Retrieved from Allafrica News
 http://allafrica.com/stories/200211080133.html


The Daily Monitor (Addis Ababa)
November 8, 2002 
Posted to the web November 8, 2002 
By Dagnachew Teklu


Africa's Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is reported to be very poor compared to the current global growth in technology. This was stated on Wednesday at the on going five-day regional ICT policy and African civil society meeting being held at the United Nations Conference Centre (UNCC).

The regional meeting is organized to build a framework of current ICT policy, and to discuss emerging international rights issues in Africa, from the perspective of the civil society. Dr. David Souter, an ICT expert from UK said on the occasion that the current ICT status in Africa requires a lot of resources in order to extend the benefits of ICT to all inhabitants in the continent. According to him, the private sector has an important role to play in ICT development in Africa in order to overcome the huge challenges in terms of ensuring equitable and affordable access for all the society. "The right to information and communication must be recognized as a basic human right," added Dr.Souter," civil society must be given a key role in the creation of the information society".

Fatou Gagne, a representative from Article 19, an NGO working on freedom of expression on her part said that currently freedom of expression is abused in many African countries at large, and more and more restriction is made on human rights. "Every citizen should be guaranteed freedom of expression and protected access to information in the worldwide public domain as part of their inalienable right to freely accessing information," Gagne added.

One of the major crippling factors of the Africa's ICT development is said to be a severe lack of technical skills to implement, manage and maintain the technologies. The gathering ICT experts that are attending the meeting noted that institutional, human and administrative capacity should be strengthened at the local, national and international levels in order to achieve greater complementarities among all initiatives to build a better information society in Africa.