GKP joins infoDev and IICD promoting learning by doing through ICT Stories

The Global Knowledge Partnership (GKP) will join infoDev and IICD this year to help spread learning and acknowledge practitioners in ICTs for development.

This year, the GKP will add its partnership to the mix, making the organisations behind ICT Stories into a tripartite. The added value brought by the GKP will be to:

• Expand the input and dissemination channels through bringing their network to the project;
• Realise a publication on ICT Stories;
• Introduce a significant financial prize for the winner of the Tony Zeitoun Awards; an award for a project most contributing to poverty alleviation.

Since 1998, infoDev and IICD have been official partners in the ICT Stories Project. In November 2001, a Memorandum of Understanding was signed to formalize the partnership. The overall objective of this collaboration is to:

• Capture the learning process that accompanies the introduction and implementation of ICTs in development through the sharing of documented stories;
• Make these sources of learning - 357 stories to-date - accessible to the public by web in a user-friendly and searchable manner;
• Add value to submitted stories by furnishing sector and process studies in Learning by Doing;
• Give the public incentives to submit stories and create awareness of the ICT Stories Project by hosting an annual ICT Stories Competition.

"When we had no such program, we had to sell livestock products at prices traders offered. But now that we know the real price - in the markets - we just hold back until a fair price is offered.
- Mr. Daavadorj, a Mongolian herder, on the introduction of Market Watch, a multi-media price information and analysis system. - From "Closing The Gap" an ICT Stories Competition 2001 winner.

The partnership

In almost all projects up-to-date knowledge about Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) is crucial, but resources and access to this knowledge are very limited. Moreover, in most projects there is neither time nor money to carefully compare the various options available. In such a situation, the experiences of others facing the same problems become invaluable. By learning from the mistakes and successes of others, one does not have to reinvent the wheel. Further, the rapidly changing nature of ICTs means that continuous innovations and availability of information can confuse the picture. In such a dynamic environment, opportunities to learn from one's own experiences and to share the experiences of others become an important means to strengthen respective knowledge bases.

In 1998, infoDev and IICD acknowledged how important experiences and lessons learned are in the field of ICTs for development by agreeing to partner to support the ICT Stories Project. Knowledge is generated throughout the entire course of a project. The ICT Stories objective is to capture the learning process that accompanies the introduction and implementation of ICTs in a project in exemplary stories. These stories describe good practices and lessons learned from contributors' experiences.

The collected stories are stored in a database on a joint website (www.iicd.org/stories) and available to anybody interested in projects with ICT components. The ICT Stories deal with a range of problems and opportunities and with a variety of actors, project sizes, objectives, target groups and regions. By means of a single keyword search one can retrieve a collection of stories from a number of different projects, all discussing a single issue. The reader can then learn about those experiences and contact the project implementer - if he wishes.

To kick-off ICT Stories and to motivate story owners to share their knowledge, IICD and infoDev launched an annual competition. An internationally acclaimed ICT Stories jury selects the winning stories from a growing database. Our expert panel of judges selects winning stories based on guidelines jointly formulated by infoDev and IICD. These are as follows:

The project

The story

The annual contest winners participate in an international ICT event to present their story to the public. infoDev, IICD and GKP as part of the collaboration, cooperate to support these events.

Tony Zeitoun Awards

The respective managements of IICD and infoDev have decided that, as a tribute to the late Tony Zeitoun from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA), the awards for the ICT Stories competition will become known as the 'Tony Zeitoun Awards'.

Mr. Zeitoun passed away on May 5, 2003. He worked for the Policy Branch of CIDA as Senior Advisor, Knowledge for Development Initiative. There, he provided strategic policy advice to senior management, coordinated the development of CIDA's strategy on Knowledge for Development through ICTs, and represented Canada/CIDA at major meetings of international telecommunications associations dealing with development issues. For many years, he represented Canada at infoDev's donors meetings.

Tony Zeitoun was a tireless and effective advocate of the role of ICTs as tools for the development process. He strongly supported the ICT Stories Competition. Renaming the ICT Stories awards is a small tribute to Tony Zeitoun's achievements in the area of ICTs for Development, but it is our hope that it will help others who have followed or will follow on Tony Zeitoun's footsteps to be inspired and stimulated by his work.

The first 'ICT Stories Competition - Tony Zeitoun Awards' will be presented next December in Geneva (Switzerland), during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS).