These projects belong to the area known as Capacity Building (CB) through Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), and are designed to help meet some of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) set by the United Nations in 2001. The MDGs are eight international development goals that 192 United Nations member states and at least 23 international organizations have agreed to achieve by the year 2015. They include reducing extreme poverty, reducing child mortality rates, fighting disease epidemics such as AIDS, and developing a global partnership for development.
The MDGs, together with the World Summit on the Information Society (WSI) have paved the way for a number of CB projects in developing countries. Satcom technology and knowledge can contribute to facilitate the achievement of those goals, especially in regions with little or no telecommunications infrastructure.
The new toolkit, known as the CBICT Reference Model, is a multidimensional tool that provides guidelines targeting three main categories of users (programme manager, project initiator, and project manager) and looks at activities in three successive phases (pre-, running, and post-) in an easy-to-navigate and interactive pdf document.
The Reference Model includes:
- A set of checklists to successfully deploy ICT solutions in developing countries. These checklists span four sectors in particular (healthcare, education, civil society, governance) and include elements such as risk analysis ,sustainability issues, ownership and project management.
- Numerous pointers that provide additional information about specific topics (e.g. round table process). Templates are also presented to facilitate the application of the concepts proposed by the reference model.
The CBICT Reference Model was produced through an ESA Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems (ARTES) 1 study led by a consortium including; TNO Information and Communication Technology [NL], ActNow Alliance [I], Avanti Communications Ltd [UK], and IICD [NL].
