Zuckerberg connects refugee camps to the Internet

The founder of the Facebook social network, Mark Zuckerberg, promised to help the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to provide refugee camps with Internet access.

This is one of the sustainable development goals adopted on Friday by consensus at a summit at United Nations headquarters with the participation of more than 150 heads of state and government.

“Connectivity will help refugees better access support and stay in touch with their families,” Zuckerberg said at a private sector forum in New York organized as part of the UN Sustainable Development Summit.

Access to the Internet should “be the basis of a global development strategy” in order to determine the approach to new challenges and the needs of the next generations of the planet’s inhabitants, the entrepreneur noted. “(Digital) data helps us make smarter decisions, but only if you can absorb the information quickly and analyze it with the right amount of confidence,” he added.

Zuckerberg recalled that currently only half of the world's population has access to the Internet. “In the current century, global development and global connectivity are closely interconnected. If you want to help people get food, health care, education, and jobs anywhere in the world, you need to connect the world, too. The Internet should not belong to just three billion people, as it does now,” he said in an article jointly with the leader of the Irish rock band U2, Bono, published on Saturday in The New York Times.

As an example, the head of Facebook cited farmers in Ethiopia or Tanzania, to whom the Internet is useful for checking purchase prices for agricultural products, its presence in warehouses and insurance against the risk of adverse weather.

In early September, Zuckerberg topped the ranking of the most influential people in the world according to the American magazine Vanity Fair. . Forbes magazine estimates his fortune at $ 41,2 billion. According to this indicator, the head of Facebook ranks fourth in the list of the richest representatives of the IT industry and is inferior to Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates ($ 79,6 billion), Oracle’s founder Larry Ellison ($ 50 billion) and the head Amazon to Jeff Bezos ($ 47,8 billion).