Paul Barera is Executive Director of RTN – Rwanda Telecentre Network. His organisation provides telecentre technology and related services, and it builds capacity of telecentre staff. In an interview with Fritz Habekuß, Paul talks about the role of ICTs in Rwanda. [Read more →]

The working group primarily focused on the issue of up-to-date telecommunication infrastructure and services not being available in remote rural areas. Although the telecommunication sector in developing countries has been growing tremendously in recent years such market failures still persist especially with broadband internet connection. They could however be overcome by policy and regulatory interventions. In order to find solutions to address these challenges three guiding questions were discussed within the group.

• What are the challenges and critical success factors that foster ICT access in rural areas?
• How could governments, the private sectors and development cooperation organisations best work together?
• How to ensure the transfer of policy and regulatory best practices?

[Read more →]

I hope you enjoyed the first day as much as I did. Our presenters and many participants shared their experiences and best practices on a wide range of topics and it all added up to a very successful day. If you missed any of the sessions, our weblog will be a great source of knowledge. One thing that surprised me most is the very active twittering that happened yesterday all over the day. Pierre mentioned it already in his interview; attendees (and many others) were tweeting like hell: posing questions, answering questions and sharing resources). [Read more →]

Daniel Annerose, CEO at Manobi, Salome Ganibe, Executive Director of the Asian Women in Co-operative Development Forum and Roxanna Samii, Manager, Web, Knowledge and Internal Communications at IFAD  presented exciting, practical project experience. [Read more →]

Pierre is Head of GTZ Sector Project ICT4D. The interview was done by Fritz Habekuß.

Fritz Habekuß: Pierre, what was your objective in inviting so many participants from a broad range of fields and backgrounds?

Pierre Lucante: We tried to invite people from several types of organisations, to get the right mix between German and international orgnanisations, between ministries, multinational and bilateral organisations, the private sector, partners in the developing countries and NGOs. For a topic like ICT it is very important to have a debate between all the stakeholders in order to get the right combination between different people. ICT4D is all about partnerships.

FH: Do you think ICT4D receives the attention it deserves?

PL: To my mindICT4D is mainly a means, a tool, not an objective in itself. If we look at what has been presented today, the real objective is a rural and economic development one. I think that one should show and demonstrate how ICT could serve these objectives.

FH: Did you already receive feedback about the conference?

PL: It is too early for a feedback about the conference itself. But I’m quite impressed to see so many tweets. It shows that there is a strong interest in ICT4D! It makes me really optimistic.

For people living in rural areas, „getting connected“ is a mean of „keeping in touch“, an opportunity to increase income, and a way of gaining better access to decentralised services and markets which are otherwise out of reach. In our Working Group, three issues were discussed:

• What are the main success factors and challenges in introducing ICT in rural areas?
• How to scale up successful practices?
• What is the role of the different stakeholders?

Outcomes: [Read more →]

ICTs are and social web does not always work as well as you expect it to do. For this reason our tweets in the right column do not update. So please check out our twitterfall or simply the hashtag #ictgtz.

Anton Mangstl from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and Valerie D’Costa from infoDev at The Worldbank gave an inspiring insight in the work of there organisations. This was a very valuable start into our conference.

Anton Mangstl

Director of the Office of Knowledge Exchange, Research and Extension, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

• We must raise the question on how to support producers in rural areas, Mangstl said. ICTs are a an instrument to do that. They provide market prices, weather forecast or financial services – thus they benefit the productivity of rural farmers and others along agricultural value chains. Provided with ICTs, farmers have the possibility to make informed [Read more →]

 Eighty high level experts will meet in Berlin to explore the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) for economic development in rural areas of developing countries.  Organized by GTZ on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), the conference participants will debate e-agriculture, ICT business innovation, ICT-backed financial service development, and universal access to ICT infrastructures. They will share project practice and experiences, analyse the impact of ICT policies and regulations, the benefits of ICT for local communities, investigate innovative business models, as well as the impact of new technologies.

 You are invited to virtually follow the discussion online during the conference, through GTZ’s ICT4D Blog: http://ict.ez-blogs.de/and Twitter using the #ICTGTZ tag. If you wish to comment on the posted summaries, you can register on the blog page. Registration is open to all.

[Read more →]