WSIS ACADEMIA RESEARCH NETWORKS ARN

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WSIS ACADEMIA RESEARCH NETWORKS (ARN)
African Regional Preparatory Conference for the
WSIS GKP Africa Regional Meeting Multi-stakeholder
Partnership Accra International Conference
Center Nurturing Research and Development in
the Information Society
Accra, 30-31 January, 2005
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CHALLENGES OF ACADEMIA

• A nation's ability to fully develop an
  Information Society depends on the capacity of
  its people to be educated, to assimilate, and to
  process complex information
• Aida Opoku-Mensah, OIC, DISD-ECA

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CHALLENGES OF ACADEMIA

• Intellectual leadership through
  knowledge-building activities
• Provide/develop IT expertise at national,
  sub-regional and global levels
• Serve as Incubator for ICT initiatives
• Engage in collaborative research activities on
  the continent and assert their intellectual role
• Provide cutting-edge solutions/ Applications

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AISI ACADEMIA

• AISI higher education and research objective is
  to
• act as vehicle for pooling national and
  regional intellectual and human resources to help
  contribute to research and development efforts in
  the continent.

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AISI ACADEMIA

• Higher education (HE) community constitues the
  intellectual backbone to lead Africa into the
  digital age
• HE to act as a vehicle for pooling national and
  regional intellectual and human resources to help
  contribute to research and development efforts in
  the continent.
• Africa Learning Network (ALN) created during
  ADF99 In re-affirming the role of Academia,
  Universities and Research Institutions in the
  Information Society

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AISI ACADEMIA

• ALN PILLARS
• Schoolnet Africa Support of national and
  regional schools networking activities. 31
  countries in over 300 schools
• OOSYNET Youth Networking Initiative to address
  the needs of Out-Of-School Youth at the national
  and regional level
• VarsityNET Promote connectivity, Research and
  Development in HEI

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VARSITYNET PILOT PROJECTSResearch Development
With Ford Foundation

• Partners Addis Ababa University (AAU) and the
  Inter-University Council of East Africa (IUCEA).
• AAU team
• Research on a pilot application in the area of
  e-government and the use of the Amharic local
  language
• web-based, multilingual and multi-alphabet,
  customizable document exchange platform
• to be used by local and central governments in
  the country
• The use of OSS has opened AAU up to various
  opportunities in software development

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VARSITYNET PILOT PROJECTSResearch Development
With Ford Foundation

• IUCEA Universities of Nairobi (Kenya), Makerere
  (Uganda), Dar-es-Salaam (Tanzania) and the Jomo
  Kenyatta University of Science and Technology
  (Kenya)
• Pilot application that supports the International
  Fellowships Programme (IFP)
• To support Inter-University Students Exchange
  Programme for East Africa.

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WSIS ACADEMIARESEARCH NETWORK

• To reflect upon their role in the Information
  society and sensitize them to the WSIS Process
• Identify their vision of an information society,
  and their involvement beyond the mere usage of
  ICTs 
• Vision Retreat on the theme Intellectual
  Leadership and the African Information society
  Initiative What Role for Africas Academic
  Community.
• Academia Research Network was proposed
• Discussion list launched
• Network created during WSIS I in Geneva

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WSIS ACADEMIA

• Organise Research Network brainstorming 9-11 june
  
• Attendees - 45 Academics and Researchers
• Reverse the absence of programmes on policy
  research on an African-driven information society
  for Africans
• Determine strategies of research on policy issues
• Review trends in the Information Society
• Identify I.S research topics
• Establish thematic networks and propose an Action
  Plan

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WSIS ACADEMIA (ctd)

• ARN1 African languages and content development
  in the cyberspace
• ARN2 Measuring the impact of the African
  Information Society
• ARN3 ICT Industrialization in Africa
• ARN4 Creating Enabling environment in the
  Information society

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ICT Industrialisation

• First meeting Maputo 13-15-august, 2004 7
  participants (Ethiopia, Tanzania, Mozambique)
• Advising countries on more strategic choices and
  potentials for ICT industrialization and
  manufacturing capacity
• Proposing a regional integration programme in the
  area of ICT industrialization
• Assessing good practices and lessons learned from
  around the world
• Designing public-private partnership mechanisms

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Enabling Environment

• Dakar 08-09- September 2004 15 participants
  (SA, Cote-dIvoire, Senegal, US)
• Assess obstacles and shortcoming to development
  and access to the information and services
• Assess conflict and competition issues of
  standards at local, national, regional and
  international levels (e-fraud)
• Assess the abusive forms of use of information
  pertaining to the public domain
• Assess ICT local needs (infrastructures,
  training, research, ) while accounting for
  specific vulnerable groups

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African languages in Cyberspace

• Bamako 23-25 September 2004 10 participants
  (Mali, South Africa, Nigeria, Senegal, ECA)
• Develop Models for the use of African languages
  in the cyberspace
• Develop latin and non Latin keyboard interface
  for the use of African languages
• Register African language set of characters in
  the UNICODE system
• Develop multilingual electronic dictionary
• Develop Machine Assisted Translation (MAT)

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Information Society Indicators

• Tunis 30sept.-01 October 2004 10 participants
  (Tunisia, Rwanda, Morocco, ECA)
• Define the referential of indicators
• Define the indicators of penetration and impacts
• Assess the indicators of penetration and impacts
  in the context of Africa
• Define and assess the Information Society
  penetration index

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WAY FORWARD

• VarsityNet
• Produce user manual of OpenCMs in Amharic
• Extend the OSS research activities to Medical
  Information Systems in Ethiopia
• Extend the e-government Platform to the East
  Africa Member State Universities
• Promote Partnership in RD
• WSIS Academia Research Network
• Review research activities in Accra
• Fine-tune methodologies and findings
• Promote Partnership in RD

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THANK YOU !