The Community Information Network for Southern Africa (CINSA) aims to build a sustainable network of community ICT projects in the 14 SADC member states Angola, Botswana, Democratic Republic of Congo, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Tanzania, Seychelles, South Africa, Swaziland, Zambia, and Zimbabwe through research, networking, facilitating training, service brokerage and more.

Held just outside Johannesburg, the conference brought together about fifty participants from women’s organisations, government officials, and gender and development practitioners and researchers, involved in gender and information and communication (ICT) projects and initiatives tasked with finding ICT strategies to specifically benefit rural women. The Community Information Network for Southern Africa (CINSA) interviewed a selection of conference attendees including APC-Africa-Women coordinator, Jenny Radloff. The regional workshop was organised by Women’sNet with the support of the Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO). Listen to the interviews with Dimitra participants.

Once again, at the Annual Meeting of Hungarian Green Non-profits (OT2004) APC member Green Spider offered herbal teas and sound internet access, training and advice to participants. Raising awareness of environmental contamination and in support of free software, Green Spider collected up visitors’ old CD-roms and exchanged them for new GNU/Linux CDs.

Local traditions in Upper Egypt prevent battered women from seeking refuge in shelters so getting training and finding a job is often the only way out of a violent family home. APC member, ArabDev, has carried out a survey to identify the skills needed for potential employment and a training project is ready to go, but there’s one problem: lack of computers. The Egyptian Ministry of Telecommunications has been promising ArabDev ten computers for the project for the last two years and still none have arrived due to red tape. “We are in dire need of hardware to improve the harsh circumstances of these women,” says ArabDev director, Leila Hassanin.

A new law passed in the South Korean parliament on March 9 requires internet media and press websites to verify the names and identification numbers of all visitors who post messages on bulletin boards or chat rooms and even personal websites regarding political elections. Civil society groups, including APC member Jinbonet, held a press conference pledging to defy the law which they claim is a violation of freedom of expression.

The Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) is an international multistakeholder network committed to harnessing the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for sustainable and equitable development. Within the GKP framework, governments, civil society groups, donor agencies, private sector companies and inter-governmental organisations come together as equals to apply ICTs for development.

APC takes its place on the committee which oversees the direction of the GKP together with the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), UNESCO, the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and others. The Excomm as it is known was chosen by the members of GKP during online voting in April.

A Mission-Driven Business Planning workshop for environmental civil society online networks in the Balkans in February was attended by APC members from the Balkans and six fledgling electronic networking initiatives from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Kosovo/a, Macedonia, and Serbia and Montenegro.

South Africa went to the polls for the third time since the end of apartheid in the early 1990s. APC member, Women’sNet, provided analysis and opinions online about the elections and perceptions of men and women. Articles included "The Dreary Dialogue", a report on interchanges between the political parties and women in civil society by director, Natasha Primo.

Was WSIS worth it? The general verdict on the recent United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in December 2003 was a thumbs-down. The Summit outcomes were limited after an arduous and expensive process. However, argues Anriette Esterhuysen, APC’s executive director, from the perspective of many civil society organisations that participated actively, the WSIS has created a new opportunity for solidarity across ideological, sectoral and geographical divides.

The APC executive board and staff met in March for an intensive planning meeting to map out APC’s activities for the next three years. The meeting took place following the definition of strategic priorities for the APC by the 36-member APC council in Cartagena, Colombia last November.