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Economic empowerment: just a click away?
The EBRD to help poorer countries gain benefit by going online
The President of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Jean
Lemierre, called for more investment in and attention to information and
communication technologies (ICT) in the poorer countries of central and
eastern Europe and the CIS.
“Making phone and internet access more widely available and easily affordable
can play a unique role in increasing productivity, reducing costs for existing
business and creating new opportunities for knowledge-intensive industries.
ICT also creates jobs in rural and remote areas where there were no previous
links to the market,” said Lemierre on the eve of the EBRD’s Annual Meeting
here. But, in countries where communications networks have been slow to grow,
both governments and investors need to help make that happen.
The EBRD’s blueprint for the sector, set out at a seminar in Tokyo last year
for policymakers in Central Asia and the Caucasus, identified three areas in
which improvements were needed. One was regulatory reforms to make the
telecoms sector more attractive to private investors. Another was setting up
Universal Access Funds which would offer financial incentives for
private-sector telecoms service providers willing to set up services in rural
areas where their profits might be low. A third was supporting
entrepreneurship in businesses that already have ICT know-how.
In 2005, the EBRD launched two pilot technical cooperation programmes in the
Kyrgyz Republic. One is providing legal and economic studies on how best to
organise Universal Access policies to spread ICT into the countryside. The
second is an EBRD TurnAround Management (TAM) Project to assist in setting up
an ICT business incubator to provide product development and marketing
assistance to help existing companies to grow, particularly by exporting. The
incubator will provide space, advice on business development, financial
planning and logistical support.
The EBRD is now broadening the scope of its endeavours. A 21 May seminar at
the Bank’s 2005 Annual Meeting in Belgrade, funded by Japan, Taipei China and
Switzerland, brings together telecommunications ministers not only from the
seven poorest CIS countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, the Kyrgyz
Republic, Moldova, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan – but also officials and
entrepreneurs from the Western Balkans – Serbia and Montenegro, Albania,
Bosnia and Herzegovina and FYR Macedonia.
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