More on ICT and development

Hi,
Thanks for an interresting meeting.
Just want to let you know about the coming conference:
"Big Brother and Empowered Sisters"
The role of new communication technologies in democratic processes
April 16 - 17, 2008
MissionskyrkanSt. Olofsgatan 40, Uppsala

see the link.

Greetings Ninni Uhrus

Useful Chapter

Hi,
I personally learnt a lot of new things in the field of ICT and Environment in today's session.
My enthusiasm in this field led me to explore more. Meanwhile, I found one chapter related to almost similar issue that we are dealing with in "Handbook of Development Economics , Volume-4, 2007". I am sure many of you have already read it but for those who have not, I feel worth reading.

Chapter 48- Information Networks in Dynamic Agrarian Economies

Kaivan Munshi^a
aDepartment of Economics, Box B, Brown University, 64 Waterman Street, Providence, RI 02912, USA and NBER, USA

Available online 23 February 2008.
Shrwan

Björn Pehrson

I am into communication systems and want to know more about user communication needs and their requirements on networks.

Differences of internet Use among Students

Hi ,
My name is Shrwan Khanal, a Nepali citizen pursuing Master's in Development and International Cooperation at the University of Jyvaskyla Finland. I am researching on "Internet use among the Students at the University of Zambia". I just came back from four months field visit in Zambia and writing my thesis. I am looking at the relationship between internet use and gender and nature of study. Currently, I got an opportunity to visit Nordic Africa Institute at Upsala as study grant holder. I found this workshop very interesting. Of course, my study is not very much related with environment and ICT but I believe I can meet many scholars who might have a lot of idea about ICT in academic sectors in Africa and have input for my work.

Looking forward to see you all.
Shrwan

Anna... ICTs, learning, adaptation (& sunshine)

Hi! I'm Anna Taylor. I work for the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), based at the Oxford Centre in the UK... although I just got back yesterday from a month in South Africa (which is home and currently far more sunny than here) where I worked out of our office at the University of Cape Town and did some fieldwork in Lesotho on rural livelihoods and the use of wetlands.

Much of the work I do at SEI Oxford is related to climate vulnerability and adaptation, livelihoods and water resource management, with a focus on actor-oriented participatory processes to support decision making and learning.

I have recently become increasingly involved and interested in issues of communication and learning in the context of social, organisational and individual development and adaptation. ICTs have an increasingly important role to play in connecting people and making information accessible but there is also the danger of perpetuating existing inequalities and gaps as well as creating new ones if we are not careful. Issues of access, skills, power, choice, inclusion, lifestyle, culture and language are all, I think, important ones to consider when discussing ICTs. The old adages of information and knowledge is power and the benefit of being well connected will no doubt remain as true as ever but they may well change in nature in the age of widespread use of ICTs.

One of the new initiatives we are heading up, which has an important ICT component, is that of developing a collaborative platform on climate adaptation, called weADAPT, providing guidance on climate risk management. One element of this platform is a wiki, collaboratively used for documenting and sharing information on adaptation process, including methods, tools, experiences, lessons, data, etc. Two big issues that are coming up for us in this regard are quality control / assurance and effectively communicating and dealing with uncertainty.

I am really looking forward to participating in this workshop because there is a lot of scope for using new technologies in adressing environment and development challenges, we already have a lot to learn from each others experiences and I'm sure we can together come up with some exciting new ideas!

See you in Uppsala.

Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute

I am Dr. Royol Chitradon, Director of Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute (HAII).
Please allow me to give a brief description of HAII.

Hydro and Agro Informatics Institute was founded on 16th January 2004 under National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), the Ministry of Science and Technology, Thailand, as an informatics institute on water resources and agriculture.

With the information system, government agencies who deal with water resource and agricultural issues should have essential information before making any decisions on their plans and operations especially in crisis like drought and flood. The information system includes the important data to apply for the implementation of following up, planning, and managing water resources and agriculture in order to lessen the loss of economic and social growth caused by water issues.

To reach sustainable development, the collaboration of agencies, essential knowledge, and appropriate technology are required. Two main tasks for HAII are to create an essential information system on water resource and agricultural management and found cooperative networks among different organizations.

Please visit our links for more details of our work:
http://www.haii.or.th//index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=60
http://www.thaiag.net/
http://www.thaiwater.net/
http://www.thaiweather.net/


It is a pleasure to be invited as one of the key note speakers of this seminar. I am looking forward to seeing you all at the event. The following is details of the presentation:

1. Information about climate change at the global level
2. Information about climate change at the regional level
3. Information about climate change at the country level
4. Community water resource management in the northeast of Thailand: shown how the community develop and manage their plans to cope with climate change risks.

Please visit this link for more information of the community in the northeast of Thailand “Ban Limthong Community"

http://www.haii.or.th//index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=47&func=startdown&id=37
http://www.haii.or.th//index.php?option=com_remository&Itemid=47&func=fileinfo&id=6

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!

The Need for the Mobilized Global Conscience for Sustainable Environment and Development

"There is a need for our urgent action to take good care of our nature and cope with a thorny issue of climate change." ICT is a means to reach a developmental and environmental sustainability end.

Greetings to You All

I am very pleased to share with you all the cyberspace communication to address the urgent issues of our fragile world today ranging from economics, the depletion of natural resources, society, food security to human life. We are now at a real peril as each nation or country is trying very hard to develop their economies without concrete mechanisms to deal with the externalities from economic growth and expansionary trade worldwide. When there is no linkage amongst capitalism, globalism, information technology, economics, social science and political science, the human atrocity definitely emerges out of the uncontrollable ecological and environmental problems.

If it is for the sake of charity, cooperation, harmony and humanity, our planet and earth can no longer sustain our present human social and economic activities for the sake of high competition dictated by the market economy, crony capitalism, economic development without ecological conscience and the developed world keeping providing instructions and orders to the less developed one, as well as the predominant diverse national interests rising above our collective efforts of mankind for the better together.

In order to well address the issues of climate change, there should be a permanent institution composed of budgets, funds and measures. From the advanced countries, they should provide some sorts of funds for the developing world to properly deal with the side effects of climate change. The motto of the world should stay within the ecological premise that nature loves us as we love it. The destruction of environment for the ultimate aims of social and economic development brings in the calamity for us as citizens of the world.

I do see Information Communication and Technology as very essential and strategic to the closed caring of our fragile ecological system. Also, I do believe that the ICT for development and poverty reduction becomes key to the developing and less developed countries to keep pace up with the developed one in terms of better living conditions and balanced growth with sound environmental management. In this way, sustainable and clean environment does match the principal concept of sustainable development for everyone.

The globalized seminar on ICT and environment is somehow a useful tool for the debate among the participants to raise concerns about the high exposure of ecology to climate change, global warming and the destruction of the nature by all kinds of means and human actions.

The workshop, I hope, will equip us with awareness and knowledge in the role of ICT for the simultaneous development with healthy and sound environment. Experiences in the domain from specialists and experts of all strata of life do definitely contribute to the mobilized force of ecological and environmental conscience. I also anticipate the technological and electronic divide among the haves, the have-nots and the inaccessible to be bridged significantly. Then, ICT starts to turn itself into a new phase of social and economic development inclusive of clean and good environment.

On this occasion, I am very pleased to partake in the workshop on ICT and Environment to be organized by the Swedish University of Agriculture in coordination with the SPIDER Center. We highly appreciate SPIDER, in particular its director, Dr. Afzal Sher and the Swedish University of Agriculture as well as other involved Swedish stakeholders for having extended the invitation to us to this very crucial event.

I look forward to having active cooperation among all participants.

Thank you for your collaboration and attention.

PHNOM PENH, 03rd March 2008

By Dr. CHHUN Vannak
Associate Dean of Graduate School of Management,
and Academic Professor of Pannasastra University of Cambodia (PUC),
Advisor to the Ministry of Environment &
to H.E. Dr. MOK Mareth, Senior Minister and Minister of Environment
KINGDOM OF CAMBODIA

Rasmus Larsen

Greetings!

I work at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU), primarily with our msc programme in Integrated Water Resource Management. Together with colleagues at SLU I am organising this upcoming workshop in ICT and Environment.

My most memorable experience in relation to ICT and environment may be the video-conference seminar we had in the Network for Integrated Transboundary Water Research (NITWAR) last yr with the International Institute for Rural Reconstruction based in Kampala, Uganda. It was a special feeling connecting across time zones and distance with Kennedy Igbokwe and his colleagues, and their partners from the university in Kampala as well as the district fisheries and natural resource management officials from Lake Kyoga. Students from the msc programme in IWRM were present and enjoyed a good two hrs dialogue.

My main aspiration for the workshop is that we may identify and see emerge effective ways of enabling fruitful collaboration amongst a diverse group of people all summoned by an interest in how ICT tools can be applied in the broad field of environmental work. I look forward to learn more about how technical solutions can be employed in harmony with values of democracy, gender, and stakeholder dialogue!

Best wishes
Rasmus

Hi there,

How do you stand on three legs and put equal weight on all three? How many intellectual legs can we develop? For me this workshop can give us an answer.

ICT is traditionally very technology oriented. Environmental issues are mainly taken up by environmentalists, and nowadays also by politicians. ICT and managing the natural resources and the environment is done by people, people with different ideas, wants, backgrounds, focus, capacity, training etc. This is why I think we cannot talk about environment without talking about people, we cannot talk about ICT without considering the people using the technologies.

For this event we are asking people to make an effort and try to stand on three legs: environment, ICT and people, in presentations, discussions and in other interactions. We are looking forward to an event where we can start thinking in new directions, triggered by meeting people with different ideas and backgrounds then ourselves.

I am an anthropologist by training, I have been working in the interface between science and practice for ten years. Since two years I am working as a project coordinator at SLU.

See you in April!

Welcome to the blog!

Dear Participant!

Warmly welcome to the blog and the preparatory exchanges before the workshop!

Preparations and introductions
We encourage you to introduce your-selves and your work by answering the three questions below:

1) What would you like us to know about you?

2) What has been your most memorable experience working with ICT and environment related questions?

3) What do you hope will emerge from the workshop in April?

You can answer these questions by composing and publishing a post here on this site - click 'new post' in the upper right of the blog. You can also use the 'comment' option below each post to respond to interesting topics raised by others. If you have any questions or comments pls contact the organiser at any time!

By sharing who we are and what we do in advance of the workshop we believe that the exchanges in Uppsala 7+8 April will be more fruitful. We look very much forward to the exchanges with you all on this blog and to meeting you in person in Uppsala! We encourage all of us to use the blog in an interactive way, and hope that the presentations may start various conversations, which may already before the workshop help us into a constructive dialogue.

Programme and more details
We will in few weeks time upload the programme for the workshop and the participants list!