an increased volume of digitized material, at least has the potential to add yet another layer of cultural dominance to the flows in films, books, songs, and other cultural artifacts flowing from the north to the south.

The Invisible Developing World

Then there is the general question of visibility. What, if anything, do we really know about the lives of people in the developing world, and does it even matter? To Sen , it matters a great deal. “One may,” Sen says “with some justice, deny responsibility for inaction about matters the existence of which one does not know. In a small way, even the limited publicity given by OXFAM or UNICEF to human suffering, and to the relatively low cost of removal of some of these sufferings, has the effect of making many people face responsibilities which they would not have otherwise acknowledged. The role of information in the ethics of international income distribution can hardly be overemphasized.” (Sen, 1984, p.300).

Yet if information about developing countries is important, where is it to be found? UNESCO’s data on traditional publications indicates just how little paper-based information is exported from developing countries. Table 2’s count of web sites shows that a significant number of web sites are being created in developing countries, but their numbers are dramatically less than what is found in developed countries. Are those web sites sufficient for the local populations to tell their story?

If this information resource is as inadequate as more traditional resources, Sen warns of significant consequences for the people of those nations. “Informational limitation restricts or distorts consequential judgments, encourages arbitrary agent-relativity, and even provides ‘permissive’ justification for the make-believe reasoning of ‘fantasie’ and the unreasoned prejudice of ‘evasion’ despite the crippling limitation of both these approaches.” (Sen, 1984, p.302). Distorted judgments lead to inadequate responses, or even to no responses at all. Hearing nothing from large swaths of the planet, it is easy to ignore or misjudge the plight of those communities.

So it would appear we have three classes of information that may be absent, or at least extant in less than optimal amounts. Some kinds of medical information may exist in significant amounts and flow easily through a variety of media, but the UNDP has concerns that medical research of specific value to underdeveloped countries may not exist and so is not available to flow through available conduits. Similarly, massive amounts of cultural information is being produced in some parts of the world and is now being digitized so that even more cultural information may be available to flow electronically. But there is a great deal of concern from many quarters that this cultural information comes from a single culture and may overwhelm cultures that produce and disseminate fewer cultural vehicles of their own. And then there is the question of whether information about the daily lives of all the world’s people is captured and disseminated in a manner that allows people around the world to make educated judgments about the situation and needs of diverse populations.

Our question is whether the growing number of web sites in developing countries marks a significant improvement in the ability to capture and disseminate any of these classes of information. Is there progress in the narrowing of the digital divide?

Web Sites and Amartya Sen’s Capabilities Model of Ethical Reasoning

As we try to answer that question, we have two immediate observations about the numbers of web sites being created around the world, and the changes in those numbers over time. First, the number of web sites hosted in developing countries increased significantly over a thirty-three month period. Second, the increase seen in developing countries was nowhere near as large as the increase found in developed countries like the U.S. So what are we to make of this evidence of growth and discrepancy?

To consider this question, we might ask, what rights might people in impoverished areas of the world have to web sites or any other good or service? One approach to this ethical question can be found through Sen’s “Capabilities Model.” Sen defines his model this way:

It [capability] represents the various combinations of functionings (beings and doings) that the person can achieve. Capability is, thus, a set of vectors of functionings, reflecting the person’s freedom to lead one type of life or another. Just as the so-called ‘budget set’ in the commodity space represents a person’s freedom to buy commodity bundles, the ‘capability set’ in the functioning space reflects the person’s freedom to choose from possible livings.” (Sen, 1984, p.40).

How might Sen’s “capabilities model” be specifically applied to the current situation noted in web site availability.

First, is the simple numerical discrepancy between developing and developed nations an automatic example of injustice? The numbers would seem so on their face. In the U.S., a population of 293 million has created 1.7 billion web sites, or 5.8 per person. African populations of 862 million have created just over 16 million web sites, or 0.018 per person. Put another way, American citizens have created 322 times more web sites than their African peers. It is difficult to think of other resource distributions that are so unbalanced.

But Sen does allow for resource differences. Sen describes relative needs in several ways and specifically addresses needs within a richer community. First he notes, “for a richer community, however, the nutritional and other physical requirements (such as clothing and protection from climactic conditions) are typically met, and the needs of communal participation – while absolutely no different in the space of capabilities – will have a much higher demand in the space of commodities and that of resources.” (Sen, 1984, p.336)

Given the overwhelming predominance of such social networking sites as My Space and Facebook in the adolescent communities of developed nations, one assumes those with no access to such communities would feel some of the same shame Sen mentions is the fate of people in very poor communities who are unable to participate in community events for lack of proper clothing. One is isolated from one’s peers, unable to participate in what appears to be essential communication.

Writing before the advent of Myspace and its equivalents, Sen provides two other examples of potential resource inadequacy in developed countries. There is the example of the child who is unable to receive a full education if she does not have a television, if television ownership is assumed and teaching assignments made accordingly. And there is the example of car ownership in a society where car ownership is common. Once such a state is reached, public transportation services often degrade, so a family without a car becomes less capable in such a society than it might be in a poorer society where car ownership is rare and so public transportation is more widely available. In both cases he is demonstrating that need can be relative to the community in which one lives.

His examples demonstrate why it may be more important for individuals in the U.S. to have web sites and to have access to other forms of information technology. Once a community communication standard is created, all community members are compelled to participate in the new standard using the new tools. By this standard, the paucity of African web sites may simply mean that community standards are different there and so no deprivation exists. In any case, a simple count of web sites is not in itself enough to prove that an unjust situation exists.

Medical Information

What of shortages of medical information? What are some basic capabilities that one would expect to see made available to every person? Sen describes such capabilities this way: “in dealing with extreme poverty in developing economies, we may be able to go a fairly long distance in terms of a relatively small number of centrally important functions and the corresponding basic capabilities, e.g. the ability to be well-nourished and well-sheltered, the capability of escaping avoidable morbidity and premature mortality, and so forth.” (Sen, 1984, pp. 44-45).

To determine whether web sites in developing countries can help at these most basic levels, it is necessary to move past raw numbers and look at specific web sites in specific countries. Namibia may serve as an example here since it is roughly in the middle of Africa states in its development status and ICT availability. What medical information do national sites provide to health care professionals?

A Google search lists 90 web sites regarding healthcare in Namibia and hosted in Namibia. Most sites are of marginal value, but there are several that might be helpful. The Ministry of Health and Social Services has a web site explaining its duties, goals, and accomplishments. A local newspaper story describes general conditions for children, “The state of the average Namibian child is one of HIV-AIDS coupled with grinding poverty, low access to quality healthcare, alcohol abuse and violence in the home, parental neglect and low access to quality educational opportunities” (Links, 2008). Other sites describe the current state of AIDS infections and a new project to supply home healthcare workers with bicycles so they can more easily get to rural homes of HIV/AIDS patients.

So there are now local resources available on-line. However, it is also worth looking to see what information is available about Namibia and made available from outside sources. The same Google search of “Healthcare in Namibia” reveals another set of medical information held in web sites outside the country. Oxfam has a web site describing current efforts to combat tuberculosis in one area of the country. A Red Cross site describes special programs to improve the health of women in Namibian villages. Both the US Center for Disease Control and UNICEF have web sites describing a major polio outbreak in Namibia, while another medical site describes the continued shortage of medical professionals in Namibia since so many have been lured away to foreign positions.

So it appears much medical information about Namibia is still developed and hosted outside Namibia. Used in combination with an increasing amount of locally-produced information, it appears medical professionals have better access to medical information than might have been the case in the past. Is there still a shortage of locally-relevant information? Only a local physician could tell us that, but it at least seems from casual observation that increasing resources are becoming available – some progress is being made.

Cultural Information

In the case of uneven cultural flows, Sen initially seems unconcerned. Where the President of France’s National Library may see “the risk of a crushing American domination in the definition of how future generations view the world,” Sen praises an Indian filmmaker by saying, “There is much wisdom, I think, in this ‘critical openness,’ including the prizing of a dynamic, adaptable world over a world that is constantly ‘policing’ external influences and fearing ‘invasion’ of ideas from elsewhere.” (Sen, 1996, p.2) He goes on to say ,”The growing tendency in contemporary India to champion the need for an indigenous culture that has ‘resisted’ external influences and borrowings lacks credibility as well as cogency. It has become quite common to cite the foreign origin of an idea or a tradition as an argument against its use”(Sen, 1996, p.5).

One of Sen’s concerns about this opposition to foreign cultural influences is the way he sees politicians using this apparent “concern,” as a cover for oppression of political rights. “The resistance to Western hegemony – a perfectly respectable cause in itself – takes the form, under this interpretation, of justifying the suppression of journalistic freedoms and the violations of elementary political and civil rights on the grounds of the alleged unimportance of these freedoms in the hierarchy of what is claimed to be ‘Asian values.” (Sen, 1996, p.7)

So it would appear Sen is not overly concerned about the abundance of cultural influences he sees coming into developing countries. He prizes a dynamic world, and is suspicious of those who may attempt to suppress foreign ideas as a pretext for denying local rights. But his praise for those who can infuse foreign ideas, and his concern over those who would misuse concerns for political purposes, should not be interpreted to say that he has no concerns at all. His reference to resistance to Western hegemony as “a perfectly respectable cause in itself,” indicates where he draws the line. Openness to foreign ideas is not synonymous with foreign dominance. To Sen, the cultural ideal is a mixture of cultures. He notes “the celebration of these differences – the dizzying contrasts – is far from what can be found in labored generalizations about the unique and fragile purity of ‘our culture,’ and in the vigorous pleas to keep ‘our culture, our modernity,’ immune from ‘their culture, their modernity.’ In our heterogeneity, and in our openness lies our pride, not our disgrace.”(Sen, 1996, p.9)

Is that heterogeneity to be found in Web sites? We know the number of web sites is increasing in developing countries, but do enough of those web sites contain cultural information so that there is some balance between local cultures and dominant global cultures?

Again, to use Namibia as an example, a Google search of “Culture in Namibia,” yields over eleven million hits, but of the first fifty sites describing that nation’s culture, none are hosted in that country. Rather than telling its own story, the culture of Namibia is told by tourism vendors, assorted American universities, booksellers, and UNESCO. As has been the case for much of the developing world, it is left to others to describe the history and culture of Namibia. One assumes these sites are well-meaning and that the foreigners describing Namibia are doing it to the best of their ability. But one wonders how we might feel if the situation were reversed – if the presentation of American history and culture were made exclusively by the French or by Namibians rather than by us. Where is the heterogeneity that Sen praises? Or does the current array of web sites rather portray the Western hegemony that Sen finds objectionable?

Visibility of the Developing World

Then there is the general question of visibility. Recall Sen’s comments on the importance of visibility. “One may,” Sen says “with some justice, deny responsibility for inaction about matters the existence of which one does not know. In a small way, even the limited publicity given by OXFAM or UNICEF to human suffering, and to the relatively low cost of removal of some of these sufferings, has the effect of making many people face responsibilities which they would not have otherwise acknowledged. The role of information in the ethics of international income distribution can hardly be overemphasized.” (Sen, 1984, p.300).

But is the developing world invisible? It is certainly less visible than the developed world. Again, simple web site counts show a yawning gap between the billions of web sites that describe the developed world and the hundreds of thousands that may describe some developing country. However, there now are hundreds of thousands of web sites hosted in some of the world’s poorest countries. So are those countries still invisible? To use the example of Namibia once more, one can quickly read the on-line version of the morning newspaper in that country (The Namibian – www.namibian.com.na), or search the national university for research studies (The University of Namibia – www.unam.na) or go to any number of government sites to see national policies or goals. Useful websites are now available to help outsiders better understand the interests and goals of citizens in that country.

If that information is not accessed by outsiders, it takes us to another aspect of Sen’s capability model – choice. Sen begins his description of justice as follows: “In the capability-based assessment of justice, individual claims are not to be assessed in terms of resources or primary goods the persons respectively hold, but by the freedoms they actually enjoy to choose the lives that they have reason to value. It is this actual freedom that is represented by the person’s ‘capability’ to achieve various alternative combinations of functionings.” (Sen, 1992, p.81)

Inherent in this definition is choice. If a person has the capacity to read but chooses not to, there is no injustice if we were to find, for instance, that his neighbors read many books a week while he reads none. Simple counts of books read might show substantial variations, but would not automatically indicate deprivation. In Sen’s words, “two persons with the same actual capabilities and even the same goals may end up with different outcomes because of differences in strategies or tactics that they respectively follow in using their freedoms.” (Sen, 1992, p.82).

In the context of visibility, the matter may be stated, if information resources are available about developing countries, but citizens elsewhere in the world ignore them, then that is a matter of choice. This choice could have many causes. One is described by Floridi as the “tragedy of the good will.” In this explanation a good person “will feel pain and frustration when informed about evil events, and the more so the more she is informed about dramatic events with respect to which she is powerless. But it is also reasonable to assume no Good Will will be inclined to leave open such a perennially bleeding wound. If one suffers too much with those whom one sees suffer, one may soon wish to avert one’s eyes.(Floridi, 2006, 258). He asserts this can result in a careful selection of information sources. The practical result may be that newspapers and government agencies in developing countries move information items to web sites, making them accessible to the world, but the world chooses not to access them.

Conclusion

Sen sums up economic development very nicely when he says, “The process of economic development can be seen as a process of expanding the capabilities of people. Ultimately, the process of economic development has to be concerned with what people can or cannot do, e.g. whether they can live long, escape avoidable morbidity, be well nourished, be able to read and write and communicate, take part in literary and scientific pursuits, and so forth.” (Sen, 1984, p.497) The figures compiled and presented earlier in this paper show that a significant gap exists in the availability of some information sources that might enhance that development.

Counts of web sites in various countries provide one metric for estimating information availability, but other metrics can be created, and it can be reasonably asked whether digital measures are helpful in understanding information gaps. We have seen a significant gap exists in the sheer number of web sites available in the developing world. But does that gap define a shortage in the capabilities of the people in developing countries?

Absolute conclusions are not easy to draw since the nature and content of web sites differs along with their number. A specific review of medical information indicates that while shortages may exist, a growing body of helpful and relevant information is being created and posted on websites both inside and exterior to developing nations. It appears in this area capabilities are being enhanced, at least as can be measured and reflected in medical web sites.

Cultural information may actually be a larger problem with a continuing shortage of locally-originated information. The people of developing nations are still not the primary providers of information about their own lives and culture – either in books, or on web sites.

As for general visibility, here the creation of fundamental information sources from local newspapers, universities, and government ministries shows that information is available to those who wish to make the effort to find it. A growing number of web sites are springing up to make such information available for access anywhere in the world. The widespread misunderstanding of life in developing countries appears to be a matter of choice, not of inadequate capabilities.

Progress is being made on the global digital divide. A 60% growth in African web sites over a 33 month period is a significant step in the right direction. A detailed review of specific national sites indicates a growing body of information available on-line. It is still clearly short of optimal, but it is far superior to the situation of a decade ago or even 33 months ago. At least as reflected in national web site counts, the capabilities of citizens in developing countries appear to be improving.

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