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About Acacia

Acacia is unique. It proceeds with a community focus and community leadership, addresses the issues related to short-term acceptance and long-term sustainability, and is creating an accessible, relevant knowledge base within a continuous learning process.

The full Acacia Programme of the IDRC can be found at www.idrc.ca/acacia. Acacia has regional presence in the West Africa Regional Office in Dakar, Sengal, as well as the East and Southern Africa Regional Office, Nairobi, Kenya, under which the Southern African programme resides. The latter has a satellite presence in Midran, South Africa.

Acacia II is the second phase of the program, building on the first notably by disseminating the findings widely, learning from the initial projects, and developing new projects and types of projects.

Broadly, the objectives of Acacia are:

to demonstrate how ICTs can enable communities to solve development problems in ways that build upon local goals, cultures, strengths and processes; and
to build a validated body of knowledge and a networked dissemination process around effective approaches, policies, technologies and methodologies.

In Acacia II, the objectives are focused on:

to grow understanding of the positive and negative effects of ICT%s on poverty reduction and human development in Africa;
to improve the capacity of African countries to formulate and implement their own national ICT policies, with the aim of promoting equitable access to ICTs and to information for socio-economic development;
to contribute to research that supports affordable and functionally relevant solutions for Africa;
to find ways to increase the African content of ICTs through software development for effective applications;
to learn from Acacia's community-based research and experimentation and to make sure this knowledge is widely distributed