Workshop on Innovative Application of ICTS in Local Governance in Developing Countries, 7 - 9 June 2004, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Nudging African Countries Towards ICT
By Ayenew Haile Selassie

“It is very easy to look at ICTs as technology, which puts a lot of people off. You have to look at the three dimensions in ICT: the Information, the Communication and the Technology. You are thinking of people, organisation and the dynamics of organisation, and how this can be facilitated through the technology.” These words, slightly paraphrased, were spoken by Dr Kadmiel Wekwete, Director of the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), during the opening of the Workshop on Innovative Application of ICTS IN Local Governance in Developing Countries, which took place in Addis Ababa, 7-9, June, 2004.

The Workshop, which was jointly organized by the UNECA, UNCDF and IDRC, was, according to Dr Wekwete, a result of the discussions on the importance of bringing together professionals for a dialogue on ICT & GOVERNANCE.

The workshop is organized at an opportune moment when decentralisation is becoming a la mode in the continent, with many countries working towards strengthening local governments to which they are ceding lots of responsibilities to them. There are 441 local governments in Senegal, for example, according to Prof Yero Sylla, executive secretary of SAFEFOD, a Senegalese NGO, represented by him at the workshop. Uganda has 74 higher local governments, and in Ethiopia lots of authority is passed by the federal government to the nine regional governments, which in turn are divided in to hundreds of Woreda Administrations, each with degrees of authorities delegated to them. The issue of local government is so close to the heart of many countries that some, like Uganda and Senegal, have ministries of Local Governments.

The importance of local governments arises from the fact that they are closer to the people than central governments and, if properly equipped, are more likely to address the problems of the people and work towards the success of both NEPAD and the MDGs.

ICTs, as a means to an end or as a tool, have a lot to offer for the performance of local governments and the fulfilment of governance, which is an element of NEPAD. And the academia is supposed to do researches that will help realise this, which was one of the objectives a workshop subsequently organised on Academia Research Network.

“To give ICTs more human perspective, to make them more people friendly, we have to bring them closer to people who manage people. … Without the marriage of ICT and governance, we can not make ICTs serve people,” said Ms Karima Bounerma Ben Soltane, Director of DISD, UNECA, emphasising the role ICT has to play in governance.

This marriage, though slow, is already taking place in some parts of Africa, South Africa being in the forefront in taking advantages of the potentials of the tool, and Egypt closely following. The Ugandan Ministry of Local Government has an Information Systems section under the Policy and Planning Division, which is working to make the potentials of ICT available to the local authorities who “are yearning to use ICT,” according to Constantine Bitawayiki, principal information technology scientist and planner at the Ministry of Local Government of Uganda. The Local Government information and Communications System, in which the World Bank is helping, has already been applied in 21 of the 74 local governments in the country, Constantine said.

Dr Petros Olango, the deputy speaker of the house of people’s representatives of Ethiopia had said during a recent workshop in Tanzania, that not only would the Ethiopian parliament have its own website, just like its Tanzanian counterpart, but that even most of the major ministries would have local area networks that would be accessible to the parliamentarians. He had also expressed his government’s intention to have 600 districts all over the country that would have Internet access.

According to a paper presented by Aida Opoku-Mensah, ICT team leader at DISD, a survey has identified 99 local government web sites in 26 African countries, most of which belonged to regional states and municipalities. The same paper indicated that only 26 African countries have ICT policies, and 13 others are in process, although much fewer is the number of countries that have implementation plans for the policies.

Roland McGill defines local governance as the concept of the quality of relationships between governed and governors that yield meaningful and local relevant socio economic development, and sees ICT as an aid to the fulfilment of that. The challenge facing the continent, and that was deliberated by the workshop on governance was the subject of the deployment of ICT for local development by “integrating the T (Technology) with the I & C (Information and Communication).”

For one reason or another use of ICTs in the continent is still rather slow. In Zambia, Ethiopia and many other African countries, available PCs are used for little more than word processing and excel. In Senegal two studies that were done seven years apart arrived at the same conclusion: negligible use of ICT in the management of local governments. Where infrastructure and other related issues are moderately resolved, ICTs still find little use because of the absence of local content that is both understandable and relevant to Africans.

Laurent Elder, IDRC programme officer, sees the major problem in African governments, which, he says, express their desire to be part of the information society and say that they want their population to benefit from ICTs, but do not provide the enabling environment. “The technology is there, and it is cheap. There are technological innovations allowing easy access, like WIFI, WIMAX and Voice over IP, but we cannot use these technologies in Africa because policies and regulations do not allow this,” he said.

“Finger pointing is not the solution,” comments Ms Bounerma. Telecom companies are a big source of income for African countries, hence their hesitation to liberalise the market. “In the west they have not privatised and liberalised overnight,” she says. “It is worth taking sometime to consider how to open the telecom market to competition. The private sector can do better. We have to analyse why they are not coming out more proactively. No finger pointing, we only need to find out the problem.”

Uganda has had a taste of the fruits of the involvement of the private sector n the telecommunications sector. In four years after allowing mobile telephone operators, Celtel and MTN have helped increase the service by 400 per cent.

Ms Bounerma says that if governments did not understand they could be helped, but “the academia have not done their part to make things clear and help governments to make the right decision.”
The African academia that were brought together by the ECA for the Academia Network workshop, most of whom are already working on ECA supported projects, have left Addis Ababa with responsibilities of a number of essential research topics piled on their shoulders. A lot is expected to come out of their joint efforts.

Making ICT Useful for Development
By Ayenew Haile Selassie

It was March 2003, and the world was holding its breath and waiting in suspense for the news when America would imminently wage war on Sadam's Iraq. Scores of people who were in Kyoto, Japan, to attend the Third World Water Forum, had escaped the tense moment and gone to visit the Temple of the Thousand Buddhas. While they were marveling at the hundreds of bronze statues of the saint, one man heard a beep on his mobile phone. It was a message, a mobile news service from Cable News Network- THE BOMBING OF IRAQ HAD JUST STARTED. This man, who did not have to sit in front of a TV set or carry around a radio to get the news, stopped everyone, the ones he knew and he did not, and broke the news of the war, with more pride than shock because of the technology he had in his hands. It was as though he was George W. Bush himself, and had just given the order for the war.

Medical doctors in Uganda are practicing with small hand held computers through which they wish to exchange health related data and information. The gadget has the capacity to connect to the internet, should the service be available in the area, which the doctors are trying to arrange in a pilot project they have embarked on. While they wait for the opportunities to use the machine at its full potentials, they are basking in the sense of prestige its possession has created, according to Dr Patrick Okello, who is director of this project on health information network.

Good old Information is at its zenith in today's world, which it has claimed for itself. Possession of information and the means by which it could be conveyed or communicated are at once a cause of dignity, happiness as well as security and development- for those who know what to do with what they have. The issue for Africa today is how to make Information and Communication Technologies available (be it radio, mobile phones, or the whole gamut) as well as how to mainstream them into the continents development and poverty reduction agenda.

Mona Afifi, ICT Specialist with the UNCDF said, "We know that the technology is here to stay. So if you are forgotten today, you are going to be forgotten tomorrow."

"Unless we are to involve the machingas," said a participant at the recent ICT workshop for Tanzanian parliamentarians, "we could not progress." His argument was that such people could intervene in ways that the intellectuals could not imagine. Machingas are people who carried around the goods that they sell, and ICTs need to help them sell their products more easily and faster, according to this person- like Ugandan farmers are today exploiting mobile phones.

For Afifi people should always be central in all debates or initiatives related to ICTs, because it is they who are going to use them to make government more efficient, who understand that there are plenty of opportunities in government, health, education, or to generate income. "We involve people to solve their own problems," she said.

She tells with amazement the story of a Jordanian ostrich farmer "in the middle of the desert", who had access to the internet where he was and was able to boost his weakening business because he was able to use the technology to find a market, a thing which he could not have done by other means. Karima Bounerma Ben Soultane, director of DISD at the UNECA, could barely hide her emotions when she spoke of her encounter with a blind man using PowerPoint.

In the developed world, increasing use of ICT is having direct and immediate impacts in the economy. As more and more information is exchanged at greater ease and speed, ever-decreasing amounts of physical goods have to be transported. Walmarts, which are responsible for 30pc of retail trade in the USA, have set up information networks with their suppliers. These networks, according to Dr Michael Gurstein, visiting professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology, has been so established that a good amount of the commodities could reach the consumer before they are even delivered to the warehouses. He says that ICTs have transformed the way all kinds of business are conducted. Going home after some years in Africa, Torvald Akesson, Swedish ambassador to Tanzania, noticed with wonderment that on-line booking had cleared most of the offices of travel agencies from the streets of his country.

In these early years of the 21st century, Africa finds itself at a definitive juncture either to continue in disease and poverty or to turn around and prosper; ICTs are proving themselves very fast as indispensable tools of development to achieve the latter.

If a Ugandan farmer could use his mobile to sell his maize, if a Jordanian farmer could have access to the internet in the middle of the desert and if a blind Ethiopian could comfortably use PowerPoint, and, in the words of Afifi, "if we have vision that ICT has infinite possibilities, then the vision will drive us to explore how ICT application will allow society to develop."