On: E-Lecture: ITC

Matti Sinko sent a recorded lecture to us on-line from the UN-ECA, UN African headquarters in Addis Abeba, Ethiopia. I didn't know that years there have 13 months, and that clocks show their own time.

Africa is a big continent, and there is many countries, but in general people there have gotten themselves mobile phones, but there is still areas out of network. As well as wealth connectivity differs from area to area, and specially between urban and rural areas.

A few terms that came up and that I want to present are: "Leapfrogging" and "Fast-tracking". "Leapfrogging" means that countries jump over technology generations, like going directly to mobile phones, instead of first installing land lines. "Fast-tracking" means speeding up certain developments to accelerate economic growth. Both held back by the level of education, and it takes time to reform an education system and implicate it. Coveredge of primar education is relatively good, but secondary and tertiary education lacks resources. Also the lifelong learning should be looked into, as also there ITC could provide help.

Two videos about ITC in Africa:
The World Bank - Towards 2020: ICT in Action in Rwanda
Africa Goes Digital

References & further reading:
-UN 2000. Millennium Declaration and The Millenium Development Goals.
-UNCTAD 2010. Information economy report. 2010.
-UNECA / ITCA 2010. African e-Learning Initiative
-UNESCO. 2000. Education for All.
-Fredriksson, Torbjörn 2010. UNCTAD’s Information Economy report 2010 launch. Powerpointpresentation. http://www.unctad.org
-ITU 2010. ITU World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators database.
-Nokia 2009. Affordable mobile communications, TCO study 2008. Nokia - Expanding Horizons

Links:
Kiva - loans that change lives
Measuring-ict.unctad.org - Measturing the information society