At the highest levels our government seems to appreciate the potential impact of the Information Technology Revolution on our country. Our most senior political figures are very aware of the importance of the convergence that is taking place between the Information and Communication technologies. Unfortunately this insight is not being translated into effective action.
I would like to tell you about a very important initiative that took
place in May this year called the ``Information Society and Development
Conference'' (ISAD) 
and
what its consequences have been.
The conference was organized at the personal instigation of the Deputy President Thabo Mbeki. In February 1995, Ministers from the Group of Seven Highly Industrialized Nations (G-7) and Members of the European Commission (EC) met in Brussels at the G-7 Ministerial Conference on the Information Society [1,2]. This Conference re-emphasized the need for all countries, including developing countries and countries in transition, to be integrated in the Global Information Society. As South African Executive Deputy President Thabo Mbeki argued in his keynote address [3], ``there are more telephone lines in Manhattan than in all of Sub-Saharan Africa.''
Mbeki's remark on telephone lines is the only one that gets quoted from his speech, but other points were really much more important from a development perspective. He called for a multifaceted approach that ``encompasses economic, financial, technological, social, cultural and moral aspects''. There was a strong emphasis on content which he paraphrased as not only having to ``acquire and grasp the technologies which enable people and institutions to access astronomical processing, storage, retrieval and delivery capacities'', but also having to ``ensure that we are not mere importers and consumers of a predetermined content'', but rather ``producers and exporters and therefore active and significant participants in the creation production and formulation of content''.
Mbeki offered South Africa as host for a follow-up conference bringing together a cross-section of the developing world with the G-7 to exchange views on such questions as strategy, finance and international coordination in con fronting the global information and communication challenge. The Information Society and Development (ISAD) Conference [4] was the result.