Overview

Keeping in view the central role of information and globalization in poverty eradication, the organization aims to build on intellectual and social resources across the world to conduct research and activities on these issues.

The mission of ePoor is to facilitate Pakistani society to engage constructively within globalization. The organization aims to fulfill this mission through four key programs:

Ø	Digital Divide
Ø	Sustainable Development
Ø	Higher Education Reform
Ø	Critique of Development

The fundamental approach of ePoor is to build networks of, and provide support to, individuals and organizations engaged in all four themes. ePoor will conduct relevant, practice-oriented research and develop linkages in order to:

Ø	Produce a body of knowledge relevant to Pakistan's engagement within globalization;
Ø	Develop policy briefings and papers and provide policy advice to relevant quarters;
Ø	Raise awareness through a variety of techniques; and
Ø	Implement field-based projects in the four themes.

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Concept

Jan Nederveen Pieterse (1998)* identifies five strands of globalization, each of which have been "globalizing" for centuries:

Ø	Economics (most recent) through global capitalism
Ø	Culture through mass media and advertising
Ø	Politics through civil society, and global political action
Ø	Sociology through post-modernity, urbanization, and nation-states
Ø	History and anthropology (oldest) through global flows

This present phase of accelerated globalization is characterized by economic integration and information flows. On the one hand, this has thrown up challenges that are an integral, inherent part of this globalization itself, including an increasing inequality in access to resources, consolidation of financial and decision-making powers in some centers, and environmental degradation. On the other hand, the same globalization is presenting opportunities by offering channels to either change the particular "form" of globalization or to take advantage of the "system" as it is.

The challenges are particularly acute for Pakistan as a Southern, fundamentally undemocratic nation, and all of them are inter-related. What they have in common is the use of information to penetrate into and in between the public, private and civic spheres of life. The UNESCO-World Bank report on Higher Education in Developing Countries: Peril and Promise (www.tfhe.net) aptly describes the world today as a "knowledge-based economy", in which access to information is the determining feature.

The power of information and knowledge is a crucial factor in determining a particular form of "accelerated" globalization. The power resides in, fundamentally, the ability to define cultural, economic and social directions, which in turn critically define the ability and perception set of the very actors who then shape globalization.

A crucial challenge facing Pakistan, and other Southern countries, then, is the inability to produce, disseminate and transmit knowledge relevant to the external environment. This results in a critical inability to engage constructively with globalization, particularly for the benefit of the vast majority of the country.

Four themes in particular cut across the strands of globalization to determine this capacity-gap:

Ø	Capacity to produce, disseminate and transmit advanced knowledge, the new capital;
Ø	Information technology to facilitate speedy communications and knowledge production and dissemination, particularly in poverty-stricken areas;
Ø	Developing national priorities around the principles and goals of sustainable human development; and
Ø	Critique of development.

Enabling Pakistan to compete in and shape globalization requires building up Pakistani society for a constructive engagement in these four themes. The recognition of global imperatives has resulted in an unconscious and heterogeneous development within Pakistan along these four themes, mostly led by civic entrepreneurs. These are based, primarily, on the concept of community development, as initiated by pioneers such as Dr. Akhter Hameed Khan and Mr. Shoaib Sultan Khan, and rely on the development of social capital and "awareness".

Some initiatives in this respect clearly need to be strengthened in this respect. More importantly, there are some glaring gaps to be filled, particularly for the promotion of globally relevant higher education and philosophical resurgence. Even more importantly, there is no place for these isolated endeavors to come together in a comprehensive, integrated strategy to facilitate Pakistani society as a whole.

The need for this is clear by the very nature of integrated globalization, that "hits" Pakistani society in a number of ways to produce a uniform effect: inequity. Individuals, groups and Pakistani society as a whole, thus, have to cope with a single phenomena, manifested in a variety of ways, and find a way through. A holistic perspective is needed, along with sensitivity to the needs and challenges of particular interest groups. Such a perspective can, further, facilitate the shaping of a particular form of globalization, although that is implicitly a longer-term goal.

The contours of such a holistic endeavor can be identified by the successes that already exist and the trends visible in global society. In order to build on the successes, two features are strikingly obvious: a) any such initiative must be centered on civil society, but not focused exclusively on civil society; and b) information flows play a critical role, not only as a fundamental theme creating inequality by perpetuating the digital divide, but as a networking tool for intellectual resurgence in the country.

* Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, 1998. Globalization and Collective Action. Distinguished Lecture Series [Islamabad: SDPI].

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