Dia 1

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Agriculture

• 10 speakers From Ethiopia, Ghana, Hungary,
  India, Jamaica, Jordan, Netherlands, Philippines,
  and Zambia
• Diverse range of experiences together
  demonstrating the rapid developments in the field
  and several concrete applications of ICTs in
  agriculture, rural development and related areas.
  
• Presentations focused on agricultural and
  developmental challenges, showing how ICTs as
  well as information, knowledge and communication
  processes make a difference.

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Agriculture

• ICTs are being used in rural areas
• To power e-commerce marketplaces for farmer
  cooperatives (the Philippines, India) connecting
  buyers and sellers and enabling efficient
  transactions.
• To automate and enable financial transactions of
  cooperatives, provide local b2b centers for
  farming communities, and provide mobile banking
  services to individual farmers (Philippines).

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Agriculture

• ICTs are being used in rural areas
• To help revolutionize Ethiopian agriculture by
  providing more efficient marketing systems for
  agricultural commodities From a sack of grain
  to a sack of money!
• To support the social and economic fabric of
  rural villages and communities (Hungary)
  providing services and employment otherwise not
  available.

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Agriculture

• ICTs are being used in rural areas
• To inform planning, land use, and tree planting
  decisions in Ethiopia. Land suitability is mapped
  with GIS to guide decisions on investment (where
  to plant interesting economic plants) and
  conservation (what is happening to the forest
  zone where coffee originated).
• As part of phytosanitary and farm monitoring and
  traceability systems to track and certify the
  quality of agricultural export products without
  this, farmers would lose access to foreign
  markets and perhaps their livelihoods (Jamaica).

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Agriculture

• ICTs are being used in rural areas
• To help safeguard agricultural biodiversity by
  providing access to catalogues and indexes of
  plant seeds and their characteristics. Such
  genebanks were used to replenish seed lost in
  recent Mozambique floods.

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Agriculture

• ICTs are being used by the agricultural
  development community
• To share experiences among development
  practitioners (India). Community of practice
  members contributed their insights on
  agricultural extension to make future investments
  more effective discussions on school meals and
  nutrition led to real collaborative pilot
  projects.
• As a knowledge sharing and exchange tool among
  people working on IFAD-sponsored projects in the
  Middle East and North Africa.

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Agriculture

• ICTs are being used by the agricultural
  development community
• To reinforce communication among agricultural
  information specialists worldwide.
• To globally document and exchange innovative uses
  of information and knowledge and ICTs
  e-agriculture

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Building the Infrastructure

• Main issues discussed
• How to build affordable communication technology
  and infrastructures in developing countries,
  isolated and rural areas.
• The role of the local telecommunication
  companies.
• Private and NGO initiatives against the lack of
  investments of the local companies.

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Building the Infrastructure

• Main issues discussed (ctd)
• The difficulties for managing new technologies by
  citizens of D.C. specially in rural areas
• The need of training people to plan, install,
  maintain and use the communication infrastructure
  and systems.

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Building the Infrastructure

• Main conclusions
• Connecting people should be considered as a need
  not a business
• Cooperation between local telecommunication
  companies and private/NGO initiatives should be
  encouraged
• Training programs are essential for the use,
  installation and maintenance of the
  infrastructure and services.

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Building the Infrastructure

• Main conclusions (ctd)
• Monopolistic tendencies should be broken to
  benefit the citizens
• Public services must play an active role
  providing connectivity
• Cooperation between countries would facilitate
  the task

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Economic Opportunities

• It focused on
• How can late comers gain from BPO opportunities
• Opportunities to create wealth by using new
  collaborative tools
• Potential for open source in developing countries
• The state of telecentres and its new frontiers

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Economic Opportunities

• Emerging thinking from the sessions
• Developing countries may gain more from focussing
  on emerging models rather than maturing models.
• They will be better placed in moving up the value
  curve by embracing emerging collaborative tools
  sooner than later.

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Economic Opportunities

• Emerging thinking from the sessions
• 3. Open source is an important option, developing
  countries may choose that as a longer term policy
  and it should be selected as appropriate.
• 4. Telecentre models in developing countries show
  promise and need the support of the strong,
  affordable and ubiquitous internet infrastructure.

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Education

• Issues
• access, equity quality
• gender
• teachers trained in ICT skills and pedagogies
• implementing ICT policies
• capacity building at all levels

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Education

• Issues
• lifelong learning
• content development
• promoting indigenous languages
• ownership

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Education

• Approaches
• participatory approaches (wiki, blogs, web 2.0)
• partnership, collaboration and information
  sharing models

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Education

• Approaches
• integrating infrastructure capacity building
• flexible alternative delivery mecanisms for
  learning for development

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Empowerment Participation

• Building knowledge societies at all levels will
  lead to the empowerment and participation of
  citizens. To achieve this, inclusive ICT policies
  must be developed, implemented and evaluated

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Empowerment Participation

• In Africa, public private partnerships are
  already contributing to education and skills
  enhancement programmes, and ICT industry leaders
  are open to proactive governments for more
  collaborations

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Empowerment Participation

• Community media centres remain effective in
  bringing empowerment and participation to
  marginalized communities through ICTs , but a
  combination of cost-effective technologies,
  policies, content diversity and private sector
  partnerships need to drive scale-up initiatives

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Empowerment Participation

• ICTs should also enhance empowerment and
  participation of the physically challenged and
  other disadvantaged groups of society

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Environment

• We recognize that there may be some perceptions
  about environmental ICT that relegate it to a
  lesser standing
• 1. Does it threaten
• a) poverty reduction?
• b) job creation?
• 2. Is it only about tree-hugging?
• 3. Is it somehow less important than simply ICT
  penetration?
• The answers are 1 No and No, 2 No and 3 No !

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Environment

• The environment commission is about monitoring,
  modelling and predicting risk to life, health,
  and quality of life when those human rights are
  threatened by
• flood, storm, seismic and volcanic activity,
  unsustainable agricultural practices,
  unsustainable land use, marginalization of
  indigenous populations, climate change, and so on

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Environment

• It is also about communicating those risks, by
  means of ICT-supported community involvement, the
  internet, ad-hoc networks, remote sensing, and
  exploring innovative uses of the traditional
  communications channels (such as wide-casting
  through mobile telephone networks and public
  media) when the environmental risk is extremely
  critical

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Environment

• Colleagues from Central America, Asia, Europe,
  and North America carried out a discourse on some
  of the best practices in good science and in
  community involvement. We will continue
  communicating
• We will reinforce the potential collaboration
  among our active participants this week, on risk
  analysis relating to land and water use and
  abuse, and seismic and volcanic activity for
  starters

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Environment

• We proposed to form a special section of IFIP
  Working Group 5.11 (Computers and Environment),
  possibly in collaboration with other IFIP WGs
  such as WG6.9 (Communication Systems for
  Developing Countries)

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Health

• 1. Healthcare is very information-intensive and
  has a very high MDG priority ? ICT has potential
  for high developmental impact in healthcare ?
  governments should put more emphasis on
  ehealthcare in national ICT strategies

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Health

• 2. There is much fragmentation and duplication
  in national health management information systems
  ? flexible integrated HMIS/HIS are needed,
  integrating manual and e-technologies and data
  from multiple data sources

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Health

• 3. ICT is now appropriate for patient-based
  information management also within health
  facilities (clinical use in healthcare
  provision), but there is a need for appropriate
  patient-based software and existing applications
  development efforts are fragmented
• 4. In appropriate software development, emphasis
  should be on Free and Open Source Software, open
  standards, integration and collaboration ? HELINA
  Collaboration Framework project

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Health

• 5. Local holistic health information systems
  capacity-building programmes including training
  for health professionals, university programmes
  and practice-oriented research must be
  developed and sustainably funded

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Social, ethical legal issues

• Input was obtained for future work by giving the
  participants an opportunity to indicate what
  legal, ethical and social problems they face with
  respect to ICT-development and what issues they
  wanted addressed by the commission.

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Social, ethical legal issues

• The Commission also set up a network of WITFOR
  2007 participants who want to join the knowledge
  exchange of our commission, so as to keep the
  work in Africa going (e.g. discussion list,
  possible future workshops in Africa, etc.) and
  have participants of WITFOR 2007 involved in the
  upcoming WITFOR activities. For this the
  participants listed their names and the topics /
  problems / challenges they are interested in.

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Social, ethical legal issues

• All the sessions were well attended and the
  speakers gave comprehensive and thought-provoking
  talks. All sessions concluded with meaningful
  and lively discussions.

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Social, ethical legal issues

• Further work will be done the following projects
• A project in Ethiopia on developing e-learning
  modules for the legal domain (human rights,
  intellectual property as first themes). In doing
  this, benefit from lessons learned with similar
  projects in developing countries among them, a
  project with Siberia.
• A project on identity theft regulation in South
  Africa. This is very important for states
  intending to maximise both e-commerce and
  e-government as full participation in these
  initiatives exposes personal information to
  exploitation by criminals.

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Social, ethical legal issues

• 3. The online portal on the MDGs will be enhanced
  and implemented.
• 4. The discussion on standards will continue with
  an emphasis on networking and collaboration
  between various states
• New work will begin on the issues raised by the
  participants such as ICTs and Human Rights, the
  cultural impact of ICTs and the formulation of
  codes of ethics for ICT professionals.