Digital solidarity fund
The Digital Solidarity Fund is a project of the President of Senegal that was a major topic of discussion at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva in 2003 .
This is intended to overcome the so-called digital divide . The Global Marshall Plan Initiative is drafting similar visions .
Few governments have shown willingness to contribute to such a fund.
One of the critics of these concepts is the Friends of the Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), who argued that structural problems are being swept under the table in favor of alms . Demanding financial resources from industrialized countries undermines the developing countries' own responsibility and is not suitable for solving structural problems.
An American representative had provoked by his remark that there was also no split in Mercedes. The thesis of the digital divide should be rejected as absurd.
In March 2005 the Digital Solidarity Fund was finally launched, if only on a voluntary basis. The "Geneva Principle" serves as a model: every company that supplies the city with computers, networks, telephones and other goods and services that have anything to do with telecommunications undertakes to pay one percent of the contract value into this fund.