Having the privilege of addressing this conference on behalf of UNESCO, may I first congratulate most warmly the International Information Centre and Archives for the Women's Movement, the Dutch authorities and all others who have helped organize this important and timely meeting. UNESCO's Sector for Communication and its Unit for the Promotion of the Status of Women and Gender Equality (both of which are represented here by my colleagues and myself) have been tightly associated with its preparation, and it is with great pleasure that I take this opportunity to thank the organizers, particularly the Director of IIAV, Joke Blom and her excellent team, and more specifically Lin Pugh and Carla Couprie with whom we dealt on a more regular basis. Delighted to cooperate with you, we are grateful to the Ambassador of Netherlands to UNESCO, H.E. Mr Justus J. de Visser, for having brought us in touch, and we hope that this cooperation will grow even stronger in the future.

Access to information and information management are undoubtedly among the key issues of our time, and will be even more so in the future. Enabling women in all parts of the world to have access to information - not just any information, but to information that is relevant to the needs and priorities as defined by women themselves is fundamental to all genuine development projects. This implies a wide range of requirements among which, considering the time constraints of my presentation, I shall emphasize only two: ( i ) the need to ensure women's access to, and their ability to use, all forms of information-communication technologies that are useful to them, including the most advanced and sophisticated communication technologies; and furthermore, to ensure women's participation in the development of new technologies so that these may better serve their particular needs and interests; and ( ii ) content-wise, the need to help women, individually and as groups, to shape content and to manage information, which means in the first place having the capacity to select from the flood of information (mostly trivial information, which characterizes above all the modern consumer society, now sanctified and amplified through the globalization process) the kind of information that can help women participate as equal partners to men in their respective societies and, above all, to help them act effectively in all matters concerning their lives and those of their families.

Both of these tasks imply another vital component: the sharing among women, as individuals and across community and national borders, of know-how in information and communication matters. Information and communication being "the nerves of government" (as expressed decades ago by the eminent political scientist Karl Deutsch) and, today more than ever, the sine qua non of all economic and political power, it is in this area above all that women's efforts and their solidarity with each other should be concentrated. The dominant model(s) of socio-economic "development", created over centuries by male-dominated power structures, having resulted in - as it is gradually being admitted and notwithstanding its positive achievements - alarming worldwide destruction of the environment and spread of poverty, the ever deeper gap between the rich and the poor within countries and globally, increasing social tension, armed conflict and other forms of violence, not to speak of drugs and arms trafficking, the nuclear threat, etc., it is indeed legitimate to demand a profound change that could be inspired and led by women. In other words, the issue of women's access to important information and to key communication means, besides being a matter of basic justice and respect for human rights, is today a precondition for an alternative, hopefully more just and environmentally more sustainable human development.

Inscribed in UNESCO's current Medium-Term Strategy (1996-2001) as one of the urgent tasks at the threshold of the third millenium, this matter is also considered to be a fundamental prerequisite for the implementation of a major part, if not all, of the Beijing Declaration and its Platform for Action. We are therefore grateful for this opportunity to examine with the participants from (so many) countries how this area of vital importance is evolving, what needs to be done, and what further commitments should be requested from international organizations, such as UNESCO and, through them, more importantly, from the national authorities of its Member States.

Distinguished participants,
UNESCO's mandate, as many of you know, includes promoting information and communication for the benefit of all humankind. Women, constituting more than half of the world's population and being one of the Organization's four priority target groups (the other three being youth, Africa and the Least Developed Countries), are given particular attention in this regard. In early 1995, UNESCO organized to that effect an international symposium on "Women and the Media, access to Expression and Decision-making", held in Toronto (Canada), which resulted in a series of proposals and recommendations known as the Toronto Platform for Action, which were presented at the Fourth World Conference on Women, in Beijing. Focusing on the media (i.e., the mass media such as the press, radio and television) and implicitly on the wider notion of information means (information technologies) including personal computers as well as libraries, archives, information centres and satellite facilities, the Toronto Platform for Action is, in spite of understandable limitations, a valid set of recommendations that continue to guide UNESCO's action in this field of its endeavour.

The Beijing Platform for Action, as you will recall, deals in its "Strategic Objectives and Actions J : Women and the media", also primarily with women's access to, and the role in the mass media, the media's portrayal of women and related issues. Although it does not elaborate on the more fundamental, and at the same time more comprehensive, question of women's political empowerment through access to politically relevant information and information management, the Platform does underline (para 237) that "Women should be empowered by enhancing their skills, knowledge and access to information technology. (....) Most women, especially in developing countries, are not able to access effectively the expanding electronic information highways and therefore cannot establish networks that will provide them with alternative sources of information. Women therefore need to be involved in decision-making regarding the development of the new technologies in order to participate fully in their growth and impact."

The empowerment of women being the overall key message of the Beijing Conference, its Declaration and its Platform for Action, ensuring women's access to information-communication technologies and to information is by virtue of its role in existing power structures not simply another area of critical concern, but rather a "priority of priorities" as successful empowerment in all other areas depends heavily on whether one has, or does not have, the ability to be informed, to share information with others and, above all, to be able to "make informed decisions". This implies access to both information-communication technologies and their content. UNESCO therefore welcomes all major efforts, such as the one undertaken by the Division for the Advancement of Women in the United Nations Secretariat in New York to create WomenWatch (a major site on Internet which pools information on women from various UN units), and has indeed invested lately much of its resources into creating its own Website on women and gender equality. Furthermore, UNESCO's special project "Women on the Net", which analyzes from different cultural and geographic perspectives the emerging cultural characteristics of women's access to the Net, and assists in developing training, advocacy and dialogue through the new technologies, is proving to be an important instrument for empowering women at the local as well as global level. (My collegue Lydia Ruprecht can give you further details on this.)

At this point, it is well to recall as we celebrate this year the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that the fullfillment of every human right and fundamental freedom hinges on the human right to freedom of expression. As noted by Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Special Rapporteur on violence against women, its causes and consequences, UN Commission on Human Rights, "the rights of freedom of opinion and expression and the right to seek and receive information are the mother of all other rights." ( Foreword to "Only Silence Will Protect You": Women, Freedom of Expression and the Language of Human Rights, by Jan Bauer, International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, Montreal 1996; Essays on Human Rights and Democratic Development, Paper No. 6)

Although rarely stated in as explicit terms, the Fourth World Conference of Women was also a call for the in-powerment of women, as expressed in Beijing by Federico Mayor, the Director-General of UNESCO. This distinction is important because to empower means broadly to enable, permit or athorize, while to in-power means to bring women into the decision-making structures that wield economic, financial, political and social power in each of our societies. Empowering women is a necessary but far from sufficient step in the process. It does not translate automatically, nor necessarily, into women's in-powerment. A number of other conditions must be met for in-powerment to follow, of which acces to information that is relevant in terms of political impact and power is of crucial importance. Hence the emphasis laid in the Toronto Platform for Action, as well as the Beijing Platform for Action, on the necessity to "increase women's access to and participation in decision-making and management of the media" (para 1.2 , Toronto Platform for Action, emphasis added) and to "include women on a parity basis in government reform committees, parliamentary, advisory, policy-making and other regulatory bodies that consider advertising and communications policy". (para 5.1, Toronto; emphasis added.)

Considering the purpose and the objectives of this "Know-How Conference on the World of Women's Information" let me illustrate what I have just said by the situation of women in Africa, which however applies mutatis mutandis also to other regions. In the past decade particular attention was given by international organizations, both governmental and nongovernmental, to empowering African women, mostly through training and education, in fields spanning from their most traditional roles (as food providers, teachers, health-care, artisanat, etc) to the more sophisticated roles (science and research, political governance, banking, etc.) This has been accompanied by numerous political statements, declarations and other commitments whose good intentions are hereby not questioned. And yet, at the recent very successful conference African Women and Economic Development, organized by the UN Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa in April 1998, its debate on the theme "African Women and the Information Age: a Rare Opportunity" underlined a number of obstacles which make it virtually impossible for the vast majority of African women to benefit from the "Information Age" opportunities . These are (quoted from the Summary of Proceedings of the ECA conference): widespread lack of awareness ( most African women appear not to be adequately aware of the importance of the on-going information revolution ); difficulties of access and prohibitive costs of ICT (computers and ICT equipment are costly compared to average African income levels. Furthermore, local providers of Internet service have set charges prohibitively high); inadequate infrastructures (most African women live in remote rural areas, lacking telephone and electricity; even in the cities, telephone lines are low by world standards.); illiteracy and techno-phobia (the low level of functional literacy and numeracy coupled with fear of technologies, especially new ones such as computers, induced by their upbringing); linguistic barriers (most African women do not speak, read or write English or French, and lack computer skills); sustainability of donor support ( lack of long-term self-sustenance) and inadequate or overly restrictive national ICT policies (lack of a conducive environment for the emergence of a dynamic and competitive information and communication sector). In a nutshell, this means that the impact of new information technologies on the empowerment and in-powerment of women remains virtual rather than reality.

To remedy this, the ECA conference proposed several actions (strategies) among which it is particularly noteworthy that the establishment/development of women's (community) information centres is underlined as a top priority. UNESCO therefore endeavours, together with the ECA, IDRC and IUT, to help African women set up, on an experimental basis, community telecentres in several countries (Benin, Mali and Uganda) which conjugate traditional communication with new communication tehnologies, training with action and basic (personal) communication with mass communication. [Our colleague Ms Jacqueline Lemoine from UNESCO's Office in Dakar, attending this conference, can provide more information on this matter.]

A further step in this direction is UNESCO's present action, initiated by the Director-General himself, to help women in Africa, the Mediterranean basin, and in the Balkan countries (as a start) achieve real impact, based on timely information, knowledge and solidarity, on all matters concerning peace and non-violence in their communities, nations and across borders, by providing them the means to establish effective communication and permanent networking among themsleves and relevant partners on these questions. A prepartory meeting to that effect was recently hosted in Dar es Salaam by our world reknown "Mama Beijing" Ambassador Gertrude Mongella, and the recommendations of this meeting are a priority on our agenda. This being said, we realize, of course, the urgency of creating similar communication networksfor effecient action also in other regions of the world, as well as on other flagrant violations of human rights that are becoming increasingly "globalized", such as trafficking of women and children, sex tourism and other forms of "new" slavery, etc.

Madam Chair,

Distinguished participants, In conclusion, let me reiterate how very timely this conference is. It is said everywhere that we are already living (and will do so even more) in the Information Age, in the age of an information revolution, of information high-ways, and what not. While this is true for some parts of the world, and only some parts of the population, the benefits of this new age are still very much out of reach for the majority of the world's population, and women in the first place. It takes a concerted effort therefore, of all who can help, to place at women's disposal, worldwide, the enormous wealth of information that exists presently in a scattered manner. But, above all, it takes political leadership, at the level of each community and country as well as at the international level, to empower and in-power women in the power-wielding sphere par excellence - that of information and communication.

We believe that this conference can be a major step in this direction. May the vast knowledge assembled here, acquired through experience and commitment to the cause of women and gender equality, emanate worldwide from this beautiful city of Amsterdam, and turn into effective action. On behalf of UNESCO I commit our further support, and I thank you for giving me the floor.