Rural Communications in Africa Forum - Africa

This two-month long electronic discussion, moderated by a team from the Knowledge and Learning Center of Africa Region of the World Bank, the Economic Development Institute, and other partners, had two principal objectives: a) to lay out the technical, regulatory, policy and infrastructure challenges and priorities facing efforts to build rural communications capacity in Africa; b) to catalogue, and draw lessons from, existing efforts to build community access centers (telecenters) in Africa. This dialogue ran from the second week of October until the end of November.

Information resources, economic development, political development, rights.

African nations and communities, and their development partners, need to develop a set of tools, strategies, policy frameworks and investments that help rural communities gain access to, and make effective use of, vital information resources. A number of development organizations have devoted considerable attention and resources in recent years to piloting the concept of community access centers and sorting out the technical, regulatory, policy and other issues that impinge upon efforts to increase rural community access to information. Discussions in the Development Forum are open to participants from around the world. In order to assure that those with limited Internet access can participate, these dialogues are conducted by means of moderated email lists, archived to the Development Forum web site.