Early in the week I met with the Director of BCPR’s Conflict Prevention Group, a champion in the use of ICTs and mobiles in crisis situations and governance processes who uses his experience in Kenya to promote this work in UNDP. BCPR clearly understands that crowdsourcing is not sufficient to adequately manage crisis situations and/or…

A call with UNDP South Africa and the government counterpart early in the week ended up in agreement on my mission to the country in early March. A 2 day workshop on the ongoing e-skills programme we are supporting will be followed by visits to several of regional hubs the Department of Communications (DOC) has…

One of our regional governance Practice leaders have been seconded to Libya for one year. The new government has strong interest in supporting e-governance. I thus received a request from our colleague to provide support for this process as well as indicating our expertise when it comes to crisis countries. Below is my reply. Background…

UNDP Libya is planning to hold a one day workshop on e-governance. They are planning to increase awareness while learning from other countries about implementation. Here is what I proposed to them -which can be used for other similar events. The idea of the workshop is good. Please note that we have supported such event…

Background The Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) was launched by UNDP in1992 in direct response to the implementation of Agenda 21, established at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. A UNDP global programme, SDNP focused on Chapters 27, 37 and 40 of the Agenda, while at the same time calling for increased involvement…

Our recently published mobile technologies report highlights the changing dynamics of local and social innovation. Whereas in the early days of the Internet, most innovations happened in the North, the situation has changed dramatically nowadays. This article, published in a well-known MIT magazine, shows the incredible impact of social innovation on Kenya’s economy and development…

Had a late conference call with UNDP Guatemala on Tuesday evening. It seems the new government, which is led by retired army officers, is very interested on e-governance and FOSS. The government has just crated a new Ministry which will focus on transparency while also having some comptroller functions. The head of the new Ministry…

DGG Director circulated a request to comment on UNDP Djibouti’s plan programmes. Two of the notes address e-governance (see djibouti-Profil-de-projet-egov and djibouti-Profil-de-projet-egov-2). After a quik review and with inputs from Serge, here is our response. I have received a request from Geraldine to provide initial comments to the e-governance concept notes you kindly shared with…

Country office demand for our work on e-governance continues to be on the increase. This week alone Djibouti, Libya, Moldova and Tunisia have asked for support. Last week, DGG Director circulated a series of concept notes prepared by our CO in Djibouti. e-governance is one of the themes they want to address. The CO wants…

Below is a draft concept note on the above I prepared from DGG Directorate this week. DGG and Media Development  Background UNDP’s support to media development has been scant to say the least. UNESCO and other UN agencies have usually taken the lead here for many years now.  While Access to Information (A2I) become a…

The Sustainable Development Networking Programme (SDNP) Using ICTs to effectively support the Rio Agenda Background The idea of SDNP ( http://www.undpegov.org/sdnp/) emerged during preparations for the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit with the perception that many countries, especially poorer ones, lacked a reliable information base to make effective decisions and promote sustainable development issues.…

Demands for Open Government (OG) initiatives seem to be on the rise as this week alone I was involved in two conference calls. In addition to Macedonia, where UNDP and the WB have agreed to work together on the topic  (and work will expand to Moldova eventually), we spoke to a group of Tunisian activists…

Such is the title of a recent post on a Davos meeting of thirty-five or so social innovators from around the globe. Social innovation is not a new concept, not by a long shot. What perhaps is unique about social innovation today is that it is natively emerging in developing countries, including some of the…

I was on leave all of last week so no real updates to report from trying to rest  -although I did spent a lot of time trying to finalize the Mobiles primer. It seems that my mission report on Costa Rica was apparently not well received by project staff. Not sure I understand the reason…