Building ICT4D Capacity in and by African Universities

Excerpt from the Introduction:


“A report released at the World Summit on the Information Society in 2003 identified a significant role for information and communication technologies (ICT) in strategies for African development (Okapaku 2003). The report notes that the New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) includes a strong focus on the dual strategies of ICT Development (ICTD) and ICT for Development (ICT4D). In this paper we argue that universities in developing nations are potentially important players in both of these NEPAD strategies, and that the eReadiness of African universities is a vital issue in African development. The eReadiness of African universities is clearly relevant to the global creation and distribution of knowledge - which, in turn, is a core challenge in the world's thrust toward the Millennium Development Goals ( World Bank 2004a) .

First a clarification. We apply the NEPAD terms to universities in the following way:

• ICT Development in the university context refers to building media and digital facilities to support university internal functions, along with an academic and research programs that prepare students to function effectively in an information society - in both the public and the private sectors;
• ICT for Development refers to the university applying ICT in programs outside its walls in the service of communities and the nation.

Central to creating a digital resources and academic infrastructure is the question of universities' relevance to the world around them, and especially to the challenge of being an active player - "an anchor of a broad-based poverty alleviation strategy" in an increasingly knowledge-based economy (Nwuke 2003, p.19).

Recently we raised this relevance issue on another continent when the National Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies for Basic Human Needs came into being in India and immediately set a goal of bringing all of the nation's 600,000 villages into the modern "information society" by 2007, the 60th anniversary of the nation's Independence. When we proposed that the agricultural universities in India be explicitly included in the National Alliance, we received this terse email response:

'The universities have failed miserably in many respects. Most university faculty have no clue to life outside the campus nor have they any social concerns. Sorry for being very forthright or even blunt.'

Is the situation different in Africa? Recently published documents provide a mixed picture (Beebe et al 2003; Okpaku 2003). For example, we do not find a clear statement of an explicit institutionalized role for universities in the vision of the African Information Society Initiative's framers (Soltane 2003)."

Excerpt from the Conclusion:

"Our research in south India and Africa focuses on public access telecenters and especially on issues related to public demand for their services and to their sustainability. We believe that telecenters constitute an important force in efforts to build an Information Society and to join the march to the Millennium Development Goals. Our experience in India suggests that universities can be valuable actors in providing some of the resources telecenters need for their survival. This is important because colleges and universities are enduring entities in most nations, and the social role of the university historically has been to create, store and diffuse knowledge, a collection of activities that partially parallels some telecenter operations. Yet, few major programs link universities to telecenters as an institutionalized source of information, knowledge and training - the basic commodities of a telecenter. University eReadiness is a good place to start."