Press Release No. 11/1997

Conference Of Ministers Meeting
ECA Forges Ahead With African Information Society Initiative

Addis Ababa, 3 May 1997: ECA will be taking its leadership role in building an African information superhighway one step further when African Ministers responsible for economic and social development and planning meet at the headquarters of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) on 5-8 May 1997.

The ministers and African experts will consider a report on the implementation of the African Information Society Initiative (AISI).

Key attention will be given to the role information and communications technologies in promoting trade and investment. A major symposium -- organised by ECA together with the Global Information Infrastructure Commission and scheduled to be broadcast live by satellite on Multichoice DSTV by MNET -- will take place on 7 May, involving senior industry chiefs.

AISI has its origins in the African Symposium on Telematics for Development organised by the ECA in 1995, in cooperation with the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the International Development Resource Centre (IDRC) working through the African Networking Initiative.

The report notes that since then AISI was endorsed by the Organisation of African Unity, African Ministers of Telecommunications and some 29 partner organisations involved in African development.

Another meeting organized by the ECA in 1996 decided that some benchmarks, articulated around a minimum prerequisite consisting of the availability of internet connectivity in each African country, were needed to mark progress over the following two years, according to the report.

It contains a policy awareness project on the dissemination of the AISI framework in Africa and beyond. With government officials, international and regional organisations interested in information technology as its target groups, the project is widely distributed in its original and packaged forms for different audiences in major languages of the region.

The report points out that ECA worked with the World Bank to produce a video programme entitled "Building Internet to Ethiopia" as part of its series on "Building Africa's Information Highway" -- a focus on success stories using information and communication technology from Egypt, Mozambique, Senegal and South Africa.

The Ministers will also note that ECA has developed an AISI Web site currently housed at Bellanet, in Ottawa, Canada.

The report makes it clear that the democratization of access to information is one of the focus areas advocated by AISI. Moving access from relatively wealthy urban centres to disadvantaged communities is the target.

A major activity here, the report continues, is the Acacia Initiative being formulated by IDRC in support of AISI. It evolves around the following:

• An appropriate approach to language/literacy content development, and the development or conversion of content into usable electronic forms;
• Definition of learning, evaluation and impact assessment mechanisms
• through which best practices could be fed into future projects;
• Impact of new technologies on gender.
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A number of background documents on the Conference of Ministers and other ECA matters are available at the ECA World Wide Web site (http://www.un.org/depts/eca).