Overview of the Conference

The African Regional Conference - Bamako 2002 was held in preparation for the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) that is scheduled to take place in Geneva in 2003 and Tunis in 2005 to formulate a common vision and understanding of the global information society to help bridge the digital divide. It was organized by the Government of Mali in collaboration with the ECA and ITU and funded by the Swiss Development Agency for International Cooperation (SDAIC), the European Commission and other national, regional and international agencies.

The Conference was attended by representatives from 51 African countries drawn from governments, civil society, the media, public and private sectors as well as international organizations, NGOs and development agencies.

Some thirteen pre-conference activities and four workshops that brought together stakeholders consisting of governments, businesses, financial institutions, the media, civil societies, and international organizations preceding the actual conference were held from 26-27 May, 2002 to deliberate on issues related to African Languages and the Internet, Open Source Software, National Information and Communications Infrastructure (NICI) strategies, the Role of the Media, Financing Mechanisms, Participation of the Private Sector in ICT Investment and Evaluation of the Impact of ICTs in African development (SCAN-ICT). A Civil Society Consultation - led by UNESCO was also held.

The pre-conference workshops were able to generate ideas, proposals and recommendations for the main conference that took place from 28-30 May 2002.

African Languages and Internet

The Workshop on "The African Languages and Internet" was one of the events that took place during the proceedings of the Conference. A document on African Academy of Languages entitled "Special Bulletin - ACALAN, January 2002" was distributed at the beginning of the workshop. It was related to the current missions of ACALAN and the various stages that it had to undergo to set it as a Pan African structure.

After reviewing the issues related to the status, the roles and the places of the languages in the process of endogenous development of African countries and various opportunities offered by the new information and communications technologies, the document gives the strategy to be set up for the use and valorization of African languages and cultures in the new information society. The experts insisted on the need to deploy appropriate African languages for Africans to express themselves and Internet as strength for social and economic development. The following are some of the recommendations forwarded encompassing economic, technological and political aspects.

Economic Aspects

- Creating a Highway of African Multilingual Information (HAMI) fund to finance the production and maintenance of Web sites in African languages; and
- Forming a vocational training fund for African data processing specialists and system administrators to configure, support and maintain Linux web hosting servers sites in African languages.

Technological Aspects

- Work out a strategic plan to assume data processing transition and implementation of new international UCS/JUC standard in their respective African data processing environment;
- List African languages coding to detect communalities;
- Take the LABTIC in the countries of the South as genuine platforms of confrontation, test and validation of the characters of standards of the African languages;
- Create national structures and association for applications development in national languages to promote an African Dot Force to ensure the convergence of the present standards in African languages (SIL, BPI, etc) for application of an integrating generic standard;
- Encourage Africanist specialists to set up lists of the African composite characters for all the national and inter-official languages of Africa requiring a sequence from 2 to - UCS-2 codes as UCS/JUC encoding to submit to the ISO to add them to UCS/JUC standards as a "precomposed African character".
- Data processing and Africanist specialists act together to elaborate, standardize and propose to the concerned African states 8-bits character sets with support of Latin characters of the African continent languages for a transition towards the international UCS/JUC standard; and
- These same specialists act together to elaborate, standardize and propose to the African States keyboard drivers and unified conventions to key in African characters for all African and trans-border languages of African countries.

Political Aspects
- Member states sign the charter of ACALAN;
- Member states commit in setting up the Pan African structure of ACALAN;
- The OAU/AU, through ACALAN, take the responsibility to follow-up administrative and political issues with the ISO standard technical committees to add it in UCS/JUC;
- OAU/AU assist linguists, literacy specialists, data processing specialists and researchers to set up and install ACALAN;
- African States adopt national data processing stands of 8-bits character sets according to their respective national and inter-states languages;
- OAU/AU undertake administrative and political actions to add the African character sets as international standard of the ISO-8859 series.

Read the full article in ICT Focus magazine