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