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Information society summit kicks off in Tunis ECA Press Release No. 20/2005 Tunis, 14 November 2005 – About 11,000 participants from all walks of life - including heads of states and governments, representatives of the private/public sector and civil society - are due to attend the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) which will take place in Tunis from 16 to 18 November 2005. The second phase is aimed at reaching agreements on the outstanding and contentious issues of financing the information society and Internet Governance. "The road to Tunis entails a process of monitoring and evaluation of the progress of feasible actions laid out in the Geneva Plan of Action. We have been monitoring the concrete set of deliverables that needed to be achieved by November 2005." says Ms. Aida Opoku-Mensah, Officer-in-Charge at the Economic Commission for Africa's (ECA), Development Information Services Division. In this regard, ECA will be presenting a report, "Benchmarking the Plan of Action of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Africa", which details the efforts made to coordinate the involvement and participation of Member States in the WSIS process. Ms. Opoku-Mensah, notes that the analysis shows that although Africa has made improvements in some key areas, such as the policy environment, "community level and rural access should become top of the agenda for Africa to bridge the digital gap between rural and urban centres." She adds that the aim should be for Africa to eventually embed ICT within all its socio-economic sectors. Other areas that need improvement include Internet Governance issues that examine Africa’s capacity to manage the Internet from a technical, policy and economic viewpoint. In preparation for the Tunis phase, ECA held the African Regional Preparatory Conference in Accra, Ghana in February 2005, which brought together over 2,000 African ICT practitioners. They held discussions on an African-led roadmap for Africa's Regional Plan of Action on the Knowledge Economy (ARAPKE). "In Tunis, we hope that this roadmap, which is time-bound and very specific, will be better fine-tuned" She says, adding that specifically, Africans have been discussing the contentious issue of Internet Governance and have agreed on a common position before the official Summit kicks-off. Parallel events, including high-level panel discussions, will be held in collaboration with UN Regional Commissions and other partners in the ICT community. ECA's new Executive Secretary, Mr. Abdoulie Janneh, will feature in the panel debates. The key focus of these events will be to concretize future collaboration, especially with respect to the role of ICTs in achieving the MDGs in Africa. A number of exhibitions showcasing and sharing information on ICT solutions will be on display at the 'ICT4all' exhibition. ECA's exhibition will demonstrate the commission's various services and products aimed at harnessing ICT for development. ECA is sponsoring the Highway Africa News Agency to ensure media coverage of Africans participating in WSIS in the form of a daily print and online newspaper. In addition, collaboration with the World Association of Community Radio (AMARC) online broadcasting will be provided by ECA in collaboration with the Highway Africa News Agency (HANA) and an ECA film crew will shoot a documentary on the process. The first phase of WSIS took place in Geneva, Switzerland from 10 to 12 December 2003, where 175 countries adopted a Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action. For more information on the events, media coverage and other updates, please visit the ECA Conference website at: http://www.uneca.org/disd In Tunis, contact: Mercy
Wambui, Communication Officer – Email mwambui@uneca.org Issued by the ECA Communication
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