The Information and Knowledge Life-Cycle

The creator of the world wide web said that the fundamental reason behind the innovation was to the technology as a tool that could create and make accessible a 'web of information'. Web sites have created an inexhaustible reservoir of information resources. Some of it is free and some comes with a price. Information dissemination and exchange still remains the predominant uses of the World Wide Web.

While Western societies have realigned and repositioned traditional information services when the World Wide Web was widely diffused in the early 1990s, societies in developing countries have not followed suit. They are also those societies where harnessing of the technologies can bring visible changes in the information environment where traditional sources of information are not fully developed and equitably accessible. Even the basic of basic informatio can be hard to come by (Mchombu, 1992).

The value of information in many developing settings is often not accorded the paramount significance that it duly deserves (Paul McConnell, 1995). There is no better time and place to accord information its deserved status than in many countries in Africa. The time is critical as the gap is widening at an alarming rate between the North (which is "Information rich") and the South (which is "Information poor").

One can express in many ways the many tangible insufficiencies of countries in the South and also a lack of concerted and sustainable programmes whether by the public and private sector in those environments to continuously tap into, process and efficiently manage a seemingly intangible item like information. It is this lack of awareness that could be attributed to many factors inherent in those societies stemming from cultural and historical hind-sights that opened those countries to colonialism and imperialism and has ensured the seeming endless practices of exploitation, social, political and economic degradation.

It has been costly for the people living in those communities to disregard the value of information not just in human terms, but socially, politically and economically. Many countries in Africa for example have moved through four eras according to John Howkins et.al (1997. These are: colonialism - 'motivated by a desire to control others', liberation - 'motivated by a desire to self-control'; development - 'motivated by a desire to catch up' and technology - 'motivated by a fear of losing out'. The fact is that most of the countries haven't seen a significant change after many decades of gaining independence. They are still trying 'to catch up'. Some of the problems facing the developing countries is that they have clearly failed to take cognisance of the critical role information can play in the process of change. It is therefore necessary to re-visit this area on the value of information and see how it can be given its true status and how it impacts on development.