The production and utilisation of information and communication technologies (ICTs) can play a key role in the context of development and act as a powerful tool for capacity building in human resources. However, there is a lack of capacity in African countries to build, maintain, and utilise the ICT resources to address socio-economic needs. This contributes to the vulner- ability of these countries in the global economy. The ICT4D project aims to build capacities to produce and use information and communication tech- nologies for development purposes in Eastern, Western and Southern Africa through sharing of expertise between two existing networks in Africa and Europe with an established history in supporting and building ICT capacity in Africa.

More specifically, the “Consortium of African and European Higher Education Institutions” (ICT4D) will foster the socio-economic development of African countries by strengthening curricula, teaching and research in information and communication technologies for development (ICT4D) at the participating African universities.

Intensive online collaboration between African and European partners will also play a crucial role in boosting networking and upgrading teaching modules throughout the course of the project. This will help build the research capacities of partners (by enabling knowledge sharing), and increase the academic quality of partner institutions (through the curriculum development component of the online interaction).

This online platform will serve as a means of communication and social networking for partners and staff. It will include discussion forums, and archives for newly created ICT4D curriculum and learning materials. It will provide a tool where ICT4D educational program planners can browse a jointly-created curriculum and decide which courses to implement in a new program. It will also be a place where ICT4D instructors can search for the accumulated academic measures, syllabi, lessons plans, teaching activities, and learning materials created by other instructors.

ICTs: a tool to fight poverty in Africa

Extensive networking through university staff and student exchanges, face-to-face workshops and a virtual collaboration platform set up by the project partners will result in an inter-institutional research agenda and creation of regionally relevant curricula in Information and Communication Technology for Development in Eastern, Western and Southern Africa.

Concretely, this will hone the theoretical and technical ICT skills of over 2000 undergraduate and postgraduate students, and 200 researchers working in computer science or development. In the longer run, these figures will be much higher, and as the courses continue to be rolled out the numbers participating in new courses developed as a result will accumulate. Researchers, developers, teachers, and postgraduate students of ICT4D will benefit directly from greatly facilitated African-EU mobility, from a larger network of peers to collaborate with, and from the greater diversity of resources that results from being part of a large network.

In the long run the project will help build a lasting capacity in Africa to enable deliver relevant, effective, and sustainable ICT4D policies, strategies and programmes. The participating African and European universities have strong relationships with private sector and civil society organisations in Europe and Africa. They will be able to employ high level ICT human resources, and use research results and new technologies to ultimately contribute to empowering the poor and marginalised communities in Africa.