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June-July
- Volume 1, Issue 4
"BAMAKO 2002" - African Regional Preparatory Meeting for
the World Summit on the Information Society
Ato Abraham Tameru, the Publisher and Editor-in-Chief of ICT Focus
Magazine was invited by the Development Information Services Division
of the UNECA to participate in the Regional Preparatory Conference
in Bamako, Mali, that took place from 26-30 May 2002. The proceedings
of all phases of the Conference are reviewed and are compiled as follows.
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
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