ECA and its partners building ICT measurement capacity in Africa

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ECA and its partners building ICT measurement capacity in Africa

Addis Ababa, 13 July 2009 (ECA) - A two-week training course on “Measuring ICT Use and Access in Households and Business” opened in Addis Ababa today to build the capacity of African National Statistical Offices (NSOs) in measuring ICTs.

The main objective of the training is to strengthen the capacities of the NSOs in the African region to produce national statistics on the access and use of ICT in households and by individuals, as well as on ICT use in business and the ICT sector. The ICT statistics and indicators will allow Governments to elaborate and evaluate their ICT policies for development and to take measures to bridge the digital divide within and between countries.

The first week (13-17 July) of the course will deliver the “Training Course on Measuring ICT Access and Use by Households and Individuals” and the second week (20-24 July), the “Training Course on the Production of Statistics on the Information Economy”. The courses are based on training material developed by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in the framework of their work as members of the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development. At the occasion of the training course, the third phase of ECA’s Scan-ICT programme will be launched. The aim of the 3rd phase is to build capacity for National Statistical Offices to collect ICT statistics.

Opening the workshop, Ms. Aida Opoku-Mensah, Director of the ICT, Science and Technology Division (ISTD) of the ECA stressed on the critical importance of measuring ICTs for development and the vital role that this initiative plays in supporting ECA’s ICT programme. She pointed out that ECA, through the African Information Society Initiative (AISI), has been engaged in addressing the continent’s Information Society development challenges since 1996. She stressed that “ECA strongly believes that any ICT measurement exercise should be linked to national ICT policy development process so as to provide the necessary baseline data as well as monitoring/evaluating progress made”. As a result, she said, ECA put great emphasis on ICT measurement since the inception of the AISI.

Ms. Aida Opoku-Mensah also elaborated in depth on ECA’s ICT measurement programme known as Scan-ICT, which was launched in November 2000 as a collaborative project between ECA and the Acacia programme of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), with financial support from the European Union (EU) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Co-operation (NORAD). The second phase was fully supported by the Government of Finland. Scan-ICT monitors the penetration, impact and effectiveness of ICT applications in pilot countries across Africa, providing added value to the AISI implementation at the national, regional and global levels. In addition, Scan‑ICT provides an opportunity to build capacity in Africa ‑ the capacity for Africa to influence ICT investments, to extend their impact, to develop sound policies and to encourage the development of made in Africa solutions, applications and content. Ms. Aida Opoku-Mensah highlighted on the two phases of Scan-ICT undertaken so far, which provided support to Cameroon, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Rwanda, Senegal, and Uganda.

Ms. Susan Teltscher, Head of Market Information and Statistics Division at ITU, advised that the ITU had been working closely with ECA and other partners in moving the ICT measurement agenda forward as an organization entrusted with collecting, analysing and disseminating ICT statistics at a global level. She discussed in more detail about the strong need for collecting reliable, accurate and timely data and ICT statistics in a sustainable manner based on international standards. Ms. Susan Teltscher elaborated more on the objectives and activities of the international Partnership for Measuring ICT for Development, to which ECA is an active member coordinating the Task Group on e-Government indicators.

In addition to hosting the training course, ECA’s financial contribution to the course was supported by the Government of Finland through its second phase Cooperation Programme with ECA on ICT Development in Africa. Over 25 participants drawn from Botswana, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe are in attendance. Participants are expected to immensely benefit out of the training course in building their individual as well as institutional capacity in measuring ICT4D in their respective countries. The organizers hope that participants will return to their countries with a sound knowledge of collecting, analysing and

disseminating ICT4D data and thus, contributing to the regional as well as global knowledge of ICT statistics.