The economic impact of telecommunications infrastructure on economic growth is enormous. Studies on the impact of ICT have indicated approximately a third of economic growth can be attributed to telecommunications.
Rural Broadband II
ICT Capacity Building
The United Nations Millennium Development Goals include ICT Capacity Building as a major theme for developing countries. Avanti supported the development of a set of guidelines for the management of ICT Capacity Building projects involving deployment of satellite communications.
The aim was to improve the success rate of such projects through the creation of a toolkit that provides guidance to various stakeholders including programme managers, project initiators and project managers. It covers three successive project phases (pre-, operational and post-) in an easy-to-navigate electronic document. Checklists are provided spanning four sectors: healthcare education civil society and governance and include elements such as risk analysis, sustainability issues, ownership and project management. A repository of reference information was also provided on various topics, including templates to facilitate the application of the concepts proposed by the reference model.
The toolkit was piloted in projects in Mali and Ivory Coast being undertaken by aid organisations ActNow and The International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD). The project was extended to explore the aggregation of Non Government Organisation (NGO) and Institutional demand and the deployment of centralised satellite broadband services to charity projects across Africa.