Inveneo

Creating a Global Community of Practice: ICT for Development

Inveneo's Clinton Global Initiative Commitment for 2009

For the third straight year, Inveneo is honored to be participating in the Clinton Global Initiative. The Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, September 23-26, 2008, brings together a diverse group of the world's most distinguished leaders from government, business, and civil society to examine today's most-pressing global challenges and to transform that awareness into tangible action.

As we enter our third year, Inveneo brings a new commitment to the Clinton Global Initiative -- to build a global community of practice, that will be a catalyst for getting effective rural ICT projects implemented around the world.

The Challenge:
For communities and individuals in remote and rural areas of the developing world, access to the tools of technology can accelerate social and economic change.

Increasingly, organizations that serve these communities with vital education, healthcare, economic development and relief services are incorporating Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) into their projects in innovative and effective ways that impact their capacity and engage local communities.

However, there are limited resources available to research approaches and best practices, engage in discussions with counterparts and experts, find local and global resources, or to share experiences to help others. In addition the lack of awareness of the overall impact and scale ICTs as accelerants of service delivery is stifling adoption of ICTs

The end result is that many effective solutions go unknown and common mistakes are repeated over and over. Each ICT Practitioner (implementer of ICTs) is starting from scratch.

The Commitment:
Our goal is to create a Community of Practice (CoP) that will become a catalyst for the increasing deployment of ICTs in rural and highly under-served regions in the developing world. The Community of Practice will engage practitioners, technology experts, and thought leaders to bring together innovative but practical solutions, ready access to available resources and best practices.

The Community of Practice will be a place to:

• Share and map (geographically) project implementations, techniques, content, tools, outcomes.
• Engage in and stimulate conversation on appropriate technologies, business models and approaches for rural and underserved areas.
• Provide access to clear and simple training, implementation and best practice resources -- "what to think about if you are planning an ICT project and who to go to get it done"

Historical Commitments:
In 2006, Inveneo committed to a three-year program to build an ecosystem of ICT professionals across Africa through the Inveneo Certified ICT Partner (ICIP) program. This formal training and certification process empowers ICT entrepreneurs with the skills and tools to implement appropriate technology in rural and underserved areas.

As a result, in each country where Inveneo works, we recruit, train and certify local ICIPs. These ICT professionals and small business entrepreneurs provide installation and support services for the organizations Inveneo serve which improves affordability and increases sustainability. Their work with Inveneo also provides new revenue opportunities to the entrepreneur, thus building the local ICT economy.

With the core training and support elements of the ICIP program in place, Inveneo implemented the program in Sub-Saharan African countries where there is a high demand for sustainable ICTs to serve rural development projects.

In 2008, the ICIP program will expand to include as many as 50 or more partners in 15 African countries. By 2009, the final year of the original commitment, Inveneo will have recruited and be supporting up to 100 ICIPs -- building a vibrant community of rural ICT entrepreneurs across Africa that collaborate to deliver life-impacting technologies to organizations that reach thousands of communities, touching the lives of millions of people.

The Community of Practice initiative builds upon and enhances Inveneo's ICIP program by creating a community through which ICT professionals can support each other and partner, share results and access best practices. But, this will not only happen between the ICIPs, in addition it will open up a clear channel for dialog between ICT professional and the ICT practitioners to build better solutions.

Inveneo's goal is for the Community of Practice to become an indispensible collective resource for ICT professionals and practitioners focusing on projects that support in schools, healthcare, relief and economic development projects across Africa and beyond.

Actions to implement commitment:
Inveneo and its growing network of in-country trained and certified ICT entrepreneurs, will provide a key role in launching, moderating and seeding the Community of Practice by bringing together practitioners, in-country ICT experts across Africa (Inveneo Certified ICT Partners) and Inveneo's team with deep day-to-day experience in ICT implementations across Africa.

The overall goal of the Community of Practice will be to stimulate discussion around ICT implementations, directly connecting practitioners and experts locally and globally, allowing practitioners to get inspiration, ideas and solutions. Practitioners and experts can share, document and improve their activities through the use of open, Internet-based documentation, geographic mapping and collaboration tools, saving their work for others in a dynamic library of implementations. Over time, this library of implementations and references will serve as a resource for best practices to be leveraged for use over and over again.

Inveneo Commits to:

• Lead the design and build-out of the technical platform by interviewing practitioners and ICT experts about feature functionality
• Recruit initial ICT Practitioner participants ("anchor tenants") and launch the Community of Practice through a variety of communications channels and stimulate/facilitate discussions to foster community interaction
• Recruit ICT Resource Participants, starting with Inveneo's Certified Partners across Africa
• Recruit funders and strategic partners

We are seeking Partners who can:

• Provide financial support for staffing of community development and leadership
• Provide financial support and/or in-kind resources for online framework creation
• Engage as expert ICT Practitioners to provide project experience/best practices/capacity building

Please join us in making our new commitment a reality. To find out more, please contact Kristin Peterson at kristin@inveneo.org today.

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