Welcome to the WSIS Follow-up Conference on Access to Information and Knowledge for Development

The event is being held because libraries are at the heart of the Information Society and also play a fundamental role in our society. Information in the public domain should support the Information Society and is an essential element for the growth of the Information Society, creating an educated public, new jobs, business opportunities, and the advancement of sciences. Therefore, public institutions such as libraries and archives, museums, cultural collections and other community-based access points should be strengthened not only to promote the preservation of documentary records but also for free and equitable access to information.

It was for these reasons that the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) held in Tunis in 2005 and in Geneva 2003 recognised the role of libraries.

Bringing African librarians, documentalists, archivists and curators together here in Addis Ababa is to begin to seek ways and means of ensuring that we work in implementing the ECA-led African Information Society Initiative (AISI), through a renewed partnership in promoting both an information and knowledge society on the continent.

Consequently the Conference is divided into two events:

1. Workshop on Building of African Capacity to Implement the Outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society in the Sphere of Libraries and Access to Information and Knowledge; and
2. International Seminar on the Strategic Management and Use of Government Information in Africa.

These events are a collaborative effort between the ECA and IFLA Government Information and Official Publications Section, and the Committee on Free Access to Information and Freedom of Expression. Workshop will capitalize on the immediate post-Tunis era to work with African librarians and information specialists to develop and agree upon an action framework which will serve as a blueprint towards implementing the recommendations of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) on the continent. The Seminar, which will be held later in the week, will address issues surrounding access to government information in Africa. This comes at a particularly good time for the ECA, which has several programmes in place to develop e-government strategies. Additionally, a number of African governments are putting priority in this area.

In the context of the African Information Society Initiative, the ECA has worked to mobilize regional stakeholders to help develop an inclusive Information Society on the continent. To this end, the ECA has played a leading role in coordinating African policymakers and other stakeholders in the WSIS process:

The ECA also played an active role at the Geneva and Tunis phases of WSIS. At Tunis, the ECA and its partners organized numerous parallel events, including workshops and conferences for regional policymakers and other key stakeholders. ECA, in collaboration with other regional commissions, organized two round tables on “Building Regional Partnerships for the Information Society” and “Women in the Information Society: Building a Gender Balanced Knowledge-Based Economy”.

To highlight its leading role in the Information Society, and to ensure that its voice was heard in the WSIS process, the library sector organized itself on a global scale prior to each phase of the Summit. The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) organized two pre-WSIS conferences to coincide with the Geneva and Tunis phases. The first, titled Libraries @ the heart of the Information Society, was held in Geneva in 2003. The second included two events held at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt to feed into the Tunis phase:

1. Colloquium on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning 6 to 9 November, resulted in the document Beacons of the Information Society : the Alexandria Proclamation on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning
2. Libraries - the Information Society in Action, 10-11 November, agreed upon the Alexandria Manifesto on Libraries, the Information Society in Action.

African librarians and other information services should in principal be the architects and custodians of the Information Society on the continent; and, as we move beyond Tunis, the crucial role that librarians, archivists and other information services play will become even more important. However, the sector was largely absent from the WSIS debates, and played only a minor role in influencing the outcomes of the Summit.

These services perform a unique function in the development of an inclusive Information Society in their capacity as content managers, providing access to value-added information and knowledge to help advance socio-economic development. They are inclusive in orientation and provide professionally organized access to information and knowledge resources to help advance knowledge sharing, preservation of local knowledge and content, indigenous languages, content management and development, access to the Internet, and many other information concerns which are indispensable to ensuring the acquisition of knowledge by Africans.

The WSIS recommendations should thus serve as a blueprint to the sector to contribute fully to the development of an inclusive Information Society on the continent.

To assist us along in this process, ECA has initiated a number of measurable activities and plans. In the week to come you will hear a lot about our AVLIN network, the AISI, CODI, our virtual learning initiative and many others. We invite you to comment on these and offer us suggestions as to how to better optimize our resources with the goal of assisting you as well as ourselves in accomplishing our knowledge management and development goals.

Following the Conference, it is expected that participants will become “champions” for the sector by influencing policy at the national and regional levels, and will work in a coordinated manner to spearhead future regional actions in this area. The Conference also hopes to foster a network of information professionals for the promotion of greater access to governmental and international information in Africa through the development of the Access to Information Network-Africa.

It is hoped that this Conference will launch a series of workshops and seminars to link the activities of the African library sector with the WSIS recommendations, and monitor progress on the Action Framework. During the next step, the ECA will partner with the IFLA Africa Section, UNESCO and other development partners to organize the High-Level Regional Colloquium on Information Literacy and Lifelong Learning, which will feed into a larger global effort in this area, scheduled for 2008.

As such, during the Conference we need to keep in mind the following questions:

I am pleased to note that we will be discussing these issues and more with you the stakeholders as well as the IFLA.

I wish you all good deliberations and a pleasant stay.