Category: e-governance

The conference call with Orange earlier today went better than expected. Orange is quite strong in West Africa where it has large market shares and is the leading company in 12 markets. They have been doing quite a bit of CSR but apparently they have hit a wall as this has not translated into market…

I have been involved in discussions and meetings related to the design of the new Global Programme for the new BDP, a.k.a BPPS. The Executive Board has approved 60 million for the new GP (for the period 2014-2017) but now the bureau needs to prepare a proposal which presents WHAT  exactly are the areas of…

Earlier in the week I received a totally unexpected communication from UNDP Venezuela asking me to contact them as soon as feasible. During the ensuing Hangout, I was informed that the National Center for Information Technology (CNTI) had once again requested UNDP’s assistance.  Previous efforts starting in 2006 had led to nothing as we were…

Orange representatives have approached colleagues at BERA’s Private Sector division to explore possible collaboration. Orange also share with UNDP this presentation which seems to be a bit dated. At any rate, BERA has now approached me to support these efforts and provide substantive inputs to start a more formal dialogue with Orange. Orange claims t have…

In the late 1990s, we were deeply involved on what is today known as “Internet Governance” thanks to the old SDNP programme. Close to 10 national SDNP programmes  were either managing national CC TLDs or were directly involved in DNS issues.  10 SDNP managers and staff attended the ICANN meeting in Marina del Rey, California…

UNDP will be participating in the 3rd international Cyberspace Conference which will take place in Seoul on 17-18 October. More than 90 countries are expected to participate. The Director on BERA will be representing UNDP at the meeting. UNDP’s Seoul Policy Center is involved in the preparation process including speaking points, presentation and speech. The…

RBLAC is organizing a meeting on political participation and young Parliamentarians from 1 to 3 October that will take place in Brasilia. We have been invited to chair a session and run a panel dedicated to ICTs and participation. Here is the session description and content. Session title: ICTs and participation: What’s really new today?…

We are in the midst of completing the IRRF for the new UNDP Strategic plan and the work is now focus on completing indicators while developing methodological notes. One of the indicators for outcome 3 is: Level of public confidence in the delivery of basic services, disaggregated by sex, urban/rural and income groupswhich sounds great…

I have been thinking about this topic for a bit now but never really had a lot of time to put down some thoughts on a piece of virtual paper. That was the case until today when I got a call from UNCDF/Better than Cash Alliance Secretariat asking for talking points for the Administrator on…

The possible partnership between UNDP and Telefónica (TF) continues to move ahead.   A face to face meeting between the two parties will take place in NY on 30 September. From the TF side, we are expecting people from the foundation side who had done programme development on the ground. On the UNDO side we have…

We have received a request from the CO in Georgetown to provide policy and technical support to national Parliament. UNDP is currently running a parliamentary support programme which apparently has an ICT compoment. Parliament is planning to have a brand new web site while beefing up its internal capacity to manage ICTs, develop and deploy…

We received a request from BDP’s Deputy Director to provide advice on the above panel which will take place on 9 September. A senior manager from BoM will be representing the organization. The agenda of the meeting is here. Now, this is a topic that is a bit out of our regular path. So I…

The Issue Brief on Science and Technology, Knowledge-sharing and Capacity Building is one of several inputs that will be submitted to the Open Working Group for their consideration. This brief will be discussed at the 6th meeting of the OWG in December of this year. UNESCO is coordinating the process and prepared an annotated outline…

A request on the above was channelled to me via BERA’s Private Sector group. Six questions were forwarded to UNDP and the last one was related to technology (“How is technology helping UNDP’s  mission?”).  As a side note, I find the assumption that technology==ICTs puzzling – and misinformed too. Technology is much much bigger and…

A few days ago we received the latest draft of the e-GAP paper a few days ago. Let us be more precise here: the paper is on Open Government and Participation and the role that GAP and ICTs can play in the process. Here are the comments I shared with the team and that were…