Communications minister Ivy Matsepe-Casaburri yesterday announced the formation of an "e-Africa" commission under the auspices of NEPAD, the New Partnership for Africa`s Development, which is to ensure the computer literacy of every African child.
NEPAD is the newest name for what was previously known as the New African Initiative and the Millennium Africa Recovery Programme (MAP).
Speaking at the official opening ceremony of ITU Telecom Africa 2001, where she was standing in for an absent president Thabo Mbeki, Matsepe-Casaburri said the e-Africa commission has been established to co-ordinate the broad strokes of IT development for the continent under NEPAD.
The commission`s first project is to be an e-schools initiative, with the goal of ensuring that every African child is technology literate within 10 years.
Matsepe-Casaburri said the project would aim to make every high school student on the continent e-literate within five years and to extend the programme to primary schools in 10 years.
"The goal is to minimise the impact of the digital divide by giving these students a basic level of competency," she said.
The commission is to be headed up by Alpha Oumar Konar'e, the president of Mali, with Henry Chasia as his deputy. Chasia is also a member of Mbeki`s Presidential International Taskforce on Information, Society and Development.
Other members are to include Andile Ngcaba, the director-general of SA`s Department of Communications, and Nii Narku Quaynor of Ghana, Africa`s elected representative at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).
SA`s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, the CSIR, is to serve as secretariat of the commission.
Matsepe-Casaburri said the members of the presidential taskforce, which include the likes of Larry Ellison of Oracle and Carly Fiorina of HP, would also be the founding members of a private sector version of the commission. She said the members of the group had expressed "a commitment not only to development in SA but to development in Africa" at its recent first meeting in George.
During the week of ITU Africa, much focus will be on bridging the digital divide, with most of the discussion at the exhibition revolving around such issues.
"With information and communications technologies having been declared one of the priorities of the renewal plan [NEPAD], this conference has a clear mandate to come up with a concrete programme to bridge the digital divide," Matsepe-Casaburri said earlier.
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