The Prime Minister yesterday pledged Malta's support to set up and fund a Commonwealth unit dedicated to fight poverty with technology.

Speaking at the official opening of the 2007 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), which kicked off in the Ugandan capital Kampala, Dr Gonzi said Malta was prepared to fund a special coordinating unit that would help deliver the Commonwealth's primary ICT programme, known as Commonwealth Connects.

The new unit, the Prime Minister said, would help give the Commonwealth Secretariat a renewed mandate to further the role of ICT in achieving the United Nation's millennium development goals.

Along with climate change, which has taken over a large chunk of the agenda for this year's CHOGM, as some states lobby for a strong statement ahead of the UN's climate change conference early next month, Dr Gonzi stressed the need for an integrated approach to the challenges of developing nations, one that does not lose sight of "digital poverty" in just focusing on material poverty.

The move is an apt follow-up to the Commonwealth meeting held in Malta two years ago, which had as its theme Networking For Development, but it also follows on previous commitments.

There is no fund asa yet allocated as the government is hoping to attract more countries in pledging support. "But we are committed to this," Dr Gonzi said, "We hope this may serve as a spark."

In 1995, in fact, the Connect-IT, a joint Commonwealth Secretariat and Maltese government foundation, which is based in Malta, had been set up with the objective of disseminating good ICT practice across the Commonwealth.

The Commonwealth Secretariat had done a lot on the subject through a specially set up steering committee, which recently published a detailed report: Tools for Development - The Capacity of ICT to Transform Societies. The new unit, Dr Gonzi told The Times, would give this area of interest a structure and enough funds to deliver the organisation's stated goals in practice.

"There is a lot of scope for cooperation with countries that are struggling to improve their socio-economic situation. Now that we've gained certain experience in ICT we can help developing countries make technology leaps and avoid investing in the wrong technologies," he said.

Essentially, he continued, it is about helping developing countries learn from the experience of states that are more advanced in ICT but also, in certain cases, about sharing hardware too.

"Certain equipment we may have no more use for may prove invaluable to certain countries," he said.

The idea, Dr Gonzi explained, is very much linked to where the government would like the Commonwealth and the United Nations to go in terms of helping developing nations, particularly Africa. "It parallels what we say about the need to attack poverty as part of a larger strategy to migration which affects us directly, since besides material poverty there is now the danger that these countries may suffer doubly in competition with other states through digital poverty."