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Partnership on measuring ICT for Development |
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To coordinate work in ICT indicators, a
Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development was established alongside WSIS (uniting
ECA,
ECLAC,
ESCAP,
ESCWA,
Eurostat,
ITU,
OECD,
UNCTAD,
UIS,
UN ICT Task Force and the
World Bank).
The Partnership aims to track the development of the
Information Society, develop a global database and
build capacity in National Statistical Offices to
measure ICTs, in order to improve the availability
of comparable data. According to its
Project Document, the Partnership pursues three objectives:
Determine a
core
set of ICT
indicators: These indicators would be
harmonized and agreed upon by the international
community, so as to become the basis for an
internationally agreed upon ICT database.
Enhance the capacity of developing countries to
collect and analyze this set of indicators: The
Partnership will support national statistical
offices in developing countries with capacity
building to develop programmes for the collection of
ICT indicators and statistics.
Develop an international ICT database: The
Partnership will develop a database on international
ICT indicators and make it available on the
internet.
Partnership webpage |
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Members of the Partnership |
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Being a member of the Partnership and the UN
specialized agency for telecommunications, ITU has a
mandate for the collection, compilation and
dissemination of statistics in its field as part of
its contributions to the project. In February 2005, the Partnership adopted a
set of
measurable ‘core’ ICT indicators agreed as best
mapping the development of the Information Society
at a
WSIS Thematic Meeting
on Measuring the
Information Society, held
in Geneva.
At this meeting, ITU
and the
Korea Agency for Digital Opportunity and
Promotion (KADO) announced that they were working on
a Digital Opportunity Index, as part of their joint
initiative for “Building Digital Bridges”.
The Digital Opportunity Index (DOI)
uses the core indicators as its starting
basis, since they have been agreed by the
international community as the most important
indicators for measuring the Information Society. The
partnership agreed that the DOI would be further
discussed in the preparatory process for the Tunis
phase of WSIS.
In March 2005, the Partnership presented the list of
core indicators and a report on the progress it had
made so far to the
36th
session of the United Nations Statistical Commission,
in New York.
In consultation with the
Partnership, a ‘straw-man’
document for a possible methodology was developed
and
presented at the
WSIS
Thematic Meeting on Multi-Stakeholder Partnerships
for Bridging the Digital Divide held in Seoul on
23-24 June 2005. It outlines a methodology for the
DOI, and analyses 2003 data for 40 economies.
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Partnership events |
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7-9 February 2006, Geneva, Switzerland |
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