• “The challenges we face in the Caribbean today are the same ones Africa faced 10 years ago,” reflected Nancy George, chair of the HIV/AIDS Steering Committee for Jamaica's technical university, in a videoconference that connected health practitioners in Jamaica's Global Development Learning Network (GDLN) Center with colleagues in Barbados, Ghana, St. Lucia, Tanzania, and Uganda. “We can learn so much from your experience!”

• Federico Macaranas, executive director of the Asian Institute of Management Policy Center, and his colleagues in the Philippines linked with experts from four countries to discuss ways of improving data collection. “GDLN allows us to harness expertise from all over the world,” he said. Interactive technologies and learning methods allow development practitioners in different locations to communicate as if they were in the same room.

The Network is a global partnership of over 70 learning centers in more than 60 countries. In fiscal 2005 more than 35,000 people worldwide, in more than 900 videoconference-based activities, used it to learn from one another's efforts to fight poverty. Policy makers coordinated humanitarian aid efforts in Côte d'Ivoire; mayors in Bosnia and Herzegovina took a course on delivering basic services to poor people; private companies in eight Latin American countries debated their social responsibility; and indigenous people in Alaska, Peru, and the Philippines discussed rural poverty.

At the launch of GDLN in June 2000, former World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn declared, “This is the end of geography as we know it.” Through GDLN, distance is no longer a constraint to transferring knowledge and experience from the people who have it to those who need it. (See http://www.gdln.org/.)