In the coming year, IICD will continue its current
strategy and pursue the integration or alignment of projects into the government-supported or donor-funded development programmes at national level. In addition, IICD
will be harvesting lessons on Rural Access, Health programmes and Education.
Improving IICD’s work on the
ground
Having
achieved a critical mass of projects in most countries, and given IICD’s many
existing commitments to ongoing projects, only one roundtable workshop is
planned for 2008. This will result in fewer new projects in 2008, since the focus will be on integrating ongoing projects. IICD
is striving for 50% of the projects to become independent and financially
self-sustaining.
Furthermore, IICD will be
pursuing the integration or alignment of projects within government-supported
or donor-funded development programmes on the national level. This is
particularly relevant in countries where the central government has been unable
to implement larger-scale ICT for Development initiatives quickly enough. In
such cases, partners can seek to increase links with local governments, helping
them to better integrate and sustain ICTs. IICD aims to have two or three of
these sector programmes in each country.
Capturing ‘lessons learned’
and knowledge sharing
IICD will continue its efforts
to document experiences and ‘lessons learned’ of its work on the ground.
Although the focus areas for 2008 will largely depend on the level of maturity
of both the Country Programmes and the individual projects (in terms of their
being ready for harvesting) and on whatever external events are organised in
the ICT for Development sector, the following key themes have been defined in
principle: Education, Livelihood Opportunities (including Rural Access-based
enterprises), Health, Capacity Development, Innovation (including Connectivity,
Web Innovation, Wireless mesh networking).
To stimulate internal
knowledge sharing and expertise building, Thematic Learning Circles will be
developed. These communities will provide a forum within which IICD staff
members can contribute their experiences relating to a specific theme. Ideally
this could lead to collaborative outputs such as research papers and other
publications.
In
2008, the iConnect platform will be upgraded using components already developed
for IICD’s corporate website and expanded further to incorporate Web 2.0 tools
that can facilitate community building, Thematic Networks groups, online
collaboration and content development.
For Dgroups, an executive
committee will focus on: managing the transition of Dgroups to a new host and
service/support provider, redesigning the Governance Dgroup, and strengthening
the administration and financial structure. There are also plans to transform
Dgroups, enabling functionality for a Web 2.0 social-networking platform with
an eye to the needs of development professionals in the South.
Furthermore, a Cross-Country
Learning Event will be organised around ICTs in Education, linked to the
eLearning Africa Conference in Accra, Ghana in May 2008 , and there will also
be a Cross-Country Learning Event on ICTs in Agriculture.
