CIPESA program | Map Revolution program | Cape skills e-literacy project

CIPESA program

International policy-making is important, and this is especially true in the area of ICT. Too often developing country stakeholders are ill-prepared or even left out of ICT policy discussions that affect them, which ultimately has serious implications for whether and how ICT can be used effectively to improve people's lives and reduce poverty in the places that need it the most. There is a growing recognition that the challenges faced by African countries will only be addressed through improved co-ordination and a reduction in duplication of effort, the availability of more relevant information for African decision-makers, and increased participation in the decision-making and policy-setting processes by African stakeholders.

The Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) is an initiative to help African stakeholders to better understand the policy-making processes that affect them, especially in the area of ICT and development. See www.cipesa.org. Our objectives are to raise awareness about key issues, provide useful information to assist African participation in policy-making, and stir debate by sparking discussion and convening productive gatherings. Decision-making related to the use of ICT for poverty reduction is a primary area of interest.

Two recent activities directly involved bridges.org staff members:

• Development of the CIPESA website, www.cipesa.org, which features a weblog on African Voices on ICT Policy.
• A public briefing on the current status and key points of the debate around ICANN, Internet governance and Africa, which provides essential background for the second phase of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS). Before this report there was no single place where all the basic facts about Africa's participation in ICANN could be found. This document brings it all together, and tells readers where to find out more.

Our main role in 2006 is to spin CIPESA off as an independent organization and help it to achieve sustainability and make a broader impact. Vincent Bagiire will take this forward in Uganda by setting up a Ugandan nonprofit corporation in Kampala, and continuing to deliver on the CIPESA mission. In the US, bridges.org will assist CIPESA with fundraising and visibility. We will build relationships with like-minded organizations based in the US and Europe that will collaborate with CIPESA in various ways. A key activity will be the establishment of a network of US and European-based students and volunteers who will conduct joint policy research and writing projects with Africa-based researchers and writers.

Map Revolution program

Mapping technologies offer huge potential to manage complex information and improve the way that ground-level development is planned, implemented, and evaluated. Digital maps have immediate relevance in a broad range of sectors, such as healthcare and environmental resource management, and simple mapping tools would have wide application among local government departments, NGOs, development aid agencies, and other kinds of organizations. However, most digital maps require high-end (usually expensive) hardware, software and technical training that is beyond the reach of the majority of organizations in the places that need the most help.

In the year ahead bridges.org will be talking about a Map Revolution. We are working with MapMaker Trust, a UK charity developing and disseminating easy-to-use tools that can create simple digital maps in formats that are widely accessible and useable with older hardware, low-cost (or free) software, and minimal training. The Mapmaker Trust team is also building a Map Library, which currently offers over 60,000 downloadable vector and raster files of the African continent, the largest and most comprehensive data set of its kind available to the public.

We will help bring these basic mapping tools to organizations working at ground level by providing real-life examples of the need for and use of maps and mapping technologies in different development sectors. We will field-test the map data and tools and explore their efficacy in practical socio-development work in Africa. Specifically, bridges.org will:

• Conduct field trials in a variety of development contexts;
• Draft case studies on the experiences the ground-level organizations had using the maps, and using the mapped information;
• Evaluate the use and the usefulness of the mapping technologies, both from a technical perspective (how easy was it to use the mapping technologies) and substantive perspective (how useful were the maps for achieving socio-economic development aims);
• Link the map library with an open content approach, by framing an appropriate Creative Commons license that would be recommended to those who contribute data to the Map Library; and
• Disseminate information about the use of the map technologies in development, in particular by highlighting the evaluation results and case study examples to raise awareness about the potential for the mapping technologies to be used more broadly.

Cape Skills e-literacy project

There are many initiatives underway to make computers and the Internet available in public spaces for use by people who may never own a computer, as well as efforts to integrate computer use into organizations working in development. There is a wide variety of computer training guides available, but most either offer instruction on particular software applications or they are proprietary tools that are expensive to use and often culturally bound to developed-country contexts. There are currently no publicly-available training materials that use a learner-centered methodology (as opposed to application-specific and/or culturally-specific) to teach a basic introduction to computers for new users.

The Cape Skills e-literacy project is creating such materials as a joint effort of the Western Cape Government's Centre for e-Innovation and bridges.org in South Africa. The project will develop and test computer and Internet training materials to be offered in the Western Cape Access Points and published as open content for others to adapt and use in other places. A strategy for rollout and recommended use of the training materials will also be published as part of the project. Bridges.org will:

• Prepare training materials targeted to the needs of the community center initiative in the Western Cape Province of South Africa;
• Pilot the materials with training sessions in the province and refine them as needed;
• Prepare a strategy document to give advice on the rollout of the materials in the Cape Access centers and their more widespread use;
• Lead further development of the training materials by establishing a global online community of users and contributors that will localize, adapt, and share ideas to take the training tools to the next level.