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ISTD
has been assisting member States to develop their National
Information and Communications Infrastructure (NICI) plans
and strategies as the guiding framework for ICT programme
planning and project development and implementation. So far,
more than 30 countries have either completed or at various
stages in the NICI process. We have also been developing national
policies on the management of geoinformation as part of National
Spatial Data Infrastructures (NSDI).
Recently,
ECA has moved to integrate the two sets of policies, arguing
that (1) the “geo” in geoinformation is only an
adjective and therefore should be treated as a subset of the
overall information infrastructure of a country, and (2) about
80% of the decisions involved in development planning and
programme implementation requires geoinformation content and
should be planned for at the start of the NICI process. Moreover,
geoinformation tools, especially Geographic Information Systems
(GIS), provide means for integrating data and information
from various sources for the implementation of the national
development goals and priorities that inform the NICI process.
However, NICI and NSDI are still being developed in parallel
at national levels, sometimes with little interaction between
the two groups of stakeholders. ECA is therefore launching
a new initiative to bring the member States in line with the
current thinking and integrate the two processes. Six NICI
countries have been selected for the initial run. These are
countries where the NICI documents have been finalised and
approved, with the NSDI process at various stages. Representatives
from the NICI and SDI communities have been invited from the
countries to a four-day working session in Addis Ababa, from
20th to 23rd November. During the working session, the NICI
and SDI task mangers will work together, while sharing experience
and learning from situations in other countries, to develop
the activity plan and road map for their various countries
to review and finalize their respective NICI plans to incorporate
SDI issues and components.
A secondary output of the working session will be a set of
structured guidelines for the NICI process that will incorporate
geoinformation from the onset to be used in future NICI development
programmes. The African Centre for Statistics and the Governance
and Public Administration Division are collaborating with
ISTD on this event, which is funded by the Government of Finland.
For more information, please contact Aida
Opoku-Mensah or Dozie
Ezigbalike. |
