ICTs Will Be Critical to Attaining the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals by 2015
Second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (Tunis, 16-18 November 2005) Will Focus on Extending ICT solutions

“To achieve the [Millennium Development] Goals, we must harness the potential of ICTs. The September 2005 UN World Summit, and the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society to be held in November in Tunis, give us opportunities to make vital progress in doing so.”
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, April 2005

When they approved the Millennium Declaration in 2000, world leaders knew that information and communication technologies (ICTs) could provide a unique contribution to meeting all Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). They understood that greater access to ICTs would improve farming practices and assist micro-entrepreneurs, would help prevent AIDS and other communicable diseases, would promote women’s equality, and would foster environmental protection. Indeed, a specific MDG Target explicitly proposed promoting availability of the many benefits of ICTs throughout the developing world.

Five years later, a growing number of examples show that ICT-based systems and services, such as electronic commerce, distance education, telemedicine and e-governance, are improving the quality of life for countless people worldwide. ICTs reduce poverty and empower people through reducing transaction costs, integrating global and local markets, and increasing the potential value of human capital.

At its first phase in Geneva, in December 2003, the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) adopted two important new tools in its bid to use ICTs to help people improve their lives: a Declaration of Principles and a Plan of Action whose objectives include “to promote the use of information and knowledge for the achievement of internationally agreed development goals, including those contained in the Millennium Declaration.”

This backgrounder is designed to provide a range of examples of ICT initiatives that are already making a difference, and contains excerpts of the WSIS Plan of Action that are relevant to efforts to use ICTs to help achieve these goals.

 The purpose of the second phase of the WSIS, from 16-18 November 2005 in Tunis, is to accelerate the implementation of the WSIS Plan of Action through tangible ICT applications and solutions that can help attain the MDGs before the 2015 deadline.

In a report, the UN Millennium Project’s Task Force on Science, Technology and Innovation (an independent advisory body commissioned by the UN Secretary-General to advise on MDG strategies) concluded: “Harnessing the strategic and innovative use of ICT in development policies and programmes may enable the world to meet the Goals. Without such technology, doing so by 2015 will be impossible.”
 

MDG 1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger

Millennium Target: Reduce by half the proportion of people living on less than a dollar a day

In line with this target, the Plan of Action approved in December 2003 by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) recommends that:

• National e-strategies should be made an integral part of national development plans, including Poverty Reduction Strategies.
• Government policies should favour assistance to, and growth of, small- and medium-sized enterprises in the ICT industry, as well as their entry into e-business, to stimulate economic growth and job creation as an element of a strategy for poverty reduction through wealth creation.

ICT solutions:

The Village Phone Project in Bangladesh and Uganda

In 1997, the Grameen Bank launched the Village Phone project to provide affordable telephone access to rural areas of Bangladesh. Run by Grameen Telecom, a private sector company, the project enabled poor women (dubbed "village phone ladies") to buy mobile telephones and sell phone services to fellow villagers.

The initiative has helped create 100,000 new jobs, boosted the incomes of local female micro-entrepreneurs, and provided phone access to more than 60 million people in the poor rural areas in Bangladesh. Besides the economic benefit to the "phone lady", who gains much-needed financial independence in one of the poorest countries of the world, access to a phone in villages where there were often no phones at all means villagers have greater access to government services and better contact with family and friends. It also helps farmers more easily obtain accurate information about prices, get more for their products and pay less for their supplies.

The formula of creating opportunities for poor rural individuals, especially women, through a cellular payphone service, has already been successfully replicated in Uganda by Grameen Foundation USA (GFUSA), through its Grameen Technology Center. More than 1,700 village phone businesses are now up and running in 50 of Uganda's 56 districts. GFUSA has just launched a similar pilot project in Rwanda.

Connecting low-income artisans to global markets

In India, non-profit organizations such as InternetBazaar and MarketPlaceIndia have developed websites to sell worldwide artisan-made hand-woven silk sarees, apparel, quilts, wooden handicrafts, wooden wall hangings, jute bags, and so on. This new distribution channel has the potential to considerably increase the revenues of poor artisans - especially women, who used to sell their products to middlemen, who in turn often sold the same products on to consumers at many times the price paid to the producer.

The websites of these “online cooperatives” feature photos of products on offer, which can be purchased by customers in industrialized countries through credit cards. One such site in Canada, www.peridar.com, offers handmade goods from artisans from 14 countries. A World Bank website, meanwhile, showcases a number of other e-commerce examples that allow for the marketing of crafts made by local artisans, like the Virtual Souk (Middle East and North Africa), Aid to Artisans, eZiba, Novica and PEOPLink (artisans all over the world), African Crafts Online and A-Piece-of-Africa (African crafts), Tortas Perú (selling homemade cakes online to expatriate Peruvians) and Village Leap (products from Cambodia). The Filipino website Global Echo not only sells quilts, but teaches people of developing countries how to use the internet to become more self-sufficient and eliminate middlemen in reaching their markets.

Millennium Target: Reduce by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger

Excerpt from the Declaration of Principles adopted by the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS):

• Our challenge is to harness the potential of information and communication technology to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration, namely the eradication of extreme poverty and hunger.
   

ICT solutions:

Computers helped avoid a famine after the tsunami

An article published in US-based Baseline magazine recounts how the United Nations’ World Food Programme succeeded in rushing food to the victims of the Indian Ocean’s tsunami, thanks to ICTs.

“Within 48 hours, computer and communications facilities were installed in key food distribution points around the area to track the rice, biscuits and bottled milk that the relief agency’s staff was rushing to the area by air, sea and road,” wrote journalist John McCormick. The agency even developed an e-mail system that worked over radio waves when all other forms of communication were down. With 300,000 dead or missing and more than one million homeless, this relief operation was logistically challenging. “Most important," the journalist noted, “there have been no reports of starvation. It could not have been done without computers and communications.”
 

Women farmers doubled their production:

In Malawi, the Farmwise project helps women farmers in the rural village of Mwandama to improve their agricultural production, both in terms of quantity of produce and quality of seeds and fertilizers used.

The project developed a computer database system with a web interface and email to help the women determine the potential harvest from their land and which crops they can grow, given soil type and fertility. The women received training on how to use the system, and agricultural extension workers advised them on the seeds and fertilizers they would need, and when to plant, fertilize and weed.

The programme also used email to communicate with a local radio station known as "Farmers Radio". The station's programme presenters used the online input calculator to answer questions from farmers about the types and amounts of input they required, and taught farmers with Internet access how to use it. The result? Farmers’ productivity has more than doubled. “None of the women are contemplating selling their produce yet. They are happy just to have enough for their families to eat," wrote Bessie Nyirenda, the managing director of an Internet service provider in Malawi.

 
Connecting poor farmers to markets through the Web

E-Choupal is the initiative of a large Indian-based private company, ITC, which places computers with Internet access in rural farming villages to offer farmers an opportunity to enhance their farm productivity, improve their revenues and cut their transaction costs.

Called e-Choupals, the ICT centres serve as both a social gathering place for exchange of information and as an e-commerce hub. Farmers can access latest local and global information on weather, scientific farming practices as well as market prices at the village itself through the e-Choupal web portal, all in the Hindi language. So far, the project has benefited more than 2.4 million farmers in six states. It is expected to extend to 100,000 villages and to be used by 10 million farmers over the next decade. Increased profits to farmers are realized through enhanced yields and improved procurement, marketing and distribution.

MDG 2: Achieve universal primary education

Millennium Target: Ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling

WSIS Plan of Action:

• In the context of national e-strategies, address the special requirements of (…)children, especially marginalized children and other disadvantaged and vulnerable groups, including by appropriate educational administrative and legislative measures to ensure their full inclusion in the Information Society.
   

ICT solutions:

Training school teachers through distance education

The Canada-based NGO Commonwealth of Learning reported that open and distance learning using ICT applications is playing a central role in addressing educational needs in Africa.

Ministries of Education from eight Southern African countries (Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe) are now collaborating with the NGO to develop distance education training materials to upgrade the skills of teachers of upper primary and junior secondary science, technology, mathematics and general studies. Training workshops and consultative meetings for education professionals have been conducted throughout Africa on topics ranging from identifying gender barriers to ICTs and developing ICT and e-learning skills, to training for those caring for orphans and other children in need.

In addition, the British Department for International Development (DFID) created “Imfundo: Partnership for IT in Education,” a programme that supports the School Empowerment Programme in Kenya, a distance learning course designed to train key teachers to deal with the challenges of free Primary Education. The programme is mainly delivered through print based material and supported by multimedia (audio, video and radio).

A radio for Rwandan orphans

The genocide that took place in Rwanda in 1994 left more than 65,000 child-headed households – a number which has been compounded by more children orphaned by HIV/AIDS.

In total, over 400,000 children live alone without an adult, the oldest child often looking after three to five younger children. They want to attend school, but their abject poverty means they must work to live.

Project Radio Rwanda was created to distribute radios that need no batteries or electricity, that can be taken into the fields by children when they work. Based on the Lifeline radio, a brand-new radio developed exclusively for children living on their own invented by the UK/South-Africa-based Freeplay Foundation, the project provides the orphaned "head" child with information, education and critical life skills, helping teach them how to prevent disease, take care of their animals, adopt better farming techniques, keep their younger siblings healthy, etc.

Surveys show that most children choose News as their first listening choice. Second choice is a popular educational soap opera called Urunana, which includes a continuing storyline about a child-headed household. “The most important thing I had was my goat, but now it is my radio. I listen to the news to learn, since I cannot attend school,” said Mukakrimba, head of her household in Rwanda since age 10.

In Tanzania, a thousand Freeplay Lifeline radios have also been donated to teach primary grades 1, 2, and 3 to children who work in Tanzanian mines or as domestic workers.

MDG 3: Promote gender equality and empower women

Millennium Target: Eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education preferably by 2005, and at all levels by 2015

WSIS Plan of Action:

• Work on removing the gender barriers to ICT education and training and promoting equal training opportunities in ICT-related fields for women and girls. Early intervention programmes in science and technology should target young girls with the aim of increasing the number of women in ICT careers. Promote the exchange of best practices on the integration of gender perspectives in ICT education.
• Strengthen programmes focused on gender-sensitive curricula in formal and non-formal education for all and enhancing communication and media literacy for women with a view to building the capacity of girls and women to understand and to develop ICT content.

ICT solutions:

Education and ICT help break the cycle of women’s poverty

Since 2001, the World Schoolhouse Project has been committed to ensuring that girls and women learn to read in the mountains of the Dir rural district of Pakistan.

Target subject matters are basic mathematics and English. Recently, basic ICT skills have been also integrated in the training modules, following increased awareness of the importance of gender empowerment resources available through the Internet.

The initial programme has broadened its focus from increasing access to primary education to improving literacy, including e-literacy. Before it began, there were no schools for girls in this area, and many parents refused to send their daughters to schools attended by both sexes. Now, the schoolgirl ratio is continuously growing, with trained educators providing pedagogically consistent learning programmes through use of ICTs. The project has been implemented by Developments in Literacy (DIL), an organization created by Pakistani expatriates in Southern California, and by the Pakistani NGO Khwendo Kor (KK) under the auspices of the international non-profit organization NetAid. The success of the project has seen it replicated in other provinces of Pakistan as well as in other developing nations including Afghanistan, Peru, Colombia, Zimbabwe and Haiti.

Internet access is reinforcing African girls’ self-esteem

World Links, an initiative of the World Bank Institute, is a US-based non-profit organization that links 200,000 students and teachers in 20 developing countries with partners in 22 industrialized countries on projects in all disciplines, via the Internet. A three-year old study on the gender impact of its work in four African countries shows that girls have benefited more than boys in terms of academic outcomes, self-esteem and communication skills. This is important, since in conservative African societies girls often have fewer opportunities to communicate than boys, particularly in public and with the outside world, and especially during their teen years when their physical movements may be increasingly restricted.

For their part, boys have benefited enormously in terms of access to technology and development of technological skills. However, even though much progress has been made in terms of gender equity, some schools visited in Uganda and Ghana still struggled with gender disparities, particularly with respect to computer access, the study showed, noting that “domestic chores, culturally-imbued feelings of shyness and traditional rules forced many girls to have less access than boys to computer labs.”
 

MDG 4: Reduce child mortality

Millennium Target: Reduce by two thirds the mortality rate among children under five

AND

MDG 5: Improve maternal health

Millennium Target: Reduce by three quarters the maternal mortality ratio

WSIS Declaration of Principles

• Our challenge is to harness the potential of information and communication technology to promote the development goals of the Millennium Declaration, namely reduction of child mortality and improvement of maternal health.
   

ICT solutions:

Maternal mortality reduced by 50 per cent in Tororo

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) new electronic Reproductive Health Library (RHL) consists of pregnancy information on diskettes and CD-ROMs accessible through computers. This assists health workers who lack access to the latest reliable information because of the high cost of journals or unreliable delivery.

The interactive RHL is being trialled in 22 hospitals in Mexico and 18 in Thailand, to determine if interactive dissemination of information improves obstetric practice.

In addition, The Dreyfus Health Foundation Communications for Better Health (CBH) program has established interactive centres in 14 countries for the dissemination of computerized health information. The CBH system contains a vast amount of computerized information which has been distributed to some 1,000 health facilities in Ghana including maternal and child centres. The system is being further expanded to localize information and create digital videos aimed at enhancing maternal health.

An evaluation of another maternal health project in the Tororo district of Uganda based on radio technology found that maternal mortality dropped 50 per cent following implementation of the project. The decrease in the number of maternal/infant deaths because of use of ICTs is an indication that ICTs have an important role in saving both mother and child. (Source: ITU World Telecommunication Development Report 2003, page 84)

Mobile phones help reduce birth complications

In a recent article, Patricia N. Mechael of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in the UK reports about a survey on the importance of mobile phones as a tool for promoting maternal and child health in Egypt, a country cited by WHO’s World Health Report 2005 as having made significant progress in addressing maternal and child health.

The positive health impact of mobile phones focused on reducing the risk of death and complications during child birth. Home delivery was discussed by lay mobile phone users in rural areas as common practice that did not require medical professionals, except in extreme cases in which people have used mobile phones to mobilize assistance or to coordinate transport of women to qualified health care workers. “Mobile phones increasingly are facilitating access to this guidance, as well as consultations with physicians when higher level information is deemed necessary. In Egypt, one can also place orders by phone with pharmacies to deliver medicines- saving time to treatment for basic childhood illnesses,” wrote Ms. Mechael.

Using telemedicine to save infants in Arkansas: In the Delta region of Arkansas (USA), local health care professionals joined together to create the Arkansas Rural Medlink (ARM) to improve the quality of and access to medical services and provide health care education programmes through ICTs.

In 1994, ARM was awarded a Telemedicine grant to purchase interactive digital video equipment to link the five rural hospitals with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Local hospitals now provide medical consultations that were previously not available at cost effective rates. The need to travel long distances to urban areas for the same services has been greatly reduced.

MDG 6: Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases

Millennium Target: Halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS

WSIS Plan of Action:

• Facilitates access to the world’s medical knowledge and locally-relevant content resources for strengthening public health research and prevention programmes and promoting women’s and men’s health, such as content on sexual and reproductive health and sexually transmitted infections, and for diseases that attract full attention of the world including HIV/AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis.

ICT solutions

50 TV networks unite their efforts against HIV/AIDS

Over the last two years, at the invitation of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, top executives from leading media companies from around the world have twice gathered to boost the media industry’s commitment to fight against AIDS. In a statement first signed by 22 media leaders (and now endorsed by more than 50), they resolved through their companies “to expand public knowledge and understanding about HIV/AIDS.”

Through the Global Media AIDS Initiative, these networks (which include regular TV networks, cable and satellite-based TV and their websites) committed to devoting substantial time and/or space to the issue, to train their reporters and producers to cover the epidemic, to support the development and broadcast of HIV/AIDS-related shows, films and documentaries, and to making content addressing HIV/AIDS available rights-free to other outlets.

The leader of this initiative, Bill Roedy, President of MTV Networks International, commented: “The media have not done enough to fight this epidemic, and I will be challenging industry leaders everywhere to step up our efforts by using our airwaves, our creativity and our influence in our communities. The media have the tremendous ability to help fight the epidemic -- not only in increasing awareness and prevention, but also in removing the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS”, he said.

Text messaging helps save HIV/AIDS patients

Wired News journalist Megan Lindow reported about how text messaging allowed making the expertise of two doctors and two nurses spread far and wide enough to take care of more than 500 HIV/AIDS patients in the township of Gugulethu, near Cape Town in South Africa.

Therapeutic counsellors visit patients at home and count pills. They take note of conditions that interfere with treatment, such as the absence of food in the house. The system they use combines a comprehensive database that includes a patient's treatment history and lab results with a messaging service that allows counsellors, clinic staff and doctors to communicate using SMS. Visiting clients' homes, therapeutic counsellors scroll through a series of menus to report on side effects, monitor adherence and provide detailed social information. Once every four months, they show up without an appointment to count the client's pills. They use SMS to send all of this information to a central database, where it can instantly be viewed on a computer screen.

With all of the relevant information compiled neatly, the irregularities stand out. If a patient on treatment is not showing an improved count and viral load, the counsellor may be asked to take the patient to the clinic. An estimated 5 million South Africans are infected with HIV, the highest number of any country in the world. Forty percent of South Africans already use cellular phones.

Upgrading information in the fight against tuberculosis

While assessing its first country project in India, the United Nations Health InterNetwork (HIN, an initiative aiming at narrowing the digital divide in health) discovered that more than 50 per cent of private sector doctors had access to the internet, compared to 20 per cent of public sector doctors. The HIN India project aimed to address that gap through documenting and analyzing the process and impact of using ICTs to provide health services. It was piloted in the states of Karnataka and Orissa in primary and community health centres, linked to the Tuberculosis and Tobacco control programmes in research institutions in Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Delhi. Computers were upgraded, networks and Internet connections established, and e-faxing, e-consultations and hand held computers were introduced. Local firms provided training for over 300 staff and students in computer and Internet skills at district medical offices and primary health care centres. Staff from multiple disciplines and levels of care were also given the opportunity to develop new skills.

Millennium Target: Halt and begin to reverse the incidence of malaria and other major diseases

WSIS Plan of Action:

• Promote collaborative efforts of governments, planners, health professionals, and other agencies along with the participation of international organizations for creating a reliable, timely, high quality and affordable health care and health information systems and for promoting continuous medical training, education, and research through the use of ICTs, while respecting and protecting citizens’ right to privacy.

ICT solutions:

Harnessing satellite technology to combat malaria

Using images from India's remote sensing (IRS) satellites, the Malaria Research Centre in New Delhi mapped areas across the country where Anopheles dirus, a deadly species of malaria-carrying mosquito, was likely to be found on the basis of ecological factors conducive to its breeding and survival.

Their model correctly predicted the exact breeding locations, which could then be selectively targeted for specific control measures. The Centre’s study found that an estimated 50 million inhabitants were being exposed to this dangerous mosquito whose presence was in some cases unknown to health authorities until the satellite-aided study.
 

MDG 7: Ensure environmental sustainability

Millennium Target: Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources

WSIS Plan of Action:

• Governments, in cooperation with other stakeholders are encouraged to use and promote ICTs as an instrument for environmental protection and the sustainable use of natural resources.
• By 2005, relevant international organizations and financial institutions should develop their own strategies for the use of ICTs for sustainable development, including sustainable production and consumption patterns and as an effective instrument to help achieve the goals expressed in the United Nations Millennium Declaration.
• Government, civil society and the private sector are encouraged to initiate actions and implement projects and programmes for sustainable production and consumption and the environmentally safe disposal and recycling of discarded hardware and components used in ICTs.
   

ICT solutions:

Radio soap opera promoting better farming practices

A radio soap opera has been designed to educate Vietnamese farmers about the negative environmental impact of using excessive amounts of fertilizer, pesticide and water, along with other practices leading to environmental pollution and degradation.

Called Chuyen Que Minh or My Homeland, it began to be broadcast in July 2004 and notched up its first 104 episodes this July. With financial assistance of the World Bank and the Philippine-based International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), this series combining a love story with drama and ecological advice was broadcast over Voice of Ho Chi Minh and five other provincial radio stations in the Mekong Delta, reaching some 10 million farming households.

In June this year, university students launched a major survey among Vietnamese rice growers. During these focus group discussions, farmers said that, through the soap opera, they learned several lessons about pesticide poisoning and the need to reduce its use, notably that leaf feeding insects have little effects on yields and need not be sprayed. Most interviewed farmers said that they had reduced pesticide use.
 

Millennium Target: Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020

ICT solutions:

ICTs improve slum-dwellers’ lives

ICTs can enhance monitoring of existing housing and the design and construction of new houses in poor urban areas. They can also improve the quality of life of slum dwellers by delivering services such as government, education and health information online, and can create new economic opportunities through online promotion and sale of products, access to employment information and training. Slums in Brazil, India and Kenya are three examples where innovative ICT projects are working to improve the lives of the local community. (Source: ITU World Telecommunication Development Report 2003, page 87)

MDG 8: Develop a global partnership for development

Millennium Target: Deal comprehensively with developing countries’ debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term

WSIS Declaration of Principles:

• For those developing countries facing unsustainable debt burdens, we welcome initiatives that have been undertaken to reduce outstanding indebtedness and invite further national and international measures in that regard, including, as appropriate, debt cancellation and other arrangements. Particular attention should be given to enhancing the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative. These initiatives would release more resources that may be used for financing ICT for development projects.

ICT solutions:

Converting debt to set up ICT link within Jordan

In 2003, the Export Credits Guarantee Department, the UK's official export credit agency, sold GBP 69.5 million of Jordanian debt to a local company for conversion to local dinars to set up a state-of-the-art information and communications technology (ICT) link within Jordan.

The project was aimed at supporting Jordan's goal to become a centre for ICT and is part of the REACH initiative — a national strategy to generate employment, improve the country's ICT export potential and provide a sound infrastructure for national development. British Trade Minister Mike O'Brien then declared: “The project will help Jordan to achieve its goal of creating jobs and exports in the ICT sector. At the same time, the sale of £69.5 million of Jordanian debt will reduce the external debt burden on Jordan as well as help the ECGD achieve an early recovery of the debt.” Jordan has settled hard currency debts rescheduled through the Paris Club at a discount, leaving foreign currency reserves unaffected.

Millennium Target: In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies—especially information and communications technologies

WSIS Plan of Action:

• Governments, international organizations and the private sector, are encouraged to promote the benefits of international trade and the use of e- business, and promote the use of e-business models in developing countries and countries with economies in transition.
• International and regional institutions, including international financial institutions, have a key role in integrating the use of ICTs in the development process and making available necessary resources for building the Information Society and for the evaluation of the progress made.
• Through the adoption of an enabling environment, and based on widely available Internet access, governments should seek to stimulate private sector investment, foster new applications, content development and public/private partnerships.

ICT solutions:

Initiative to bridge the Digital Divide

The ITU launched a major new development drive designed to bring access to ICTs to the estimated one billion peopleworldwide for whom making a simple telephone call remains out of reach.

Called “Connect the World,” the initiative is designed to encourage new projects and partnerships to bridge the digital divide, creating a critical mass that will generate the momentum needed to connect all communities by 2015.

At present, ITU estimates that around 800,000 villages -- or 30 per cent of all villages worldwide -- are still without any kind of connection. The initiative was endorsed by 22 leading corporate partners such as Alcatel, Huawei, Intel, Microsoft, KDDI, Telefónica, Infosys and WorldSpace, along with governments, intergovernmental agencies and civil society organizations.

To create an enabling environment for ICT access, the initiative includes an ITU’s project in Western Africa to harmonize ICT markets and provide ICT services at affordable prices. To boost development of infrastructure and readiness, the initiative includes a mobile services project by Alcatel in Senegal targeted at individual Senegalese farmers and Microsoft’s “Unlimited Potential” programme that provides technology-related skills through telecentres. In the area of applications and services, the initiative includes Child Helpline International’s effort to provide helpline services for children via telephone and the Internet, and the provision of emergency telecoms services to tsunami-hit zones in Indonesia, India, Thailand, and Sri Lanka by French-based Télécoms sans Frontières.