Policy briefs

Getting a CSTD Working Group on Enhanced Cooperation through a UN General Assembly resolution was an hard won victory for developing countries. It was an opportunity to propose and push for a new institutional architecture for the global governance of the Internet. In April, 2013, IT for Change wrote this paper for the South Centre, Geneva, an inter-governmental think-tank of developing countries, outlining the significance of the Working Group and exhorting developing countries to take up an active role in it.

Anita Gurumurthy, Nandini.C and Emma Saloranta represented IT for Change at the International Working Forum on Women, ICTs and Development. The Forum was organised by UN Women and the U.S. Secretary of State’s Office of Global Women’s Issues, between January 10-11, 2013, in Washington D.C. The overall objective of the Forum was to convene a broad-based coalition in order to take stock of current ICTD and gender approaches, challenges, opportunities and to chart a course forward.

The emergent information or network society context  offers a range of opportunities for women and girls to enhance their participation across economic, socio-cultural and public-political realms of life, as well as the scope for enhancing their individual freedoms. The Post-2015 Agenda therefore, both in terms of goals and related targets and indicators, has to promote and measure women's participation in the information society and their access to and effective use of the Internet and ICTs.

The work of public institutions leads to continuous creation of knowledge, but such knowledge often remains with specific individuals or institutions. This policy brief argues for sharing of such individual knowledge across the institution, and sharing of institutional knowledge across the domain through the use of publicly available ICTs. It also argues for and outlines an organisational policy on ICTs, besides providing a list of public (Free and Open Source) software resources for common organisational use.

IT for Change has been working in the area of ICTs and education, at the levels of research, capacity building and demonstration projects. Based on our work, this note explores ways in which ICTs could be used as an integral part of the education system and its processes to promote teacher professional development. The digital medium has the capacity to allow local knowledge construction and supporting text, audio and video learning materials development. Hence its potential for revolutionising teaching learning needs to be explored. However, in order to be successful, this exploration needs to be firmly grounded in both educational aims/philosophies and in educational contexts, and anchored by educationists.

This paper discusses the background, strategies, outcomes, challenges and learnings of Kishori Chitrapata, a project of IT for Change that addresses the learning needs of out-of-school adolescent girls through innovative uses of ICTs such as video, radio and computing technology.

India is known as an IT powerhouse but still has the largest number of poor people in any country in the world. India’s experience with policies for digital inclusion may thus offer some useful lessons for other developing countries. This policy brief looks at a range of initiatives in India including the ambitious Common Service Centres (CSCs) scheme of the National e-Governance Plan (NeGP). It looks at the challenges faced by the scheme in ensuring the delivery of development services in a socially inclusive manner using this infrastructure.

The Department of Public Instruction, Government of Karnataka and Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, have initiated a public software based ICT education programme imed at all the high schools of the state. This entire programme, including the classroom training, has been outsourced. However, preliminary implementation suggests that vendors are finding it challenging to impart an ICT based education in the selected schools.

IT for Change (ITfC) submitted a solicited paper on the role of Common Services Centres (CSCs) to the e-governance division of the Department of Information Technology of the Government of India. The paper briefly examines the CSC model of employing ICTs for community development, wherein one telecentre is being set up in every 6 villages around the country in a public private partnership (PPP) model.