Acacia Initiative

Activities include regional and sub-regional convenings to garner broad participation of stakeholders in debates about ICTs and development, as well as recognition of the need to address a broad spectrum of policy issues. There are projects to develop local content needs to meet educational, business, and environmental needs and a variety of community access mechanisms (such as telecentres). Acacia activities also include stimulating private sector participation and supporting sectoral initiatives such as school networking to support formal and informal learning.

Specific activities include:

• SchoolNet South Africa Programme - to test various connectivity models and to develop an understanding of the educational processes, benefits and constraints relating to the use of ICTs in education.
• Mozambique Pilot Telecentres in Manhica and Namaacha - The telecentres will offer various services from photocopying to email, but the main focus of the telecentres will be to provide educational resources to the most disadvantaged groups in the two communities.
• Application of ICTs and Decentralization of Health Services - Phase I: Telemedicine Pilot Project - to introduce new information communication technologies and enable the control of such technologies with local health practitioners. The telemedicine facility will service distant and underprivileged communities outside Dakar.
• Economic Empowerment of Women through ICTs in Uganda - Online and offline databases and other information sources on a variety of issues to increase women's entrepreneurial opportunities are combined with ICT training for women and technical assistances for using these databases.

Economic Development, Technology, Education, Gender, Women.

The Evaluation and Learning System for Acacia (ELSA) constituted a very significant element of the entire first phase of Acacia (Acacia I). According to organisers, perhaps the most important lesson learned from the first generation of Acacia was how challenging it can be to mount this type of programme. Other lessons learned from Acacia 1 projects and programming include:

• Policy is key: ICT policy development requires positive support at the highest level of political leadership for ICTs to be considered critical ingredients in helping to foster burgeoning economies. Project implementation was severely hampered by the poor infrastructure and rural connectivity whose provision, or lack thereof, were policy-related.
• Technologies exist for difficult environments: Despite the heavy costs, rural connectivity is feasible with the new range of options available worldwide. A menu of different technical and technological options needs to be tried and tested to enhance access to rural people.
• Content matters: The huge potential of the internet is not being adequately harnessed on account of the lack-of-fit of its content to the daily needs of Africans. Consequently, more work needs to be done on developing African content.
• The Management of Community ICT projects is complex: Necessary administrative, technical and managerial expertise is slim in rural settings. Moreover, the model of a development project operating with a business mandate is a new phenomenon.
• Partnerships are important but elusive: Private cyber cafes and telecentres are becoming regular phenomenon of the modern African capital city. However, rural ICT projects need to be maintained/sustained in order to reduce the national and regional digital divides within countries. Private-public partnerships are a necessary condition for the continued existence of rural ICT projects but such partnerships are elusive and transaction-intensive. The private sector is impatient with the slow pace of public sector initiatives and especially with the public culture of subsidies.
• Gender equity is difficult to attain: Programming for gender equity is particularly difficult with ICT projects, as these are in the area of technology, which has a long history of being gender-biased to the exclusion of women. Improved gender sensitivity among programmers and project implementers is required to bring about appreciable change.