WSIS latest

25.04.2008 “If the world is serious about achieving the Millennium Development Goal of halving the number of people living in extreme poverty by the year 2015, ICT must figure prominently in the effort. Everyone – governments, civil society and private sector businesses – has a vital stake in fostering digital opportunity and putting ICT at the service of development.”

Kofi Annan, Former Secretary-General, United Nations

11.04.2008 ACWICT in collaboration with other Women’s organizations from the Eastern Africa Region formed the WSIS-Gender Caucus (Africa Region), a group that worked to ensure that African women’s issues and concerns were incorporated in the WSIS process

21.03.2008 If the Kenyan lawmakers had debated and approved the recent ICT Bill put before parliament, some of the communications issues raised by the recent political crisis in that country would have been more easily dealt with, argues KICTANeT's Alice Wanjira.

11.03.2008 An area where young people have an edge is the emerging information society driven by new technologies. Young people are often the leading innovators in the use and spread of information and communications technologies. They adapt quickly and are generally quite hungry for the great quantities of information, locally and globally, that can be provided through emerging information and communication technologies.

04.03.2008 Changing an economy through introducing ICT is akin to trying to set up a whole row of spinning plates. Without infrastructure, you can’t get media, services and applications. Without media, services and applications, you can’t get critical mass. Without critical mass, there’s no-one to e-mail or exchange videos with, so why bother? And that’s before you get on to all the “nice things” that might happen if African governments delivered their services better

26.02.2008 AZUR Development and the Reseau Sida Afrique based in Congo which includes 230 institutional and individual members in 17 African francophone countries. The project aims to set up a media campaign and system of alert on malaria and the creation of a partnership between the press and member organizations of the Africa AIDS Network in 10 African countries.

18.02.2008 The African Centre for Women, Information and Communications Technology (ACWICT) is a pioneer Kenyan based ICT for Development with regional outreach, whose mission is to promote women's access to and use of ICTs as tools for social, economic and political advancement.

14.02.2008 Most advocacy initiatives and research projects do not undertake the challenge of new data collection to devise their own ICT indicators. However, for different advocacy moments, we still need statistical information from legitimate and recognised sources. This section briefly identifies the organisations that currently have significant stocks of ICT indicators available to the public for free or at a nominal cost. Whether the entity collecting data has the sufficient resources, legitimacy and mandate for such an undertaking are also important to consider. There is no shortage of ICT indicators sources, and there are also strong overlaps with measurement of other sectors that are being transformed by the use of ICT – economic, poverty and governance assessments, health, education, etc.

07.02.2008 The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) was the largest single event in international debate on information and communications technologies (ICTs) during the past ten years. It absorbed a great deal of the time and resources of international organisations, governments, civil society organisations and businesses over a four-year period (2001 to 2005). It produced four documents setting out aspirations for the information society. It provided a framework for international discussion of infrastructure finance and internet governance. But it received only limited public attention and failed to bridge the paradigm gap between the worlds of information technology and international development. Sixteen months after it ended, its impact – on all parties – seems to be receding as technology and policy debate move on to meet new challenges.

05.02.2008 During the course of the last 15 years, information and communications technology (ICT) indicators have become increasingly popularised and prominent in mainstream discourses. In the advocacy arena, indicators provide the groundwork for effective lobbying and policy-making at different levels of mobilisation. To address inequalities in access to ICTs – what is commonly referred to as the “digital divide” – it is essential to identify where there are inequalities, and how exclusion is manifested, in order to specifically target solutions.