CILAC seek to integrate research, research communications, network-building and advocacy to make internet broadband universal and affordable. It’s a one year project that started on February 2008.

Oriented to influence national and regional ICT policy processes to ensure that demands and perspectives of civil society organisations are considered.

Oriented to develop and strengthen capacities in civil society organisations to effectively engage and influence global, regional and national ICT policy processes .

Oriented to learn, understand, discuss and analyse about the impact of ICT policy decisions on civil society as well as to offer inputs to inform advocacy in Latin America at regional and national levels.

Available since 2001, the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) ICT Policy Monitor website gathers essential news and documentation about policies relating to information and communication technologies (ICTs). Through the website, the only one of its kind across Latin America and the Caribbean, APC aims to demystify internet policies and regulations.

What is “harmful content” on the internet? The definition is contestable, subjective and open to a range of interpretations, and the majority of interventions to combat it are mostly concerned with obscenity and child pornography. Sexual rights workers are troubled by the growing role of conservative forces – supported by religious extremists – and their attempts to encourage new legislation that would treat all online sexual exchanges as sexual predation and all adult content on the internet as pornography. This protectionist approach overshadows other important aspects of the internet that directly impact on internet users’ lives and their ability to access to vital information on sexuality, sexual health and sexual rights. EroTICs, an exploratory research just starting at APC, aims to narrow the gap between political assumptions and a better understanding of content and “harm” based on women’s real experience of sexuality online.

The Gender, Agriculture and Rural Development in the Information Society (GenARDIS) small grants fund was developed in 2002 to support work on gender-related issues in ICTs for agricultural and rural development in the African, Caribbean and Pacific regions. In 2008, the third round of small grants was issued, and projects are currently being implemented.

Marginalised women, teenage girls and women in armed conflict in more than ten countries will be the people most likely to benefit in a project launched in January 2009 by the APC women’s programme to tackle what the UN has called a “global epidemic of violence against women”.

This two-year research project examines the nature and extent of media piracy and the effect of anti-piracy legislative and enforcement frameworks on access to knowledge in South Africa. The research was carried out by researchers from APC and several South African universities, and forms part of a larger study by researchers in Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico, and Hungary, on media piracy in their countries.