Netaid.org to fight poverty

The site hopes to act as a clearinghouse for funneling donations to organizations working to end a laundry list of the world's afflictions. Three overlapping rock concerts will be broadcast live on the Internet in October in the hope of drawing major attention and funding to the effort.

Lending support to the launch Wednesday were U.S. President Bill Clinton, British Prime Minister Tony Blair, former South African President Nelson Mandela and U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan. David Bowie, U2 lead singer Bono and Fugees rapper Wyclef Jean also took part in the Web site's unveiling.

"The millennium should be a time for joining and common purpose," Clinton said as he became the first person to officially log on to the Netaid site. "Today, we do just that. Netaid will make our global village more responsible and a lot more global."

That global presence will be underwritten in large part by computer networking giant Cisco Systems (Nasdaq:CSCO), a co-partner in the Internet effort with the United Nations. Cisco announced Wednesday it was donating $10 million to the Netaid foundation. In addition, Akamai Technologies of Cambridge, Mass., will set up 90 "data centers" around the world.

The U.N. Development Program operates in some 174 countries, including many where government leaders are less than open to the free flow of information. But UNDP Director Mark Malloch Brown doesn't see that as a problem. When Netaid was first announced he said the effort would be "thoroughly subversive, in ways that even old-line dictators have trouble getting a handle on."

Ironically, even the United Nations acknowledges that the power of such information access is, by default, thwarted, since the majority of people in the Third World don't even have electricity, let alone a computer and Internet access.

"Market forces alone will not rectify the imbalance," the United Nations says, a factor that Netaid officials hope their efforts can overcome by setting up public computing centers, even in regimes hostile to such information access.

New site, old problems
Exactly how Netaid plans to tackle world poverty in a different way is not clear. After all, relief and development organizations have been plagued by the problem since the early 1960s.

Unlike Band-Aid, the series of high profile rock concerts that spawned Live-Aid in the 1980s to fight Ethiopian famine, Netaid will depend on the staying power of the Internet to keep people involved long after the roadies have stripped the stage of its microphones.

But simply pouring more money into efforts to defeat poverty and hunger hasn't worked in the past, a situation that is not likely to end with the launch of Netaid, said Ian Vasquez, director of the Project on Global Economic Liberty for the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington.

"The UNDP has a terrible record of providing aid to governments with the worst [economic] policies on Earth which are responsible for poor people's misery to begin with," Vasquez said. "I don't see how this project is going to change that at all."

Of Brown's comments that the project will be "subversive," Vasquez said he thinks "there's an inherent conflict of interest when the United Nations, which is supported by these very dictatorships he's referring to, is providing aid precisely to those governments."

Vasquez also wondered whether the organizations highlighted on the Netaid Web site were going to be limited to those that were in line with the UNDP's own development agenda. "I'm pretty sure there's going to be a bias here," he said.

If Netaid isn't the answer, what is? "The historical record is clear," Vasquez said. "Unilateral liberalism and unilateral reforms by countries have always been responsible for economic growth and prosperity. There's no correlation between foreign aid and economic growth or improvements in human development indicators."

Reach out and click
Beyond the Herculean task of fighting global poverty, Netaid also will have to find a way to attract and keep people involved, said Jillaine Smith, senior associate of the Benton Foundation, a Washington group dedicated to promoting communications tools, applications, and policies in the public interest.

"I think they'll need to push content to people," Smith said, "and how respectfully they do that will be the key to their success."

Advertisement Relief and development organizations constantly fight for attention and donations. All fight a never-ending battle against "misery fatigue," a term used by philanthropic organizations to describe the burnout people feel when they are inundated with requests for contributions from all corners.

"It really all depends on how they engage people after the initial launch of the site and those first concerts," Smith said, "whether it's young people or otherwise." Using the power of the Internet to "extend the impact" of the concerts was a good first start, she said.

The concerts, which are intended to be as much a fund-raiser as a star-studded advertisement for the effort, will take place in New York, London and Geneva on Oct. 9. Like Live-Aid before it, the Netaid concerts are aimed at the young. The organization hopes the concerts will "catch the people's imagination, especially young people's imagination - in a way that sometimes politicians can't," said British Prime Minister Blair.