SCENARIO: FINAL PLENARY
ADF 28 October 1999

1. Closing Remarks by the Executive Secretary

Excellencies
Ladies and Gentlemen:

We now begin our final session of the first African Development Forum. The Forum has been designed to deepen the consensus-building process of policy-makers by including a broad range of pertinent interests. If you have been a close reader of the programme, you are probably frustrated because you could not be in six places at once. It is the aim of this session to bring as much of the Forum together as possible. It is an impossible task, but a diligent group of rapporteurs, caucus leaders, and representatives of interests have worked hard to bring you as good a summary as is now possible.

We have several components in this final session. The first component will reflect the view in my opening remarks that youth are the critical generation in the coming Information Age. So it is fitting that we hear from youth first. As you know, they are one of the five cross-cutting interest groups which have been such an active part of this Forum. I want to thank all these groups for their active participation over the past days.

My experience is that youth groups are the most democratic of any, so it is not surprising that there is a whole delegation of youth who will make rapid-fire reports to you. I welcome this group and welcome back to the microphone, their moderator, Heba Ramzy, who is a young leader of IDCT who has been working with clubs of young people in Egypt.

2. Heba Ramzy and 5 youth speak for a total of about 15 minutes or less.

3. Introduction of the Rapporteaur's Report presented by Prof. Clement Dzidonu --

I would like to thank all six of the presenters from the Youth for their excellent presentation. We very much appreciate the participation of this important segment of Africa's future.

We now have a consolidated report from the rapporteurs, to be presented by a representative of this dedicated group. The rapporteurs, seated in the dias in the row below, have worked more than diligently to capture the substance of this conference. I call upon the rapporteur's representative. He is Professor Clement Dzidonu, a man with a very impressive set of initials after his name, who is President and CEO of the International Institute for Information Technology in Accra. Professor, the podium is yours.

4. Presentation by Professor Dzidonu. Expected time: 20-25 minutes.

5. Introduction of Karima and her report on Process

Thank you very much, Professor, for an outstanding report. Our congratulations go to you and to all the rapporteurs for their valuable contributions to this Forum.

I now turn to my colleague, Dr. Karima Bounemra Ben Soltane, Director of the ECA's Development Information Services Division, who has led the preparations for this Forum along with a wonderfully dedicated staff who will be properly thanked a little later in this session. I would now like Dr. Ben Soltane to speak with us about the process from this Forum, particularly as to how the ICT issues will be carried from here.

6. Dr. Ben Soltane speaks for about 10 minutes.

7. Discussion

As Professor Dzidonu indicated, he and my colleagues in the Secretariat would welcome your comments, in whatever detail you wish, on the substantive conclusions of the rapporteurs. I am sure they will help strengthen the final report of this Forum, and that is why we ask for these comments in writing, to be sure we know your views as accurately as possible.

But we now wish to open up discussion for about 15 minutes in case there are recommendations, that you would like to suggest, on the Process of Follow-up. I would like to hear as many of these as possible, so you will understand if I hurry up any commentaries that run more than a minute or two.

The floor is open.

8. Introduction of ITU Thank you very much for your constructive suggestions on follow-up process.

I would now like to invite Brahima Sanou, representative of ITU to address us. As you know, ITU is an important partner in this Forum and is a key actor in the delivery of infrastructure. My colleague from ITU: the microphone is yours to give us remarks on the significance of this Forum from ITU's standpoint.

9. Sanou speaks for 5 minutes.

10. Introduction of the GK II people

It is fitting that we now hear from leaders of the Global Knowledge, particularly since this Forum is not only in and for Africa, it is also one of the important streams flowing into the Global Knowledge Process.

I invite, for relatively brief interventions, three active leaders of this process, who, I am glad, have been active participants in this Forum. I shall introduce all of them now, so that they can speak, one after the other, in one seamless flow of information (!)

First, Mr. Philip Karp, Manager of Knowledge Products and Outreach from the World Bank Institute.

Next, Mr. Stephen Roman, Director of Global Information Services of the British Council, and an active member of the Global Knowledge partnership.

Finally Ms. Rinalia Abdul Rahim, of the National IT Council Secretariat of Malaysia, who is here representing her Government. The Government of Malaysia will be hosting the Second Global Knowledge Conference, March 7-10, 2000 in Kuala Lumpur.

11. GKII people speak for a total of 10 minutes.

12. Executive Secretary's closing remarks: From the Podium

Thank you very much. It is a pleasure to collaborate with the GKII process. I am pleased that through this Forum you have added evidence that Africa is active in this field and wants to be an active player in the global forums on ICT.

Before I start my concluding remarks, I want to make sure that we recognize the extraordinarily dedicated staff who have brought to bear terrific skill in putting this Forum together. There are too many people who deserve special recognition to mention each by name, but I will name three. First, Dr. Ben Soltane provided the organizational umbrella and scope of vision to foster this whole enterprise.

Second, we are especially grateful to Ms. Kate Wild, who with support from IDRC, has devoted her last year to this effort. She directed this Forum by conceptualizing the program, putting it together piece by piece, and like a good shepherd, lead it all to a common destination.

Finally, I want to recognize Nancy Hafkin, a true pioneer of networking development information and ICT, who was talking and acting on ICT in Africa before just about anyone and whose dedication, enthusiasm, hard professional work and contributions have been exemplary.

I invite you to thank these outstanding professionals and all the people and organizations which sponsored, laboured and collaborated on this Forum.

Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

This summary session indicates to me what a rich and useful experience this has been. We dealt with fundamentals; we had a broad participation; we were low on rhetoric and high on information; and we aimed at actions.

I want to mention just a few of the highlights of this Forum that are worth underscoring in this final session.

First, the promise of ICT. It is immense. It has profound ramification in education, commerce, bringing our societies and nations closer together, and relating us to the world.

Second, it is not a panacea. While it requires lots of human and financial investment, there are partners willing to share the load. There are proven approaches, and there are new and unproven approaches. So the policy choices and the investment approaches will present policy and decision-makers with the need to make, what could turn out to be, profound choices on the path to development. Choices which not only need to be made, but to be intelligently guided in implementation.

Third, we learned a lot about content as well as hardware. Content in health, in education, in e-commerce, in cultures for peace, in linkages of civil society, business and so many other topics. There is surely African content, but, as President Konaré so wisely underscored, we must be true to ourselves…. We must produce as well as consume.

Fourth, I am struck by how urgently it is becoming for Africa's leaders to understand what is at stake in decisions being made outside of Africa and how vital it is that we be prepared with regional positions and collective force to fend for our interests in the global decision arenas.

Fifth, I am impressed with how new forms of communication and information management can aid democratizing society. Particularly, with new ideas on the enabling and liberalizing roles of government, there is every possibility, if we are wise, to allow the Information Society to be a very broad-based one. That is why I am so pleased that we explored together the widespread involvement of youth, of women, of poor, of rural as well as of the elites whose access to ICT is not in question. There are implications, of course, in how ICT is managed. And all those implications are to include the broadest possible spectrum of African society into the creation and management of ICT systems.

Sixth, I must say that I am impressed with the level of talent in this Forum. We have here leaders in so many fields who clearly are the hope of tomorrow's Africa. I heard very little about how we are only in this for profit, or only in this for hardware. There was a broad, informed and often passionate desire to really make a difference in Africa's development with the aid of ICT. Our work together is a chance to help hasten the day when the intelligent ICT community has more of a role in shaping society.

Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

This new Forum is meant to reflect on a regional basis the kind of consensus building and broad policy consultation which has been singled out in so many cases at the community and national level. I think we learn from each other about how to improve the process of policy creation so that it also imbeds within it the process of policy consensus.

Some initiatives are low risk, low reward. I already feel that the Forum is a high reward enterprise. The reward is in finding better ways to discuss policies and to stimulate national actions. I am pleased that so many of you have taken the time to tell me about what this Forum has meant in your own thinking and planned actions.

Our next Forum will be on HIV/AIDS. This, like ICT, is a fundamental issue facing Africa. Noah Samara mentioned the HIV/AIDS issues and quoted some soul-stirring statistics. He referred to the problem of orphans caused by the death of AIDS victims. The figures are that today there are 8 million such orphans and that the consensus projections are for that figure to rise to 40 million AIDS orphans in only five years.

When, for the first time, Africa's Ministers of Finance and Planning met together in this room last April, we had a presentation by the director of the UN AIDS programme. It was dramatic. The Ministers included in their resolution their view that the HIV/AIDS issue is now a central one for planning development in Africa.

We have talked about how central youth are to the future of development in Africa, especially ICT. I have to observe that HIV/AIDS is the biggest challenge facing these youth. The challenge has community, economic and social ramifications which are profound. Those ramifications are leading national planners to adjust their thinking, just as it is pushing our international partners to greatly adjust their programs.

There have been a number of policy conferences in Africa on the HIV/AIDS challenge, and there will be more. The Forum next year will make its special contribution by raising the level of attention to more senior levels of government and the private sector. It will bring together the private sector, civil society and research communities to meet with officials. It will give special attention to the best cases of managing with the challenges presented to society's at large by the disease. Like this Forum, there will be opportunities for considerable learning across countries and disciplines.

At the same time, there will be an important ICT component in next year's Forum since communications and new networking of policy information is a key part of the successful approaches being developed to curb the spread of HIV/AIDS.

Indeed, this Forum has demonstrated that any issue of sufficient importance to be a topic of the African Development Forum must have include ICT experience on that issue and implications of ICT in the policy recommendations that emerge from the discussions. ICT, therefore, will become a permanent feature of this Forum. ICT will also become a cross-cutting feature of all of ECA's programmes.

Excellencies,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

I want to thank each of you for participating in this initial Forum. You have made it a gathering of significance for the continent. We look forward to a continuation of this process. ECA will be both proactive in helping Africa attain its goal of becoming an Information Society. I also want us to be constructively reactive to your suggestions for helping Africa meet the challenges of globalization in an Information Age.

I wish you a safe journey home whether you travel by mechanical means or virtually.

This first African Development Forum is concluded.

Thank you.