The Nigeria's Federal Capital Territory (FCT) Abuja, will next month play host to a five-day workshop of high-level experts from Commonwealth countries to deliberate extensively on how best to assist the African nation?s to adequately implement Information and Communication Technology (ICT) policies.

The five-day event scheduled for September 3rd through 7th , this year, is being organised by the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) and has been planned to gather ICT policy experts from Malta, Singapore, Malaysia, Nigeria and Trinidad and Tobago among others.

Confirming this to Highway Africa News Agency (HANA), Communications officers at CTO, Messrs Toby Davies and Marcel Belingue, described it as an "unusual workshop," and is focused mainly on unravelling implementation bottlenecks and challenges.

According to them, the workshop is aimed primarily at Director-level staff of African public sector agencies responsible for ICT planning and implementation.

"Over the last decade, most African countries have developed national ICT plans and have made various degrees of progress in their implementation," CTO officials noted.

They also noted that in spite of various African countries efforts, they have continued to face difficulties in the smooth implementation of their national ICT plans and e-strategies.

CTO pointed out that some of these challenges include resource competition from other sectors of the economy, inadequate financing and shortage of skilled manpower, special problems in the regulatory sector, uneven playing fields for some operators, delays in privatisation of incumbents and weak in-country inter-departmental coordination.

CTO also said that it was of the view that ICT planning was central to national development processes and as such, the chief executive of CTO and a former Minister of Communication of Ghana, Dr Ekwow Spio-Garbrah, took the unusual step of deciding to be the lead workshop facilitatosr.

Dr. Spio-Garbrah, the officials informed, would lead experts from three other more advanced Commonwealth countries and two developing countries to the forum.

HANA has learned that topics slated for discussion would range from the showcasing of various models of ICT planning, implementation and monitoring, to a case study on communications markets, and from the economic considerations of ICTs, to the roles of Universal Service Funds (USF), ICT implementation agencies and e-strategy agencies.
The essence, CTO said, is to provide an insight into the reasons for overtime unsuccessful attempts by African policy implementers.

"I am personally very concerned about evidence of the slow pace of implementation of the national e-strategies of most African countries. At the Millennium Summit in 2000, developing countries made commitments to achieve a number of Millennium Developing Goals (MDGs) by the year 2015," he said, stressing that at the World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS), further commitments were made by countries to use ICTs to enable them to more rapidly achieve these MDGs.

"Within the Commonwealth, similar commitments have been made by Heads of State. Yet, throughout the continent, a combination of slow policy development and implementation, uncertain regulatory practices, delays in privatisation of national telephone companies and urban creaming by mobile phone companies, have combined with other factors to delay effective implementation of national ICT strategies. Early implementation of these strategies is critical if African nations are not to be left behind, once again, in the quest by nations to develop Knowledge Economies," he said.

CTO believes that participants in this workshop could benefit from the unique experiences of its lead speakers.

Highway Africa News Agency