He was involved in broadcasting and telecom policy work in South Africa during the transition to democracy, and in the immediate aftermath of the 1990s establishment of the Mandela government. A student of political philosophy, English literature and media studies, he has been in the field of policy for the past 15 years. Willie Currie (51) is now APC’s Manager of the Communications and Information Policy Programme.
Currie was involved in developing policy and legislation on broadcasting and telecom for the Mandela government. Then, he worked for the communications’ regulator – first for the South African Telecommunications Regulations Authority (SATRA), and, when convergence happened, the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa.
In an interview in Dhaka, Bangladesh in April, he explains what the Association for Progressive Communications is concerned about and the important policy issues plaguing our times from an APC point-of-view.
APCNews: Could you please tell us about the focus of your work?
It has to do with the connections between [information and communication technology] ICT policy, advocacy and finding ways of raising awareness on ICT policy issues.
We are working at national, regional and global policy spaces, to raise awareness and undertake advocacy that can provoke a change in policies.
APCNews: What are your priorities?
At the global level it has been the WSIS [World Summit on the Information Society], and now its implementation and the follow-up. All these things such as the Internet Governance Forum, the action lines coming out of the last WSIS meeting in Tunis – of which there are about twelve – are being worked on. The ones we’re concentrating on are about infrastructure; creating an enabling policy environment; and access to knowledge and content.
APCNews: In concrete terms, how does this play out in the different regions?
Regionally, we’re doing work in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa and South Asia.
In Africa, we’re working on two things.
We’re part of the CATIA, the network for Catalysing ICT Access in Africa. It involves working with five national advocacy campaigns – in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), Nigeria and Senegal.
Each campaign will focus on a different policy issue. In Ethiopia, the issue is free and open source software (FOSS) capacity building and awareness raising. In Kenya, the focus is on ICT policy and legislation.
In Uganda, it’s looking at gender issues in relation to universal access. In the DRC, it’s access to the internet backbone network. Essentially creating the policy conditions for an open access policy network.
In Nigeria, its advocacy on community radio; because there’s no community radio process there. And Senegal’s is raising awareness about ICT policy in the media.
So, there’s a combination of specific ICT advocacy-focussed work and, like in the case of Senegal, awareness raising about ICT. We also look at wider pan-African issues with through the lens of the Africa ICT Policy Monitor website.
Then, there’s a campaign around the EASSy cable, the East African Cable Submarine System. It’s a submarine fibre optic cable that a consortium plans to lay between Durban, South Africa and Port Sudan, that will then allow the countries on the east coast of Africa to connect to the cable and then access the internet connectivity internationally through the cable.
The idea is to keep the pricing of the cable as low as possible, in order to encourage the maximum level of communications flow with East Africa.
APCNews: To play devil’s advocate, do we take the importance of communication as a given?
Without communication, you’re dead. Economically speaking.
APCNews: Who are the main interest groups promoting this?
The whole initiative is being promoting by NEPAD, the New Partnership for Africa’s Development. It’s taken very seriously by the governments. As well as the development finance institutions, like the World Bank, the Africa Development Bank and the other agencies.
And it’s taken very seriously by the university networks that are wanting to get low cost access to the internet, as a matter of survival for their academic work. It’s taken seriously also by the African ISPs [Internet Service Providers] association, Afrispa. APC is helping to raise awareness around the issues of low-cost international connectivity within civil society.
One of the vehicles is the Fibre for Africa website, and the APC organised Mombasa meeting in which many stakeholders took part on March 9, 2006.
APCNews: Could you offer a good example of the opening up of the internet?
India has got access to a very low-cost internet bandwidth. That has enabled India to take the lead in the call centre business. This is enabled by the fact that you can connect to the rest of the world at a very low cost.
APCNews: APC has been away from South Asia for long. Could you tell us something more about your priorities in this region, for the moment?
In South Asia, we’re looking at a number of national advocacy campaigns. One in Bangladesh is advocating for a broadband policy. One in India is looking at questions of access to digital content for development. Here I’m talking about access in the sense of the ways in which information is made available by development agencies, with respect to any kind of development issue.
It seems there isn’t a very clear strategy of how development agencies get information out, particularly content. There are all kinds of bottlenecks and cost factors that make it more difficult. The idea is to get an open content approach to the distribution of content in development issues.
In Pakistan, we’re looking towards an advocacy campaign around community radio and community networking in North Pakistan.
We’re also interested in the regional policy space, as this meeting (The APC Regional Consultation on ICT Policy in South Asia, Bangladesh, April 19-22, 2006) here in Dhaka indicates. Seeing to what extent cooperation between regional ICT activists is possible, as well as in what areas is our specific goal.
Out of this meeting, a number of initiatives have emerged around localisation of languages and FOSS, developing a strategic vision for ICT policy in a region that organisations can use to engage with the donor community, process for identifying some quick wins in ICT policy that could have some immediate impact, ongoing attention to issues of gender and ICT or, ICTs for peace, the need to liberate the airwaves, the promotion of FOSS, the possibility of developing a regional FOSS association similar to the one in Africa, the ongoing debate on gender and pornography issues on the internet, violence against women, the need for a new approach to ICT infrastructure in rural areas… that’s the spectrum of issues we were looking at from the regional perspective.
APCNews: What’s the focus in Latin America?
Work in Latin America is spearheaded by the Latin American and Caribbean ICT Policy Monitor. This portal is used to monitor and raise awareness about ICT issues.
But we also get involved with regional advocacy around the eLAC 2007 Action Plan. It’s a regional action plan defining a number of policy processes and working groups around issues like FOSS, digital television, WSIS follow-up and implementation, and various other ICT issues. It’s like a comprehensive regional plan, and we’re getting involved from a civil society perspective.
We’re also involved in national advocacy processes in Ecuador and Bolivia. These are similar in nature to the ones in South Asia or Africa.
The kind of pattern that we’ve been building on is to follow a number of national level advocacy processes. Then, we focus on the regional level. In the case of Latin America it’s eLAC2007, in the case of Africa we’re talking EASSy and the submarine cable issue, while in the case of South Asia, we are kicking in on a number of different processes.
APCNews: Where does this fit into the global process?
At the global level, we focus on the internet governance, but from the development perspective. We’re promoting a development agenda within the IGF (Internet Governance Forum).
We argue that access to the internet at an affordable cost should be one of the key policy issues that the IGF addresses. The basis for that argument is that for the developing world, only five percent of the people have access to the internet, compared to the developed world where 46% of people have access.
One of the key WSIS goals is that half of the world’s population has access to ICTs by 2015. We’re picking up on that and we’re saying, okay, if you look at ICTs, internet is lagging behind the other ICTs. There’s greater penetration of mobile phones, fixed lines and radio and TV than the internet.
It’s crucial for economic development that people gain access to the web. That’s how countries in the developed world are connected to the global economy.
That’s why we have to have much higher levels of access to broadband networks in the developing world, so that we don’t get a new digital divide taking place, between countries that have good broadband access and countries who rely on dial-up access.
We’re applying the same reasoning within the action lines emerging from WSIS, as well as the Global Alliance for ICTD, which is due to be launched in June in Kuala Lumpur. In all of these spaces, we’re making policy arguments about the importance of access to the internet for the ‘developing’ world, and in particular open access –open content, open source and open access to infrastructure.
APCNews: To conclude, could you explain Open Access, and its relevance?
The opposite is barriers to full access.
In the content area, it relates to unreasonable copyrights or intellectual property rights that limit access to information and knowledge. In the case of software, the monopolisation of proprietary software is a barrier to access to the internet. That’s why FOSS is an important alternative.
In the case of access to network infrastructure, anti-competitive monopoly control over networks forces the prices for gaining access to those networks up, to unreasonable and unacceptable levels. We’re therefore arguing for open access to those networks.