Science & Tech Quote by Carol Bellamy

Bellamy’s sentence reads like polite diplomacy, but it’s doing quiet political work: it frames the “technology revolution” as an inevitability, then positions the global North as both gatekeeper and benefactor. The key move is in the contrast between “has yet to reach” and “can assist.” The first phrase makes the digital divide sound less like a product of policy, pricing, infrastructure, and power, and more like a delayed delivery. The second assigns agency almost entirely to “more developed countries,” implying that progress arrives via external help rather than local capacity, governance, or market design.

That’s not naivete so much as the language of international development in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when internet access and consumer tech were being sold as accelerants of education, health, and civic participation. As a UNICEF leader and educator by trade, Bellamy is speaking from an institution whose mandate depends on coalition-building with donor nations. The tone is calibrated: “certainly” signals consensus; “another area” places technology alongside familiar aid domains like vaccination, schooling, and nutrition; “less developed world” uses the era’s managerial vocabulary that softens inequality into a taxonomy.

The subtext is transactional: assistance is cast as enlightened self-interest, a way for wealthy countries to extend influence while appearing humanitarian. At the same time, the quote makes a moral claim without sounding accusatory, inviting responsibility without naming culpability. It works because it’s frictionless; it offers a simple direction of travel (from developed to developing) and a comforting role for those with resources, even as it leaves the deeper question - who controls the infrastructure and terms of access - carefully offstage.