ICT for development

APC member Ungana-Afrika have been providing strategic technology planning services to the development community in Southern Africa for nearly three years. The processes have been refined through experience, and are presented here in their current form to assist other technology support providers to implement technology planning in their own context.

Sri Lankan journalist Nalaka Gunawardene has this interestingly-argued piece Waiting for Pilots to Land in Tunis on the IslamOnline.net site, that has some blunt questions to ask around the question: “Are Pilot Projects Helping Development”.

But I’ve many interesting experiences at WSIS. For example, one evening in Tunis I was travelling back to my hotel by bus and the lady who was sitting next to me was talking to me in French. When I’ve problems explaining things in French, she started speaking to me in English and informed me that she used to work with a writer group in USA.

With the focus at Tunis largely on who controls the Net, and the far-from-sophisticated control mechanisms of Tunisian society, the issue of what the Net can — and is — doing for the excluded in the planet might have taken a back seat. Disparity in accessing the levers of communication is markedly sharp. But interesting stories are coming in about what’s possible from various...

Only 11% of African people have a fixed line telephone, 12% of African people questioned have a mobile telephone, less than 3% have an email address…So says a new study conducted by RIA. Although one of the WSIS’s main objectives is to decrease the digital divide, 80% of African people today do not have access to any form of communication service. A shocking statistic is that 15% of...

Highway Africa runs the Highway Africa News Agency. (Interestingly, its work is put out under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.) They’ve got some interesting stories in their e-despatch which just reached mailboxes earlier today.One story is about African delegates boast of ICT success stories. Perhaps the most catchy title is No teeth but can still chew the fat and...

Prototypes for a $100 laptop for Third World schools are out… what does it look like? What can it do? Is there a catch? And, hangon, there is still discussion on whether the internet is a friend or foe of education….

She’s a Peruvian heading towards The Mountain Forum in Nepal. The forum is particularly created as a medium of alternative communication for mountainous areas, which is why, since its conception, it has specifically used the internet as a communication tool between the participating people and communities that constitute the different nodes.