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Quotes of the day “I sat in on the Schoolnetworking breakaway session. I cannot understand, but South Africa seems to be so developed, and yet I can hear from the participants, they are all doing there own thing, there is no congruence with what is happening on the ground with what is happening in government. In Mozambique we agree about implementation and policy.” Carlos Tamele, ICT Institute and Science Park coordinator for the Mozambique Acacia Advisory Committee. “Thank you for bringing my team and I to this workshop to meet our South African counterparts. This is a very good thing you have done for Acacia and us. I believe that we have developed a deeper understanding or each other.” Venâncio Massingue, Vice Chancellor, UEM and Acacia research coordinator in Mozambique. “We support the Acacia concept that Global Knowledge must fit into government programs that benefit people. We don’t seek to do this with political power, but with scientific knowledge.” Venânçio Massingue “Policies that are not suitable for developing countries are too often uncritically adopted not adapted. There is a failure of ownership of policies, and agreements often happen out of conditionality.” Alison Gillwald, research director, LINK Centre, Wits University. “We have a great need to disseminate and share information and there is a need for integration of community and NGO objectives in projects.” Charley Lewis, LINK Centre, Wits University and former head of Congress of South African Trade Unions IT division. “The two terms most used in the workshop today were integration and national policy, and none of these tell us stories about people.” Graeme Addison, media consultant and webmaster. “We have examples of where appropriate content was too successful and caused our media platform to be too large. We now need to develop database source software so that we can continue to provide an efficient search and retrieve service on our site.” Natasha Primo, Womensnet.org.za. “We find it difficult to talk to rural women about the internet and how this can serve their information needs, when they have not even come across a computer.” Benhilde dos Santos Nhalivilo, director Forum Mulher (Women’s Forum) “Research needs to impact on policy formation and policy makers should not betray the outcomes.” Charley Lewis “I met up with some excellent people. I hope that we can cooperate.” Enrique Portillo, Leland Initiative, USAID, Maputo. “A stand-alone ICT project in a rural area falls apart. It needs to be integrated into other development activities such as healthcare, job creation, basic services. We must avoid silo projects. Among us we found several projects promoting the community-ICT access points for multiple use, but we found that there were very few cases of ICT projects that directly supported small businesses.” Peter Benjamin, Association of Progressive Communicators giving feedback from the breakaway group on networking communities. “The community pays to come and learn at our centre and to make use of our centre so that the children of the school could make free use of the facilities.” Momed Cadir, Principal and ICT school pioneer from the Emilia Dauss Secondary School in Inhambane, Mozambique. “We are suffering from a DIGIT ALL divide. We like to DIG ALL the fancy technology, the multi-media applications, the speed of delivery and unfortunately the promises on the box do not live up to the expectations of the person wanting to use it in a rural area.” Peter Benjamin “The fact that TDM (Mozambique’s telecommunications service provider) is opening up commercial telecentres in provincial towns and other funders are supporting telecentres; and the fact that the Ministry of Education has taken on the Schoolnet Mozambique, and TDM has in turn offered two years of free internet access to these schools, is validation of the research that Acacia has initiated.” Venâncio Massingue Heloise Emdon: Our "official" sideshow event of the WSSD was very well attended, with plenty of input from all. The 50 Acacia partners from Mozambique and South Africa met to talk about their research so far, lessons and ideas for future research, actions and policies. We published a webpage to accompany it. There was great excitement from the participants that they could get their projects "aired" and thus it remains an unfinished project but with much reflection as we go along. We will share lessons learned in the process soon. Your comments are welcome. heloise@dbsa.org
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