A World Bank / IFC report by says for every 10 percentage-point increase in high-speed Internet connections there is an increase in economic growth of 1.3 percentage points. The Global Information and Communications Technology Department of the World Bank and IFC has published an online resource for its global report: IC4D, Information and Communications for Development 2009: Extending Reach and Increasing Impact.

The IC4D report examines how broadband and mobile communications are driving economic growth in developing countries. It includes comparative data on ICT performance in 150 economies. IC4D also includes many new ways to measure and compare access, affordability and applications in government and business.

The report shows that access to affordable high-speed Internet and mobile communications are central to economic growth and job creation in developing countries. Launching the report, Mohsen Khalil, Director of the joint World Bank and IFC Global Information and Communication Technologies Department, said that mobile is “the single most powerful way to reach and deliver public and private services to hundreds of millions of people in remote and rural areas across the developing world”.

The second issue of the series Information and Communication for Development “IC4D 2009: Extending Reach and Increasing Impact” takes a close look at mobile and broadband connectivity; it analyses the development impact of high-speed Internet access in developing countries and provides policy options with the opportunities and challenges of convergence. The report also presents a framework of e-government applications and discusses various country experiences with the institutional and policy arrangements for e-government and for the development of local IT industry. The common thread running through these topics is the development impact of ICT.

Other findings of the IC4D report include:

To read the report and download resources, please visit its website.

Source: InfoDev

Source: UNPAN

The Global Monitoring Report, developed annually by an independent team and published by UNESCO, assesses global progress towards the six Education for All goals to which over 160 countries committed themselves in 2000.

The 2010 Report, Reaching the marginalized, charts some spectacular advances in education over the past decade, a striking contrast with the “lost decade” of the 1990s. Since 1999, the number of children not attending school has fallen by 33 million — and more children are completing a full cycle of primary education.

Sub-Saharan Africa has increased enrolment at five times the rate achieved in the 1990s, with countries such as Benin and Mozambique registering rapid advances.

In South and West Asia, the number of children out of school has been more than halved, partly through policies aimed at getting more girls into school. In India, the number of children not in school fell by almost 15 million in just two years, from 2001 to 2003.

The gender gap has also narrowed. In the space of one primary school generation, Senegal has moved from 85 girls for every 100 boys to an equal number of girls and boys.

Numbers such as these dispel the myth that poor countries are unable to achieve rapid progress in education. But Reaching the marginalized warns that many countries are likely to fall far short of the targets adopted by governments in 2000, because of the failure of governments to address inequalities and of donors to deliver on pledges.

Setbacks in education will have wider consequences, too. With a major international summit planned on the UN’s development targets — the Millennium Development Goals — in 2010, the report points out that lost opportunities for education will act as a brake on economic growth, poverty reduction, and progress in health and other areas.

The report’s authors identify sub-Saharan Africa as an area for priority action. With fiscal deficits rising across the region, education spending plans could face painful adjustments. Education systems across the region could be deprived of around US$4.6 billion per year in public spending in 2009 and 2010 as a direct result of the crisis.

The report urges rich countries and the Group of 20 to scale up the concessional aid required to avoid damaging budget adjustments in the poorest countries.

The report estimates that donors will have to bridge a financing gap of US$16 billion a year to meet the goal of universal primary education by 2015. These numbers reflect governments’ ongoing neglect of the need to address extreme inequalities; the world will only get all its children into school by putting the marginalized at the centre of education policy.

Falling short of the goals

With less than five years to the 2015 target date, the Global Monitoring Report warns that the window of opportunity for getting on track is closing. Among the global indicators highlighted as a cause for concern:

• On current trends, 56 million primary school age children will still be out of school in 2015
• Another 71 million adolescents are currently not at school
• Gender disparities remain deeply engrained, with 28 countries across the developing world having nine or fewer girls in primary school for every ten boys.
• Girls still account for 54% of the children out of school– and girls not in primary school are far less likely than boys ever to attend school
• 10.3 million additional teachers will be needed worldwide to achieve the goal of universal primary education by 2015.
• There has been little progress towards the goal of halving adult illiteracy – a condition that affects 759 million people, two-thirds of them women
• Child malnutrition remains a major barrier to progress in education, with 178 million children aged 0-5 years old affected and the numbers rising
• Far too many young people emerge from primary school unable to read or write. In some countries in sub-Saharan Africa, young adults with five years of primary schooling have a 40% chance of being illiterate.

The report cautions that reality may look worse than the picture provided in national data. Using household survey data analysis, it presents evidence that school records overstate the number of primary school age children in school by as much as 30%.

A collective aid failure

There has been a collective failure by the donor community to act on the pledge made in 2000 that ‘no countries seriously committed to education for all will be thwarted in their achievement of this goal by lack of resources’:

• A financing gap of US$16 billion a year must be bridged to reach the Education for All goals;
• Rich countries are exaggerating how much aid they have provided to help poor countries cope with the financial crisis;
• The Fast Track Initiative is not working: the principal global education aid coordination body needs fundamental reform.

Aid commitments to basic education, having stagnated from 2004, fell by more than one-fifth in 2007. The aid budgets of three major donors – France, Germany and Japan – continue to reflect a relative neglect of basic education, as they commit over half of their education aid to post-primary levels. Spain, on the other hand, has led the way by increasing its aid to basic education by 78% since 1999.

The report estimates that low-income countries could raise an additional $US 7 billion per year, or 0.7% of GDP, by increasing domestic resources and allocating more to education. However, even if governments maximize their efforts to increase domestic spending on education, the financing gap is estimated by the Global Monitoring Report to be US$16 billion annually for 46 low-income countries. Previous estimates have underestimated the cost of achieving core education goals, partly because they have failed to count the additional spending needed to reach deprived groups.

The UNESCO report acknowledges that increasing aid will be challenging for donors in a period of acute budget stress. Aid levels will have to rise markedly, however, to close the Education for All financing gap of US$16 billion: current aid for basic education in the 46 countries covered amounts to just US$2.7 billion.

The authors of the report call on the UN Secretary General to convene a high-level pledging conference in 2010 to address the financing shortfall.

Wealthy countries and international financial institutions have been misrepresenting their support for developing countries, using ‘smoke and mirrors’ aid reporting. “Rich countries have mobilized a financial mountain to stabilize their financial systems and protect vital social and economic infrastructure, but they have provided an aid molehill for the world’s poor,” said the Global Monitoring Report’s director, Kevin Watkins.

The centrepiece of multilateral aid for education needs fundamental reform. The Fast Track Initiative has achieved some significant results, but the Global Monistoring Report identifies wide-ranging problems that have diminished its effectiveness. Payout rates are very low, developing countries have a weak voice in governance, the private sector’s role is minimal and countries affected by conflict are poorly served.

The Report calls for fundamental reform of the Fast-Track Initiative. Drawing on the experience of global health funds, the authors call for more effective multilateral approaches in education, with a focus on closing financing gaps, raising learning achievement and strengthening equity.

In addition, aid effectiveness needs to be improved to fix problems with aid predictability, donor coordination and donors’ failure to use national financial management systems.

Donors also need to adopt more flexible approaches in order to scale up support to conflict-affected countries, which account for one-third of children not in school, but less than one-fifth of aid to education.

Fighting ‘education poverty’ is key to better progress

Extreme and persistent inequalities linked to poverty, gender, ethnicity and language are holding back progress in education, wasting human potential and undermining prosperity. Lost opportunities for education hinder economic growth, and efforts to reduce poverty and improve health.

Using a new measurement tool – the Deprivation and Marginalization in Education data set – the report explores the extent of acute disadvantage, using an ‘education poverty’ threshold of four years in school, the minimum required to acquire basic literacy, for young adults in the 17-22 year old age range. The report identifies 22 countries with 30% or more young adults below the four-year threshold, and 11 countries in sub-Saharan Africa that have 50% or more below the threshold.

The Global Monitoring Report data set reveals stark differences in education opportunity within countries:

• Being born into a poor household significantly raises the risk of deprivation. In the Philippines, there is a four-year education gap between the richest and poorest households. The gap in India is seven years.
• Gender interacts with wealth and location. In Nigeria, the average youth aged 17-22 has received seven years in education. For poor rural Hausa females, that figure drops to less than 6 months.
• Disparities within countries are often bigger than disparities between countries. In Mexico, one quarter of the young adults in the southern state of Chiapas have fewer than four years of education — a figure that falls to 3% for the Federal District.
• Some groups face acute disadvantage. In Kenya, 51% of male Somali pastoralists aged 17-22 have less than 2 years in school, rising to 92% for females.
• Language and ethnicity often reinforce marginalization. Turkey has made rapid progress in education, but Kurdish-speaking females from poor households average around three years in school, which is on a par with the national average for Chad.

Marginalization in education is fuelled by structural disadvantages, bad policies, and neglect by political leaders. The report identifies policies that successfully counteract persistent inequalities in education, including:

• Improving accessibility and affordability. Governments need to go beyond removing formal school fees for basic education to cutting informal charges, and providing targeted incentives for disadvantaged groups. An innovative programme in Cambodia, for example, which supplies grants to the families of girls who reach the final grade of primary school on the condition that they then go on to secondary school, is estimated to have increased enrolment among participants by 30%.
• Strengthening the learning environment. Governments need to ensure that marginalized children have access to highly skilled teachers, by offering incentives for deployment to remote rural areas and disadvantaged urban areas, and by recruiting teachers from ethnic minorities. The experience of Bolivia, where inter-cultural bilingual teaching has expanded rapidly since the mid-1990s, shows how such reforms can help to overcome language-related disadvantages, while at the same time challenging discriminatory social attitudes.
• Expanding entitlements and opportunities. Education strategies need to be integrated into wider anti-marginalization policies. Social protection policies, including cash transfers, are a key way to counteract poverty and vulnerability. Half of the households that receive cash under an Ethiopian programme, for example, report being able to keep children in school for longer as a result. Legal entitlements also have a role to play, and are most effective when backed by political mobilization, as demonstrated by the success of New Zealand’s kōhanga reo Māori language movement. Redistributing public spending more fairly is also crucial, and in Brazil has been a central pillar of wider strategies aimed at breaking the links between poverty, inequality and marginalization in education.

Source: Unesco

As the outcomes of the crisis are clearly still in the shaping, it will also be critical for businesses to have the capability to adapt quickly to changes which are undoubtedly still to come.

IT is expected, perhaps more than ever, to deliver business value at the lowest possible cost. However, as IT is more and more integrated in the “fabric” of corporations – IT and business processes becoming so intertwined they are arguably not distinguishable – the crisis has also brought upon IT another, more fundamental role than effi ciency: IT is, or should be, a main actor in facing the business challenges in these turbulent times, through transformation, and ultimately leading to a better competitive position.

In this context, alignment of IT and the business plays a critical role, starting with a shared understanding on what should drive IT decision making and how IT should contribute to the business. Our survey addressed these two perspectives, investigating how IT and business executives perceive the decisive external factors driving IT decision-making, and how they perceive the “effects” of IT on the business, over the past two years and looking forward to the next three.

The Study download here

Forrás: IT-Business Hírlevél

Is Hungary rich enough to write off the larger half of the population of active age and to preclude them from the information society? In the age of the internet does the society have the right to open “digital infinity” only for the children, the young people, people with high education, high income, and the inhabitants of cities, and to direct the elderly, the people living in remote villages, the poor, and the less educated to a modern “societal Taygetus”? In our age the basis of getting information is the electric media, and the terrain of societal communication is the internet; and the internet will be more and more the terrain of working and exercising the citizen rights as well. Therefore, can the country allow itself to erect prohibitive barriers for several million people with reasons like they are too old to learn; they live too far for accessing the internet; they are too stupid to learn the skills of the age? Thus, do we have the right to preclude the generation from which we could otherwise learn as well? Approaching the end of the Year of e-Inclusion, we think we have the right to raise our word and say that modern outlawing cannot be forced upon 50 percent of the population of the country.

Inforum (the Forum of Hungarian IT Organisations for Information Society) published in year 2000 its call named Hungarian Charter of Information Technology prepared by the professional community, which declared among others that the chance of getting acquainted with the internet should be provided for people in disadvantageous situations and the elderly. Eight years have gone by, and the number of internet users above the age of 50, which was around ten thousand at that time, has increased to half a million by today, but still 5 million of our fellow-countrymen (above the age of 18) do not know how to use the internet. Although the ratio of internet avoiders decreased, but not at a significant rate: the ratio of people excluded from the information society is decreasing annually with only less than 4 percentage points. It is a very sad fact that close to 50 percent of the digitally illiterate are 60 years old or older, and 68 percent of them are inactive.

Present report deals primarily with the elder generation, since in Hungary – in addition to the very unfavourable employment and labour market indices – we have to face first of all the problem of the rapidly aging society. We will also present examples. However, since Europe struggles with the very same problem, it would be worthwhile if the economic and governmental decision makers of Hungary would get acquainted with the best practices of the EU and at least with the political trends of the European Union.

At present there are close to 4 million inhabitants over the age of 50 living in Hungary, and from those who are of the age that is still employed (between the ages of 50-64) only each third is working. In Hungary the ratio of active workers hardly exceeds 60 percent of the adult age population, which is an unprecedentedly low ratio even among the EU member states. 62.1 percent of the people between the ages of 15-64 appear on the labour market and 57.3 percent of them are employed. According to the data that are published by Eurostat, while the rate of unemployment was 6.8 percent in the member states of the EU27 in August 2008, in Hungary it was 7.7 percent.

The digital literacy level of the employees is also very unfavourable. In 2006 while 51 percent of the employees of the Union used the internet, in Hungary only 29 percent. More than 40 percent of the domestic employees do not have any computer skills.
In Hungary the groups that are most in need of assistance from the aspect of e-Inclusion are those, who are older than 50 years, the pensioners, the unemployed people, people with low education and people living in smaller settlements, the poor. These groups can be considered to be fully excluded from the information society.

We may see that in the last couple of years openness towards the internet has increased not only in the Hungarian society as a whole, but it is true for the age groups above 50 as well. But even within this societal group there is a huge gap along the border of societal status, education level, income. People with high education, who met computers at their workplaces, the groups of higher income can be easier persuaded to use the internet. On the other side those members of these age groups, who are in more disadvantageous situation socially are in need of significant and real assistance, and serious programs.

Unfortunately already the side-wind of the credit and financial crisis was sufficient for Hungary to direct the “vehicle” of the country into the emergency lane. But it is possible to turn this into an advantage, if the country will accelerate – compared to everything else – the execution of the so far postponed societal modernisation programs, the transformation of the structure of the labour market, the development of the adult training system, the dynamic increasing of employment, and especially if – meeting the requirements of our age – the country will make internet the joint basis of communication for everybody.

The first e-Inclusion Report outlined an overall status quo, and it formulated an action plan. The implementation of the action plan still requires time. Only one point was performed from it: the theory and concept of e-inclusion started on its way to conquer. In the report of this year we have defined the status quo in a more differentiated way, and we have reported those processes that have been started in Hungary. The second e-Inclusion report not only raises attention towards the gaps, but it already introduces the opportunities and the good practises as well. Between November 2007 and the end of 2008 the Hungarian civil organisations continued a heroic struggle to persuade the representatives of the decision makers, the governmental actors, the companies and the media about the importance of overcoming the digital divide through acts, and about the societal, economic, governmental, life quality and mental hygienic advantages that may be achieved by widely spreading the internet. This effort was initiated and it was also partially organised by Inforum. Inforum succeeded in persuading the representatives of the five Parliamentary parties to stand behind the issue, and concerning the need to bring Parliamentary Resolutions and to establish a Parliamentary Committee for solving this problem. Inforum succeeded in mobilising the civil organisations, which tried to exercise a stronger pressure in their own operation areas. It succeeded in persuading some high level governmental officers as regards the benefit that is offered by the increasing number of the users of online governmental services. The Hungarian Parliament, relatively late in time, on October 6, declared that 2008 is the year of e-Inclusion. However, such declarations were not made at all by other European Parliaments.

The mandate and resoluteness of the established e-Inclusion Ad Hoc Parliamentary Committee is till May 2010. The news of the e-Inclusion event series reached the media only slowly. No success was achieved in mobilising the decisive majority of the Hungarian IT companies, in spite of the fact that in the economic sense the issue is exactly about the expansion of their markets. The enterprises that stood behind the issue were mostly the Hungarian representations of international companies.

Something has started in Hungary. If the enthusiasm of the civil organisations will not decline, if they will find supporters, if the Hungarian economy will not collapse, if a couple of such development programs will be started that will finance the internet training and attention raising of the people involved, then maybe the plan to connect one million new internet users to the information society in Hungary could be realised, and the majority of them could be from the group of people of disadvantageous situations. It can be already seen that the one million users to be connected cannot be involved till the end of 2010, but maybe by the end of 2011 they can be. The European e-Inclusion policies contain several outbreaking points for Hungary. It is depending on the governmental actors and the enterprises whether they will live with the opportunities that are offered by the Union and the situation. The civil organisations performing beyond their strength and the Parliamentary politicians did their task and they will continue doing so.

In Hungary about 50 percent of the population of the age of 18 and above was digitally illiterate in 2008, that is, they were not using neither computers, nor the internet. This ratio decreased in the recent years, but not at a significant rate. The ratio of those excluded from the information society has been decreasing with only less than 4 percent points each year. It is an unfavourable fact that close to 50 percent of the digitally illiterate are 60 years old or older, and 68 percent of them are inactive .

Our annual report focuses primarily on the older generation, since Hungary has to fight in addition to its very unfavourable employment and labour market indices primarily with the problem of the rapidly aging society in the coming years.

At present there are close to 4 million older than 50 years inhabitants living in Hungary. 16 percent of this generation used internet, and among them the ratio of regular (with at least one week regularity) users is close to 60 percent. The profile of the typical older than 50 years world wide web citizen is similar to the typical (average) internet user’s profile: he/she has higher education, he/she works, he/she is intellectually active, he/she lives in a multi-personal household, has a higher income, therefore old age internet usage is characteristically influenced by these factors in Hungary. The gender of the internet user is not a significant influencing factor of internet usage.

The information society of the elderly in Hungary in 2008:

(Source: World Internet Project, Hungary 2007)

The members of the 50+ age group got acquainted with the internet at the age of 53 on the average, but there are also people, who started to learn the basis at the age of 87. The elder age group mostly browses, reads email, reads news, and searches/checks things when using the internet.

In the case of the older people not using the internet the reasons of staying away is mostly cognitive type of reasons (not interested, do not need it), and not financial type of reasons.

Unfortunately from among the people 50-64 years old, only each third is working. If we examine the active people from the aspect of the labour market (both employees and entrepreneurs), then their computer and internet usage indices are close to the average of the population as a whole.

In Hungary the ratio of active workers hardly exceeds 60 percent of the adult age population, which is an unprecedentedly low value even among the EU member states. 62 percent of people 15-64 years old appeared on the labour market, and 57 percent of them were employed. According to the data published by Eurostat the unemployment rate was 6.8 % in the member states of the EU27 in August 2008, while in Hungary it was 7.7 percent.

Unfortunately the level of the digital literacy of employees is also very unfavourable. 51 percent of the employees of the Union used the internet in year 2006, while in Hungary only 29 percent of them.

The full study: hungarian_einclusion_annual_report_2008

The World e-Parliament Report 2008 represents a first effort to establish a baseline of how parliaments are using, or planning to use ICT to help them fulfill their responsibilities and to connect to their constituencies. The Report also provides an opportunity for sharing lessons learned and good practices from different regions of the world.

The Report is based on the responses and comments provided by 105 assemblies from around the world to a survey on the use of ICT in parliament conducted between July and November 2007. It also draws on experiences exchanged during the World e-Parliament Conference 2007 and relevant publicly available information.
The WePR 2008 is a joint product of UNDESA and the Inter-Parliamentary Union, prepared as part of the work of the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.

The WePR 2008 was launched on the occasion of the second high-level meeting of the Board of the Global Centre for ICT in Parliament.
The launch of the Report was followed by a high-level dialogue on the right of access to information.

• UN Press release
• IPU Press release

Download PDF:

• Complete report (zip file – 3.9 Mb)

• Executive summary (140 kb)

Download the Report by chapter

• Cover (254 kb)

• Foreword and Acknowledgments (412 kb)

• Executive summary (140 kb)

• Contents (142 kb)

• Introduction (664 kb)

• Chapter I: Parliament, ICT and the Information Society (312 kb)

• Chapter II: Vision, Innovation and Leadership (319 kb)

• Chapter III: Implementing the Vision: Management,
  Planning and Resources (603 kb)

• Chapter IV: Infrastructures and Services (1.415 kb)

• Chapter V: Documenting the Legislative Process (1.247 kb)

• Chapter VI: Parliamentary Websites (1.015 kb)

• Chapter VII: Building a Knowledge Base for Parliament (729 kb)

• Chapter VIII: Parliaments and Citizens: Enhancing the Dialogue (880 kb)

• Chapter IX: Cooperation and Coordination (294 kb)

• Chapter X: Conclusions and Recommendations (252 kb)

• Bibliography (225 kb)

• Annexes (425 kb)

Forrás

The Lisbon Ministerial Event (2-3 December 2007) is an occasion to evaluate the maturity of the policy initiatives at EU and Member State levels in the area of e-nclusion. The recently adopted Commission Communication on the “European i2010 -Inclusion Initiative: To Be Part of the Information Society” stresses the need to step up actions, enhancing cooperation and policy learning across all policy levels, to make e-Inclusion a reality.

This collection of National Strategies for e-Inclusion in the European Union is aimed at assessing the status and exchanging practices of e-Inclusion policy approaches across the diversified European context. The set of national plans presented here is work-in-progress since they are regularly updated by the i2010 e-Inclusion Subgroup. The aim is to enrich them through
additional information, in a decentralised fashion and by using Web interactive applications. These reports will be soon available on the platform www.epractice.eu. The following country files follow a structure of reporting that was agreed by the
i2010 e-Inclusion Subgroup on 27th October 2006. Some of the reports have been updated in 2007. Others refer to national status of e-Inclusion in 2006. These reports address:

- Strategy development
- Legal and regulatory framework
- ICT and Ageing
- e-Accessibility
- Digital Literacy and Competences
- Inclusive e-Government
- e-Inclusion Challenges

The European Commission (DG Information Society and Media) will further support with analyses and studies emerging patterns in e-Inclusion status and policy. It will also continue to facilitate exchange of good practices on e-Inclusion issues, relying on
the active involvement of Member States and their updates of the information contained in this report.

Paul Timmers and Loris Di Pietrantonio
ICT for Inclusion
European Commission
DG Information Society and Media

information-society-jobs.pdf

Quality of life, digital equal opportunity and social revival in Hungary
Status report, best practices and action plan

Introduction

There has never been an eInclusion, the information society inclusion report carried out in Hungary. This is the first report of scientific and documentary character in our country which analyses the issue if information society from the points of view of those who have failed to join it so far. In Hungary the development of the information society started with Sulinet, when thousands of members of different generations entered the modern world in an organized way. This so-called “ascending system” met the forms of the new technology, in which the information and social technologies gradually spread from the scientific-social and economic elite downwards in the society.

However, the development of the information society is not only a process of positive impact. While not everybody is a member of the net society, it can be stated that the tendencies of the information society affect everybody. In order to form a realistic image it is required to see more precisely the tendencies of the increasing social exclusion generated by the information and communication technology, all the more so because in Hungary the gap in the usage of IT devices has also been widening.

Hungarian civil organizations, libraries and cultural institutions acted first with due consistence in closing the digital gap. It was regrettable that even the Ministry of Informatics and Communications which became defunct last year could not change these new symptoms of the division. The European Union (and also the USA and several Asian governments) has been supporting the aspiration for nearly a decade that those who have remained stuck in the more disconsolate side of this gap should join the millions of Internet users on the other side. This is the reason why the year of eInclusion will take place in 2008, and the so-called Riga Declaration was accepted by 32 European leaders last year according to which the digital divide between the groups at risk of exclusion (the elderly, the unemployed, the disabled) and the majority of the society should be decreased by half. Further tasks are the expansion of broadband access – which is a fundamental tool to provide equal opportunities relating to the information society for the people living in backward regions – and the complete accessibility of governmental web pages – it is important primarily for the groups at risk of exclusion.

In our opinion, Hungary has been investing quite a lot of money (but perhaps not enough) in technical investments and developing networks but in fact it has spent negligible amount of money on opening up the possibilities and new prospects of the Internet for the disadvantageous groups of people who -owing to the new possibilities – would be able to change their lives and improve their quality of life. Investment in human capital has been missing again and again, from the New Development Plan as well so far, and the active participants, citizens, councils and individuals who are worried about the future and the passing generations cannot see the signs of strategic governmental actions which put the human in the centre and inspire better quality of life and active deeds. The life of an individual is not a marketability, social or health issue. Happiness, security or keeping personal relationships cannot be measured by returns and profit rates. But we do think that Hungary cannot give up the improvement of the quality of life of 3,000,000 people over 50 years who do not use the Net yet.

Informatics is a tool for the equal opportunity, but now we cannot see if it is a real part of our lives, the fundamental idea of the decision makers and the basis of governmental actions. Together with the leaders of the European Union we ask the Hungarian decision makers to leave the classical, decades-long attitude behind according to which disadvantageous situation is a question of health, social or employment issue. It is lot more and less than this: it is a question of quality of life. We presume that the general skill of Internet usage – which is recommended by civil organizations of informatics – would carry Hungary a step ahead. Active, thoughtful citizens would be integrated (in the information society), the market of informatics would be wider, and our citizens would become more well-informed, civilized and responsible.

During the years after the political transformation Hungary has not spent even the price of 300 meters of highway on the digital accessibility of the lives of disadvantageous people (the elderly, people living in the countryside, minorities, and the disabled). We would like to live in a modern, developing country. To strengthen this development more than half of the population cannot be abandoned. They should be a part of the modern and dynamic Hungary. Now!
Gabor Dombi – Szilard Molnar

First Hungarian eInclusion Report and Action Plan