Stakeholders hold summit on ICT for Africa

By Emmanuel Elebeke
A conference to brainstorm on the current challenges relating to infrastructure, security and government policies slowing down the benefits accruable from a virile ICT growth for 2011 is to hold in Nigeria.

The Conference will be co-hosted by Covenant University and Bells University of technology, Ota, Ogun state come March, 2011.

According to the Chairman, organizing committee, Dr. Longe Babatope, the conference will focus on current research on ICTs in Africa with a particular interest on how to create awareness and identifying potentials and building capacity, as empirical evidences on ICT adoption and diffusion in Africa has revealed an upward growth, adding that this position is supported by the rapid increase in mobile telephone subscribers in the region.

With the theme : ICT For Development in Africa – Sustaining The Momentum, Extending The Reach,  Olumide said firm-level variables such as financial capacity and technological absorptive capacity have also influenced the intensity of the adoption of ICTs,  thereby suggesting that globalization has also influenced the adoption of new technologies in Africa, but regretted that  the developmental trend has concentrated in cities, metropolis and urban communities in Africa with millions still out of reach of the ICT development wave.

“This scenario raises two basic questions in the mind of ICT technocrats, practitioners and the academia: How can we sustain the present developmental momentum? And what can be done to extend the reach of ICT to the unreached?,” the chairman observed.

This notwithstanding, he contended that there is an urgent need  to keep pace with ICT development and its benefits in Africa,  while also addressing possible areas of developmental benefit of ICT to other target groups.

Rural dwellers, farmers, extension officers, health workers and social workers to them, must be empowered to use and apply ICTs much more creatively and pragmatically to development problems beyond the internet-enabled PC telecenters. “There is also the challenge of the non-involvement and imbalance of gender, dearth of sound ICT-roadmap and strategies by policy makers resulting in uncoordinated and unsustainable ICT-development activities,” they added.
To achieve the desired objectives, the group said that the conference will bring together a fine mix of practitioners and academicians in the area of ICTs for sustainable development, stressing that the conference apart from discussing on the current challenges facing the growth of the ICT sector in Africa, it will also explore the possibilities of continuity in terms of contributions from Africa to the ICT for Development discourse, as well as initiate pragmatic measures needed to extend the ICT reach.

“The objective is to highlight the synergy of collaboration between African countries and other developing countries, and between African countries and the developed countries towards
development solutions.

Discussions and panel debates will focus on what can be done to sustain the developmental pace and close the ICT gap still existent in Africa. Workshops will examine international grant-seeking opportunities for ICT research and projects, the menace of cybercrime as a limiting factor on ICT for development and e-learning for African universities and new frontiers in telemedicine,” the group stated.