APC and KICTANet draw on the experience of their successes in the Africa ICT Policy Monitor project and the CATIA project to bring an integrated approach to ICT policy research, dissemination and advocacy through the building of sub-regional networks. They operate using the principle of multi-stakeholder partnerships developed through the CATIA experience to engage in evidence-based policy change. The project seeks to identify the political obstacles to extending affordable access to ICT infrastructure in Africa and to advocate for their removal in order to create a sound platform for sub-regional connectivity in East, West and Central Africa that will provide a platform for the effective use of ICTs in development processes.

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.

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.

In Africa, APC’s main focus is on access to infrastructure. Africa currently has to pay for some of the most expensive bandwidth in the world and the hard currency paid leaves the continent. Because East Africa does not have international fibre connections it is paying even more than West African countries connected to the monopoly-controlled SAT3/WASC cable.

APC’s FibreForAfrica.net site provides basic information about international bandwidth in Africa, its costs and the existence of monopoly access to it. It focuses especially on the proposed East African cable projects and the ending of the monopoly of SAT-3.

APC is currently building a coalition of civil society organisations and businesses to campaign for the lowering of costs associated with the internet in South Africa. The project being carried out with the support of the Partnership for Higher Education in Africa (PHEA) will mobilise a number internet service providers (ISPs), communications workers, content providers, academics, alternative energy experts, a number of civil society organisations and private sector associations to advocate for affordable broadband access for all South Africans.