Dear All,


I am working at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) at the Sida Helpdesk for Environmental Assessments that is part of the EIA-Centre at SLU. We are commissioned by Sida - Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency - to assist in the work to integrate environmental perspectives into Swedish development cooperation. Development has to take natural resources and environment on which people depend for their livelihood into account to be sustainable. Environmental assessments are therefore important for integrating environmental aspects into the design and decision-making of development projects and programmes. We work from a holistic point of view through a wide sustainability approach, including strategic environmental assessment.

As we were invited to the ICT workshop, we discussed what our contribution could be. At first, we did not find any nor could we see the linkages. But… after some thinking we realised that we may have quite a lot of sharing to do, if we stand on three legs; environment, people and ICT.

To be honest I have seen several ICT projects in developing countries failing. There are of course many reasons for that and for some of them they had to fail, while others not necessarily had to go that way. Many times a major reason was that experts somehow thought they had the good (read; best) solutions for … there are many lessons learned to be done and I can see that SPIDER and this workshop can bring us all a step further through sharing, learning and cooperating.

I do not think that there are connections or that searching for linkages, between environment and ICT, in every project is necessary or a goal as such. Key is to find the specific added-value or support when looking for special solutions in a specific project or context.

I look forward to present one of our projects; we are developing a web-based tool in order to integrate environment in projects/programmes/sectors and that is an example to discuss further together with you, whereas I can bring back experience to my colleagues…

Looking forward to meet you all,

Anja

Marco Zennaro

Hi! My name is Marco Zennaro. I work at the International Centre for Theoretical Physics as a researcher in the field of wireless networks. We use wireless networks as a quick and cheap way to connect universities in developing countries. I am also a PhD student at KTH, Stockholm, looking into the use of a technology called Wireless Sensor Networks for development projects. Wireless Sensors are quite interesting: they are able to measure some physical parameters and send the measurements wirelessly to a server or to the internet, they don't rely on any existing infrastructure and they are cheap (ok, kind of). They are small and use little power (they are usually solar powered). Despite their huge potential, there are not many deployments in developing countries. I though that an interesting application for them would be monitoring water quality. Since I have a project running in Malawi, I thought it would make sense to use them there. I will be in Malawi this summer, and deploy my system to monitor water quality.

I am really interested in the topic of the workshop, and hope I will be able to discuss with the participants about their projects and about possible collaborations.

Looking forward to meeting you soon!

Best,

Marco

Who I am..

Hi all,
my name is Simone Sala and I graduated in Information and Communication Technologies at the University of Milan, after a four-month research in FAO on the applications of Information and Communication for Development to Natural Resources management and Climate Change Adaptation in Developing Countries. The focus of my studies and experiences is ICTs for Development: in my bachelor thesis I designed an outdoor wireless network for a community of rural Sierra Leone, and I managed also a cooperation project in Ghana for an Italian Ngo (RAY Foundation). I am currently involved in a joint Research program of FAO and the Italian Ministry for Environment and Territory, on the topic of Information&Communication for Natural Resources Management and Climate Change Adaptation.

In November I became an associate member of ICT4D Collective of Royal Holloway, University of London, and I won a scholarship and now I'm a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Agriculture of the University of Milan: through the complementary work at my University and in FAO in the last months I had the chance to deepen my knowledge about the potential applications of ICTs in the Climate Change field and in the broader environmental sector. In this sense I designed some pre-feasibility study of ICTs applications in these fields: in an official conference at the Italian ministry of Foreign Affairs I proposed the participatory application of a set of software tools to manage the Jordan river basin to a tripartite organization of Palestinian, Israeli and Jordan authorities (EXACT Meeting). Even if I didn't make any practical application of ICT for Environment yet, I consider this as one of my best work because my intervention was very successful.

I think that the workshop will be the ideal side for making me push things forward, sharing what I learnt with other researchers. In my opinion, sharing is surely the best way to learn.. and I look forward being in Uppsala!