Age: 25

Country: Canada (Métis nation)

Main development interest: Community development, empowering indigenous communities to improve their economic, social and political conditions

Main reasons for coming to IGF: To be exposed to best practices through presentations and exhibitions—a great opportunity to learn from successes

3 favourite Web sites: www.ccsa.ca (Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse), Dictionary.com, www.facebook.com

How does a lack of access to ICTs limit young aboriginals’ sense of what is possible in their lives? Cassondra Campbell, who lives in Thompson, Manitoba, has a story that vividly answers this question.

“My grandmother is from a remote northern Manitoba community that has no road in, you have to fly in and fly out. When I was attending Acadia University in Nova Scotia, a friend of mine went to teach children in my grandmother’s community. On her first day, my friend asked the kids, ‘If you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?’ Almost all said they’d go to the nearest community with a road out of town. That was as far as their horizons extended; anywhere further just didn’t seem possible.”

Fortunately, this isn’t the end of the story: Cassondra’s friend was able to begin opening up the world to the children by starting a summer exchange program for them with a community in Nova Scotia. And many other First Nations individuals and groups are using ICTs to bring possibilities and options to isolated reserves and communities across Canada.

“ICTs give First Nations’ communities tools they can use to improve their economic, social and political conditions,” Cassondra says. “And ICTs also make it possible to share information and experiences, so indigenous people in Canada and around the world can help each other by sharing successes and ideas.”

Discovering the potential of ICTs

Trained as an historian and sociologist—she received her B.A. Honours degree from Acadia in 2005—Cassondra first became aware of the full potential of ICTs for development when she attended the second World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Tunis, Tunisia. “WSIS changed my attitude to technology,” she explains. “Sitting in a computer science class every day had no appeal to me, but using computers to access and share information and experiences did. I was particularly inspired by presentations and exhibitions on best practices and innovations. It was a great opportunity to learn from successes, and I was impressed by the resourcefulness of southern nations. People were achieving so much with so little.”

Her experiences at WSIS, along with a four-month government-sponsored Young Professionals International Internship assignment working with the Organizacion de Naciones y Pueblos en Argentina (ONPIA) in Buenos Aires, convinced Cassondra that for ICT-based development to be self-sustaining, projects must focus on transferring skills and knowledge to indigenous communities. “It’s not about just about handing over money, it’s about empowering communities to improve their economic, social and political conditions from within the community.”

Canadian access issues

At the IGF, Cassondra will focus on issues of access, a theme that is far from theoretical for her. When she returns from the IGF, she will start a new job as emergency preparedness officer for the regional health authority in Thompson, which is an eight-hour drive from Manitoba’s largest city, Winnipeg.

“Most northern Manitoba communities are small and isolated reserves,” she says. “Thompson is the regional centre, but even Thompson doesn’t have services that southern Canadians take for granted. For example, I had a visa problem just before the IGF, and IDRC asked me if I could overnight documents to Ottawa. Not possible from Thompson. Before that, I couldn’t send my IGF application because I was visiting a remote community and had no Internet access. It was ironic, really—I can’t send in my application to a conference about people not having access to ICTs because I don’t have access myself. I think that if you haven’t actually seen the state of many reserves and communities in the north, it’s easy for people in southern Canada to think that everyone lives in a community like yours, with all the services you have.”