Pre-Conference ICT Workshop: Issues and Recommendations

Rapporteurs Summary Report,
Monday, 4 March

By Vincent Nwanma, Official ADFIII Rapporteur

Information and Communication Technology experts at a pre-conference workshop Sunday and Monday agreed that the impact of ICT cuts across the various aspects of regional integration and thus has the potential of accelerating the move to integrate Africa's markets and raise the continent's competitiveness in the global economy.

Participants analyzed the various dimensions of ICT, its current level of development in African countries and the requirements for its optimal utilization in regional integration.

They observed however that the continent's ICT capability is currently low, being constrained by a myriad of factors, including inadequate funding, poor physical infrastructures, weak regulatory and legislative frameworks, dearth of human resources, and lack of ICT policies.

To address these problems, the workshop made the following recommendations, among others:

• Establishment of working groups on ICT at the national level using the framework of the African Information Society Initiative;
• Introduction and harmonization of ICT policies at the national and sub-regional levels;
• Sensitization of the citizenry on the uses and applications of ICT through seminars;
• Liberalization of Africa's telecommunications sector;
• Strengthening local capacity for ICT by instituting exchanges of experts and specialists;
• Promoting the development of Internet services in communities and at the regional level, and
• Setting up an Internet-based, regularly updated databank on African resources.