ICT

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) have proven to be important avenues to foster development worldwide. Their applications are countless, their potential to enhance living conditions is remarkable, and they have a huge potential to contribute to development, and the MDGs in many ways.

The central role of ICTs in wealth creation has become increasingly understood and accepted, and as a result the priority afforded it in economic planning has steadily increased. Making available the benefits of ICTs’ has more than ever before become a required component of any credible poverty reduction strategy (PRSP) or other national plan for economic development.

It is by no chance that the final word on the MDGs is always reserved for ICT. This is because the very last sentence of the final MDG Goal No: 8 says, “ In cooperation with the private sector make available the benefits of new technologies – especially information and communication technologies”.

The widespread hope within the international development community that ICTs could be a powerful tool of development and poverty reduction, and of achieving the Millennium Development Goals, led to a proliferation of donor-funded ICT-for-development pilot projects in several sectors in a wide range of countries in the past decade.

EDUCATION

One of the MDG education goals, Goal 2, stipulates that the world should achieve universal primary education for boys and girls by 2015. In 2002, donors began working with developing country officials to set up a coordinated approach to address this Goal. For those low-income countries with credible education plans, rich countries would provide the necessary external financing to assist in the implementation of these plans. The resultant blueprint, the "Fast Track Initiative" (FTI), represents a new approach for donor financing. Donors are to combine resources to directly finance a portion of the recipient governments' education budgets, instead of each financing many separate, sometimes small "projects." Recipient countries are, in turn, required to commit to plans, which in many cases require difficult political and financial reforms.

MDG Review is following these developments very closely and continues to lobby with the policy makers the need to involve and engage the private sector as in each and every other goal we all seem to share the belief that partnership is key to reform and pushing a way forward.

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