Connect Africa Follow - Up Activities

To maintain momentum following the Kigali Summit, ITU convened a number of key partners in Geneva from 31 March to 1 April 2008, to discuss follow up actions. The participants reported on their respective actions and agreed to meet together once a year and to prepare an annual report on progress.

Since the Kigali Summit, among others, the following actions are underway:

1. The World Bank together with ITU and AfDB are working on the Central African Backbone (CAB);
2. The World Bank Regional Infrastructure Programme is going well in other countries of Eastern and Southern Africa;
3. The GSM industry is continuing a solid pace of investment despite the global financial difficulties;
4. ITU and ADB are working on the East-African- Community Broadband infrastructure network. Consultancy firms have already been shortlisted for the pre-investment analysis funded by ADB;
5. ITU and AfDB are working on the ECOWAS Broadband infrastructure network. ITU and AfDB are in contact with ECOWAS Commission to speed up the establishment of the missing links;
6. ITU is facilitating a joint project Guinea-Liberia and Sierra Leone for their connection to the submarine optical fiber and their national backbone infrastructure;
7. ITU is facilitating a meeting between Ministers of Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin and Togo to close the broadband infrastructure missing links between these countries (meeting schedule in December 2008);
8. ITU and European Commission are implementing a 6 million US dollar project on the harmonization of policy and regulation in Sub Saharan Africa;
9. ITU has put particular emphasis on mobilizing resources for the rural and remote areas. We have secured US$ 4 million from Craig and Susan McCaw Foundation which is being combined with US$2.4 million from ITU to start wireless broadband projects. Concrete implementation in the field will start very shortly. ITU is in contact with other Foundations and private companies to speed up the investment in rural areas;
10. ITU is implementing a centre of excellence project for Spanish and Portuguese speaking countries of Africa, a project jointly funded by the Governments of Spain and Portugal. Both Governments are participating in the project as partners, The First Steering Committee meeting of the project takes place in Maputo, Mozambique, during the first week of December 2008.
11. ITU is following up all activities in the framework of implementation of the Kigali Commitments. As agreed at the meeting of partners in March 2008, an annual follow up report is under preparation and will be released in the coming weeks.
12. ITU Global View, a new on-line mapping application announced during the Connect Africa Summit, has since been developed with the support of Microsoft to showcase ICT development projects and track progress towards WSIS goals. To see the Beta “test” version, click here.