Background The main objective of this two-day CO funded mission was to present to CCSS’s Board of Directors (BoD) the findings and recommendations of the diagnostic report that we completed and delivered to the Agency in early December 2012 ( a copy of the version submitted is here: http://undpegov.org/~raul/egov/country/costarica/CCSS-reporte-final-2012-12-06.docx, in Spanish). The mission also took…

Working with the support of the EU and the UN, UNDP Bishkek has just completed a e-readiness report that was undertake by an international e-governance consultant. A copy of the report that was shared with us by UNDP Kyrgyzstan is here: Final Assessment Report 19 Dec. The CO has requested us to provide comments. Here…

While completing the ROAR exercise for 2012, I run into his question. What has changed under this outcome area (with and without UNDP support)? Please specify the evidence base used. (4000 characters maximum) Here is what I quickly responded. The decisive impact of the Arab Spring and other social movements in this area has been…

The Administrator is planning to attend this forum (http://philanthropyforum.org) and BERA requested inputs along four questions. Here are the questions and the inputs provided. 1. What are ‘big’ opportunities for human development that can be spurred by ICT ?

The final version of this report does not have an Executive Summary. Plus we also discovered that the back cover had no text. So we decided to draft some text. I wrote the text below in response to an earlier draft prepared by Ruhiya. While developing countries continue to make important gains in accessing new…

Intel has been developing this paper for the last few months and is now seeking endorsement from major development organizations. The paper is supposed to be out next week. I have been in touch with Intel on this since August last year and have provided an initial set of comments that were not added to…

The new Microsoft Technology Officer (MSTO), based in DC and assigned to International Organizations, has been contacting me since November last year. We finally met on Tuesday 15 January when he was in town also meeting other organizations, UNWomen included. Here is what we agree to do: 1. Extend or renew the current MoU between…

Thiss week a UNDP post-2015 team member went to Korea to explore ways in which that country could support the process. Korea had also expressed interest on youth and ICTs to DGG -DGG being UNDP’s focal point on youth. DGG had suggested to the mission to also pitch e-governance. Here is what I prepared on…

14 February Inputs for TICAD5 one deadline. Submitted on 15th after speaking with TICAD FP 12 February – GFM request for cost estimates re GPIV and staffing. Matric produced in sync with Ops Manager. 5 February – support yo youth event with Benin, 14 Feb. MM commkted to support. Meeting on 7 Feb with MM…

DGG received a request from RBAP to provide inputs on the above. The Director of RBAP is going on mission to Afghanistan and is planning to make a pitch to the CO supporting this. Here are the inputs provided. 1. A digital copy of our report on mobile technologies is attached – the report is…

I travelled  for 24 hours to DC to attend the 2012 edition of Beyond Access (http://www.beyondaccess.net/conference2012/, #BA2012). I took the opportunity to meet with colleagues from WBI who are working on ICTD and governance. At the informal meeting, I realized that the approach of WBI to the issues is similar to ours in the sense…

Additional comments shared with BDP on the platform and a bit more.. The platform in itself is meaningless if is does not attract people who are at the same time willing to put and share content. There are already over 2 billion web sites out there so having one more does not help. So the…