Playing an active role in community development, Adama Samassékou, President of the World Network for Linguistic Diversity (MAAYA) and African Academy of Languages (ACALAN) believes that lingual diversity is crucial for delivering an inclusive information society.
In an interview with Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP), he speaks about the spirit of solidarity and his vision to create the conditions for all 6,000 languages of the world to be used on the Internet.
GKPS: Let us start by going back to your time as President of the Preparatory Committee for the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) Phase 1 in Geneva. It has been two years since WSIS Phase 2 in Tunis has lapsed. What do you think has been achieved in building an information society and what are the challenges ahead?
AS: It is important to understand that WSIS was a unique one in the history of the United Nations. Since the beginning it was built in two phases.
It was Geneva, where the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) is based and the initiative of the Summit came about, through ITU, and it was Tunisia, which actually proposed to host the Summit in 1998 at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Minneapolis.
For me, the focus in Geneva was about laying the foundations while in Tunis was more on deepening as well as widening the impact.
WSIS Geneva was the foundation of the so called information society which I call information and knowledge sharing society. You can in a single moment share what you know with a million people, to disseminate, diffuse and share what you want to create. This is the new added value.
From my point of view, the main achievement of the Summit was this new spirit of the multi-stakeholder approach in which every partner, felt recognised by the other and involved in the building of this new society.
The Summit presented the opportunity for several very important international agreements. The bottom-up process that led to Geneva and then Tunis also enabled these agreements to multiply at the grassroots, national and regional level. GKP is creating a very good space to get to know of what is happening around the world and in each region. This shows that finally the process of social appropriation of ICTs is going on in each regions of the world. Of course, we always need to do it better, and some regions are doing it better than the others.
GKPS: Moving to language next ... what your mother tongue is?
AS: I always say that I have at least two mother tongues. Manding is my first language, because my mother speaks Manding. But I grew up in a Songhay-milieu, so we also spoke Songhay in the family. And I came from Mopti where the main language is Fulfulde, so I speak three Malian-African languages.
GKPS: Subsequently you had the introduction of the colonial French language as it became the lingua franca of the region, and now you are speaking in English. So you can speak in five languages then?
AS: No, I also speak Russian.
GKPS: You have stressed many times that improving access to technology does little if the users cannot use it in their native languages. But how do you relate post WSIS process with fact that the vast majority of Internet content is only available in three or four major languages across the world?
AS: During the WSIS process, there ware three main challenges. First of all, how to transform the digital divide, which is in fact a knowledge divide and hence, societal and economic divide, into digital perspectives (not just opportunities) for all. The second one was how to accelerate the achievements of the Millennium Development Goals through the use of ICTs. The third was how to preserve and develop cultural and linguistic diversity, which is a world public good, through the mastering of ICTs.
The Summit gave rise to two big initiatives taken by Africa. The first one was the World Digital Solidarity Fund to tackle the first challenge: the digital divide. And the second initiative is what we as ACALAN. It was the creation of MAAYA, the World Network for Linguistic Diversity to tackle the issue of the third challenge.
As long as the world population is not at ease in mastering ICTs in their own languages, we are not going to attain an inclusive information and knowledge sharing society.
Our network (MAAYA) is a multi-stakeholder institution involving governments, international organisations, the civil society and the not-for-profit private sector, that aims to continue to create the conditions for all the languages of the world to be used on the Internet. That is why we will take the opportunity of 2008, which was declared by the UN Assembly as the International Year of Languages to boost this process of having a multilingual Internet.
Linguistic diversity is for the linguistic society what biodiversity is for the nature. Therefore it is important for us to keep the momentum and have the world community commit to preserving linguistic diversity.
GKPS: You also participated at the Internet Governance Forum in Rio where the call to rally the Next billion people to get online emerged. What is your vision for Africa?
AS: First and foremost, Africa needs to strengthen her connectivity. This of course, will call for a review of regulatory processes of ICTs in Africa, and the building of confidence in good public-private partnerships.
Secondly, the infrastructure needs to be made affordable whilst having computers adapted to our realities and conditions. Thirdly, there must be an all out effort to make the Internet accessible in our languages. This is key for us, because 80 to 90 percents of the population in Africa are not literate in European languages but their own native ones.
We need to boost the process of empowering our languages in order for them to become effective communication tools through the Internet. We have several initiatives that are ongoing to drive this through the Pan-African Localisation Network of which ACALAN and MAAYA are part of. We also have some big projects at MAAYA, called Voices and Texts that are built on the experience of several African countries, including South Africa, Djibouti, Ethiopia, Nigeria.
Knowledge is embedded in languages and if you want to share knowledge around the world you should promote linguistic diversity. I am very confident of this.
Source: GKP
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