Dakar Symposium (2003) Digital Opportunities for Africa: Community Multimedia Centres
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Digital Opportunities for Africa: Community Multimedia Centres
UNESCO in collaboration with AMARC Africa organized a pan-African symposium on Community Multimedia Centres from 12-17 June 2003 in Dakar, Senegal. The aim of this meeting was to find out more about how community radio stations across Africa are using ICTs in order to forge a strategy for larger-scale CMC development in Africa.
The first part of this meeting was a workshop from 12-15 June, which brought together representatives of a selection of community radio stations that are successfully offering some form of public access to ICTs or planning to do so and also ICT-based projects such as community telecentres planning to start community radio as part of their operations. The purpose of this workshop was to:
1. Exchange experiences and compare models, approaches and contexts
2. Identify needs and recommend measures to meet these needs for successful project implementation
3. Make recommendations for a coherent programmatic approach to CMC development in Africa that can serve as a rallying point for all partners and stakeholders including donors
The second part of this meeting, on 16-17 June, brought together international partners including national development agencies and international governmental and non-governmental organizations in a roundtable on CMC project support in Africa. The roundtable examined models of best practice and determined partnership strategies for programme development that ensures full community appropriation of NICTs, sustainability, networking and technical support systems.
