Connect Africa, Kigali, Rwanda: Michael Rawding

Last week, I had the unique opportunity to attend the Connect Africa Summit in Kigali, Rwanda. The summit was organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the African Union, the World Bank Group and UN GAID, in partnership with the African Development Bank, the African Telecommunication Union and the UN Economic Commission for Africa. It brought together local leaders, international organizations, and ICT industry representatives from around the world to discuss how to best leverage world resources to support social and economic growth in the African region. I was there to represent Microsoft Unlimited Potential and share examples of and learnings from our own efforts to help create sustainable economic growth through technology in Africa.

Across all of Africa, there’s a growing understanding that creating sustainable economic growth is going to take a much greater investment in capacity building and resources. As part of this, it’s crucial that young people receive more IT training and access, encouraging them to further innovate with new technology products and services, in turn creating and nurturing local knowledge economies. We’ve found that a positive way to expand ICT literacy and access is for private sector and public partners to collaboratively set a proactive agenda for capacity building as well as creating applications and e-services for citizens — including e-government, e-health and e-learning programs.

At Connect Africa, I had the privilege to participate in a panel discussion on this very topic, called “Capacity Building and Deploying Applications for E-Services.” The session asked panelists to highlight specific African success stories in capacity-building and e-services deployment. It was illuminating to hear so many great stories of successful e-services programs and partnerships from such experts in the field—and the discussion really drove home the importance of continuing to push forward with new and innovative programs and applications. Here’s a photo from that event:

(Pictured, L-R: Dr. Pradeep K. Khosla, Dean, College of Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University, Ms. Lala Ben Barka, Deputy Executive Secretary, UN Economic Commission for Africa, M.E. Ms. Mariam Diallo Diarra, Minister of Communication and Information Technologies, Mali, Prof Celement Dzidonu, Chairperson, GAID Africa Network, Myself, H.E. Mr. El Hadj Gley Minister, Ministry of Communication Technologies, Tunisia, Mr. Maximilan Metzeger Secretary General, CERN, Prof. Sreenivasan, Director General ICTP Trieste, Italy, Dr. Craig Barrett, Chairman of Intel and GAID)

In keeping with the goals of this panel, Microsoft signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with ITU at the summit. As part of the MOU, we’ll be partnering with ITU on a variety of skills development and capacity building programs, with a special focus on youth empowerment and technology training. Microsoft and ITU are also launching a very cool interactive Microsoft Virtual Earth-based online platform called “ITU Global View” that will track and help accelerate implementation of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) goals in Africa by visually identifying current efforts, identifying gaps, and avoiding overlap in collaborative efforts.

We believe that strong public-private sector partnerships like these are really going to make the difference in successfully bringing successful and sustainable economic growth to Africa. We’re looking forward to working in partnership with ITU to help meet our shared goals as Unlimited Potential continues to make progress towards bringing the benefits of technology to the next 5 billion people around the world.

Thank you,

Michael Rawding, Vice President, Unlimited Potential Group