UNCTAD DELEGATES STUDY ROLE OF IT IN GROWTH|

Doha, Qatar, April 27- Delegates at a special event on ‘Information and Communication Technology for Knowledge Sharing’ at Unctad XIII yesterday explored the potential of information communication technologies (ICTs) in the areas of knowledge sharing, training and capacity development in developing countries, particularly least developed countries.

Knowledge plays a key role in today’s globalised world as it enables firms and organisations to increase their competitiveness through a better understanding of the most important issues of economic development.

As ICTs support, accelerate and improve the sharing of information among firms and individuals, they change the way people learn and network.

Panellists during a session on ‘Technological Solutions and e-Learning’ included Latin American and Caribbean Economic System Permanent Secretary Jose Rivera Banuet, ictQatar ICT and society division executive director Robin Blake, Singapore-based Infocomm Development Authority centre director (Middle East) international operations Shaik Umar Abdul Salam and International Labour Organisation’s international training centre programme officer Tom Wambeke via video link, shared experiences from their respective countries on how ICTs have helped aided development and knowledge sharing.

Blake discussed the milestones achieved by ictQatar since it launched the Qatar National E-Learning Portal (QNEP).

“Presently, we have more than 4,500 e-learning courses being discharged to employees of over 60 companies and now we are trying to encourage more countries to take part in our programme, which we believe will build the capacity of their employees,” he said.

He mentioned that ictQatar is also looking at a more innovative approach in its course materials in order to ensure more high quality content materials including content in Arabic, which he said was still not available in the region.

He mentioned that ictQatar was proposing establishing a centre for learning technologies here.

ictQatar project manager Nader Rida Subaih explained during the second session on ‘M-Learning, Cloud-Learning, Web 3.0, Web 2.0, Technology Incubators’ that the centre of learning technologies will perform many functions such as marketing development, encouraging vendors to start new companies e-learning community to bring forums, social media and blog users together; events including workshops, conferences, exhibitions and awards; expertise building to help upgrade resources and capacity to adapt e-learning; and resources for providing innovation, research, case studies and reports.

Banuet spoke about how ICTs were being used to enable integration of rural people of Latin American and the Caribbean.

He explained that ICTs have served as a cultural mediator among people bringing about new social cultural practices.

Banuet also mentioned that ICTs were being utilised to provide value added policies apart from harnessing its unique features for e-health and tele-medicine to give prompt information to people about their health.

Abdul Salam shared with the audience how ICTs have been more of enabler than driver of development, drawing instances from Singapore’s over 30 years of depending on ICTs as enabler to develop people for knowledge processing and sharing.

Other speakers in the second session were World Class learning project director Stephen Cox, Senegal-based Dakar University professor Claude Lishou via video link, Orange Emerginov Concept’s Morgan Richomme and UNHCR learning technology unit head Atish Gonsalves.

The sessions were moderated by Unctad knowledge sharing training and capacity development head Genevieve Feraud.

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