Alison Gillwald, director of Research ICT Africa!, and Helani Galpaya, director of Strategic Development for LIRNEasia, are attending the 3rd Internet Governance Forum (IGF) this week in Hydrabad, India.
Gillwald is a panelist for the first main session on Access: Reaching the Next Billion(s).
Click here for the transcript of the Access session.
Galapaya will participate as a panelist for the workshop session, Digital convergence beyond technology: socio-economic benefits, SMEs & public policy – 9:30-11:00 am, Day 3 (5 December), in Room 1.
Click here for the full IGF programme.
Click here for the IGF workshop schedule.
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Alison Gillwald, director of the Research ICT Africa (RIA!) network, in her article published in South Africa’s Business Day, reports on the significance and implications of the most recent ruling by the Pretoria High Court denying the Communications Minister’s application for an urgent interdict to prevent South Africa regulatory authority (ICASA) from issuing certain licences.
“While those who would finally be able to enter the market unconstrained have been rubbing their hands in glee at these rulings — and those who thought they had got in through the flawed licensing process and closed the door behind them gnashed their teeth — not much has been said about the significance of Judge Norman Davis’s carefully reasoned judgment reasserting a sound institutional and administrative basis for a sector so long paralysed by indecision.”
Click here to read the full Business Day article by Gillwald.
Click here to download the RIA policy brief: South Africa – Policy vs. Performance, ICT Access & Usage in South Africa (in .pdf)
See also: Appeal plunges telecoms sector back into limbo
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Participants from policy and regulatory agencies, telecommunications operators and ISPs, the private and public sector, educators and civil society organizations, as well as interested individuals, recently came together, in Trinidad and Tobago, to discuss the potential for mobile Internet technology to promote economic and social development in the Caribbean and to contemplate what is required to create an enabling environment.
These discussions were the focus of the Sixth Caribbean Internet Forum, which took place at the Crown Plaza, Port of Spain from October 29 to 31, 2008. The Forum was organized by the MRP (Telecommunications) programme of The University of the West Indies (UWI), and co-hosted by the Caribbean Telecommunications Union (CTU) and the Eastern Caribbean Telecommunications Authority (ECTEL).
Click here for the agenda, presentations and other resources.
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The University of the West Indies 2008 graduation ceremony saw the graduation of the third and final cohort of The University of the West Indies Master’s degree in Regulation and Policy (MRP) programme. This programme, which was delivered through the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, offered a specialization in telecommunications intended to meet the challenges of managing liberalization of the sector.
After a year of stakeholder consultations and intensive planning, the MRP (Telecommunications) programme was launched in December 2003, with scholarship support from the Cable and Wireless Virtual Academy. It serviced three cohorts of students through a multidisciplinary two-year programme. Because of the nature of the programme both students and staff came from diverse backgrounds and were widely spread geographically. The programme has over seventy graduates from thirty-two developing countries around the world. Teaching staff and project supervisors contributed to the programme, as experts of the highest calibre in their fields, from the Caribbean, Europe, USA and Africa.
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LIRNEasia, in collaboration with the Institute of Water Policy, Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, Singapore and the University of Hong Kong, is organizing a conference entitled “Infrastructure Regulation: What works, Why, and How do we know?,” 26-27 February, 2009, at the University of Hong Kong.
Sponsored by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the conference will address the following questions: Does regulation work? What kind of regulation works? What kinds don’t work? Why do some forms of regulation work and not others? How do we know whether they work or not? How do we isolate the effects of different political, economic and legal contexts? Are there systematic differences among water, telecommunications, energy and transport infrastructure that necessitate particular regulatory design?
Click here for the call for papers (deadline 5 December 2008).
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