August 12, 1999

With Concerts and Web Site, U.N. Agency Attacks Poverty

By SETH SCHIESEL

idding to fight poverty with music and megabits, the United Nations Development Program and Cisco Systems Inc., the No. 1 maker of data communications gear, have enlisted a dozen popular entertainers to kick off an Internet-based initiative to help the world's poor.

The new project, called Netaid, appears to represent the most extensive partnership the United Nations has ever formed with private enterprise in trying to relieve poverty in the developing world. The development program is casting about for ways to advance its anti-poverty mission even as countries including Denmark and Germany have slashed their contributions to the agency.

Cisco, which makes makes much of the complex communications equipment that forms the synapses of cyberspace, has agreed to underwrite the Netaid project with assistance from KPMG, the consulting firm, and Akamai Technologies, an Internet communications company. Cisco and KPMG have each agreed to spend up to $20 million on the project, according to people close to the companies.

"It's not unprecedented in that we on many fronts are starting to engage with the private sector," said Mark Malloch Brown, who took over as administrator of the U.N.D.P. last month after serving as a vice president of the World Bank. "However, there has been nothing attempted on this scale and of this ambition before. For us, this is a quantum step up from the previous level of collaboration with the private sector."

Netaid's public debut is scheduled for Oct. 9, when the group will stage overlapping concerts at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N. J., Wembley Stadium in London and the Palais des Nations in Geneva featuring musicians including Jimmy Page, Pete Townshend and Jewel. The MTV and VH1 cable television channels have agreed to televise the concerts in the United States; the British Broadcasting Corporation will televise them in Britain.

But Cisco and Mr. Malloch Brown say that Netaid is not just another charity telethon. The heart of Netaid is not the concerts, they say, but a Web site (www.netaid.org) being created to allow people around the world to participate in antipoverty efforts long after the music is over.

The Web site will be intended to allow, say, a church group in Iowa to make contact with a needy church in Indonesia. The U.N.D.P. plans to work with nongovernmental organizations to develop the site.

"The money raised is not the measure of success of this project," Mr. Malloch Brown said in an interview yesterday. "This is organized very differently from the earlier things like We Are the World or Live Aid, which were intended to meet the immediate knee-jerk fund-raising potential of the event. For me, the money will come, but it will come out of building a very large group of people in the millions who will keep coming back to the issues through the Web site."

He added, "People who write their Congressman or organize a local chapter of Oxfam will be making at least as significant and perhaps more significant contribution than someone who writes a $15 check."

The others scheduled to appear at the Netaid concerts are Bush, the Corrs, Counting Crows, Celine Dion, the Eurythmics with Annie Lennox, Wyclef Jean with Bono, Michael Kamen and Orchestra, George Michael and Robbie Williams.

It is not clear which artists will appear at which concerts. Netaid plans to add a few more artists to the lineup.

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• www.netaid.org