[GKD] The Role of ICT in HIV/AIDS Education

[Abloome]

In light of the recent discussion about fighting HIV/AIDS with ICT, I've
attached an article describing an ongoing World Links project on
HIV/AIDS Education which through an online collaborative project links
students and teachers in four African countries - Ghana, Uganda, So.
Africa and Zimbabwe -- with an online facilitator to explore HIV/AIDS
causes, myths, and community action.

The article was featured in last month's Techknowlogia online journal.


Anthony Bloome
Anglophone Africa Regional Coordinator
World Links for Development
www.world-links.org
www.worldbank.org/worldlinks


**


SCHOOLS THINK ABOUT HIV/AIDS:
A World Links Online Collaborative Project  


Ann Klofkorn Bloome,
World Links HIV/AIDS Consultant1

Can you catch AIDS from kissing? Why doesn't saliva transmit HIV? Why do
we care about HIV/AIDS anyway?

These are the latest questions discussed by participants in the World
Links HIV/AIDS Online Collaborative Project, an ongoing HIV prevention
effort conducted mainly via email, using, as resources, the Internet and
information downloaded onto a CD-ROM.

WORLD LINKS

World Links, established in 1997 within the World Bank, is now a program
jointly coordinated by the World Bank's World Links for Development
Program (WorLD) and the World Links Organization, a non-profit based in
Washington, D.C.  This international program, currently in twenty-seven
developing countries around the world, works with Ministries of
Education and secondary schools to promote the use of information and
communications technologies (ICT) to enhance teaching and learning.

With support from public and private sector partners, World Links has
established over 700 school-based Internet Learning Centers.  The World
Links program focuses on professional development workshops for students
and teachers on how computers and the Internet can be used as resources
across the curriculum. As part of an ongoing series of workshops,
schools participate in a number of online collaborative projects, on
topics as diverse as border disputes, solid waste management, bullying,
traditional medicine, and HIV/AIDS. WORLD LINKS AND HIV/AIDS

At the start of the year 2000, World Links took a look at the HIV/AIDS
situation in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa, and Africa in general, and
decided to sponsor a new collaborative project on the prevention of HIV.
The World Links' Executive Director, Mr. Sam Carlson, and the regional
coordinator living in Zimbabwe, Mr. Anthony Bloome, saw how the AIDS
epidemic is affecting Africans, their children, their economies and
their way of life, and wanted to explore how the program could help. 
Financial support for the project came partly from an online auction on
the program's behalf by Wired magazine.

Students and teachers from fifteen schools in four African countries --
Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, and Zimbabwe - signed up to learn more
about HIV/AIDS through the project's educational activities.

Over one in four Zimbabwean adults between the ages of fifteen and
forty-nine are infected with HIV, and over half a million orphaned
children struggle to survive in a deteriorating economy.  In South
Africa, adult HIV prevalence rose from 2% at the start of the 1990s to
nearly 20% by the end of the decade.  The AIDS situation in both Ghana
and Uganda contrasts with Zimbabwe and South Africa.  Uganda used to be
the most affected country in the world in the 1990s, but has since
brought its adult HIV prevalence under 10%.  This was done through
sincere government interventions, public discussions, and the
encouragement of condom use.  Ghana has been fortunate enough to keep
its adult HIV prevalence under 5%, partly because of its location in
West Africa, where HIV is neither as prevalent or as virulent as in
Southern Africa.

A SOUTH AFRICAN EXAMPLE

A typical World Links school, Mpophomeni is in a township in the
Midlands of KwaZulu/Natal, in the east of South Africa.  AIDS is a huge
killer in the township.  Seven hundred and fifty students and eighteen
teachers work at the school every weekday.  One teacher, Pam Robertson,
and her students have been participating in the HIV/AIDS Collaborative
Project for over a year.

The teacher continues to participate despite her busy schedule and
problems with connectivity, because, "even though there is a lot of
information about [HIV/AIDS], we don't seem to be winning the
battle...Each year we have girls who fall pregnant.  This shows that our
students are sexually active at a young age and that they are engaging
in unprotected sex. My hope is that through projects like this one our
students will think more seriously about the risk that AIDS poses to
their lives."


COLLABORATIVE PROJECT ACTIVITIES

With the help of the World Bank's AIDS Campaign Team for Africa
(ACTAfrica), World Links designed a five-month collaborative project on
HIV/AIDS.  First, students and teach

Re: [GKD] VCs shy away from funding Simputers

[Janice Brodman]

Dear Susan, Nancy, and other members:

We have had the same thought (that people and organisations would like
to find a way to make direct donations to worthy efforts in developing
countries). Our approach is to set up a database of organisations that
are working in the South, with each organisation providing information
about its mission, achievements, plans and needs, as well as references.
The database will be widely publicised to the public and to "giving"
organisations, including foundations, government agencies, international
organisations, etc. We would like to start w/ organisations that are
working on effective use of ICT for development. We've seen so many on
the GKD list, doing fabulous work in their own communities, but
struggling to survive. We think this is a way to start directing
contributions to those organisations.

If this is of interest to you or your organisation, kindly contact me.

Thanks,
janice

Janice Brodman
Director
Center for Innovative Technologies
EDC
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>



Susan Kuhn wrote:

Nancy White wrote:
>> Is there any mechanism or organization that can accept individual funds
>> from any citizen of the world who would support the development? Sort of
>> a reverse microlending -- microinvesting?
>>
>> I sense there are many in the world, especially now, who look to build
>> bridges, connections and healing. This might be one small way. There
>> just needs to be a financial mechanism and agreements (well, that isn't
>> so simple, but one can dream, eh?)


> One approach would be to use "donate now" buttons on an internet site.
> You will still need an institutional "backend" to legally receive and
> disburse funds.  The easiest approach would be to append this internet
> function to an existing orgnaization or create some kind of partnership.
> See  for AOL's solution (there are
> others) and see  for how this is working to raise
> funds for the Red Cross and other organizations.  Perhaps you could
> partner with an existing microlender as a source of additional capital;
> or what if it were sponsored by a group with enough name recognition to
> get listed on the libertyunites site, which has raised many 100s of
> millions from people worldwide.





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[GKD]: Kerala To Protect Tribal Intellectual Property Rights

[Frederick Noronha]

Kerala to protect tribal intellectual property rights

by Liz Mathew, Indo Asian News Service

New Delhi, Sep 22 (IANS) The Kerala government has decided to introduce
legislation to protect the intellectual property rights of its
tribespeople who have been practising traditional nature-based medicine
for centuries.

"The Kerala government will soon pass legislation to protect tribal
intellectual property rights. With the new legislation, the government
would be able to get patent rights for the traditional tribal
medicines," M.A. Kuttappan, the Minister for Welfare of Backward and
Scheduled Communities and Youth Affairs, told IANS.

The bill, according to its preamble, is to provide for the
determination, preservation, protection and improvement of the tribal
traditional system related to medicine, agricultural practices and
knowledge of wild flora and fauna used for food as well as shelter.

"The Kerala government has identified 35 scheduled tribal communities
and 13 other tribal communities with a number of traditional medicines
and other agricultural practices. Many more are to identified," said M.
Viswanathan Nair of the Kerala Institute for Research, Training and
Development Studies of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (KIRTADS).

KIRTADS is setting up a new Web site with details of the varieties of
tribal medicine practised in the state. The institute has also been
documenting the unique medicinal practices on the state government's Web
site.

"The new Web site would be a landmark as tribal medicine, or
ethnomedicine, has become a treasure hunting ground for other medical
systems and multinational drug firms," Kuttappan said, adding that
registering it on the Web site would prevent others from wresting the
patent rights.

"The bill is also meant to safeguard the tribals' right over their
knowledge on medicinal herbs," he said.

"The new bill would provide economic and social benefits to the state in
general and tribal communities in particular as well as protecting the
intellectual properties from piracy. With the bill, there would be
adequate legal mechanism to plough back the revenue earned from such
ventures," Nair told IANS.

Kuttappan said the federal government had agreed to establish an
institute for tribal medicine education and research in a joint venture
with the state.

On other projects for tribal welfare, Kuttappan said the federal
government has agreed in principle to set up an archery academy to train
tribal boys and girls in the modern variation of the sport.

"The academy will be set up to honour the memory of Talakkal Chandu, a
tribal chieftain of Kerala. The project, funded by the sports and youth
affairs ministry, will be implemented at the cost of Rs. 63.5 million.
This will be a residential school to train in modern archery," he said.

The federal government has also sanctioned three more projects for
tribespeople in Kerala. The first, costing Rs. 700 million, would
rehabilitate tribal families while the second, costing Rs. 100 million,
would improve sanitation and drinking water facilities in Kerala's
northern tribal-populated districts of Wayanad and Attappadi. The third,
a Rs. 100 million project, would build English-medium residential
schools for tribal children.

--Indo-Asian News Service




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[GKD] CFP: Multicultural Perspectives on ICT for Childhood

[Arun-Kumar Tripathi]

Education
Sender: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]

Dear GKD Members,

The following call for papers is forwarded via thanks and courtesy to Dr.
SUDHA SWAMINATHAN and SIGTE List --MEMBERS, Please reply directly to Dr.
Swaminathan regarding the below mesage at <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Thank you for your co-operation. 

Best Regards,
Arun
---

Date: Wed, 3 Oct 2001 09:51:14 -0400 
From: "SWAMINATHAN,SUDHA (Education)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>


Dear colleagues:

The 2003 international theme issue of CHILDHOOD EDUCATION will focus on
the use of technology in classrooms around the world.  We are inviting
articles from international authors (or co-authored with U.S. based
authors).

Articles may integrate theory, research, policies, programs, and
practices relating to a specific country's technology use in the
classrooms. Topics may include the following: Definition of technology
from that culture's perspective, hardware and software resources, issues
of equity and developmental and gender variations related to technology
use, developmental appropriate integration within the curriculum as well
as drawbacks connected with misuse and overuse, administrative support
and parental involvement, and comment on teacher training and teacher
competency levels.  Wherever possible, the voice of children should be
included.

Please submit manuscripts by September 30, 2002.  Send four copies of
manuscript and an electronic copy to 2003 International Focus Issue,
ACEI, 17904 Georgia Ave., Ste. 215, Olney, MD 20832.  For more
information from the guest editors, contact Sudha Swaminathan, Eastern
Connecticut State University ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) or Nicola
Yelland ([EMAIL PROTECTED]).

Thank you.

Sudha Swaminathan
---




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Re: [GKD] RFI: Global Internet Users

[Rhernandez]

Vikas,

The following are some bookmarks which I hope might be of help. You may
want to take a look at the "Information Infrastructure Indicators,
1990-2010" report prepared by Pyramid Research and commissioned by
infoDev. This is a quite comprehensive set of data, organized by region,
country and other categories. It is available at:

http://www.infodev.org/projects/375/fin375.htm

Some relatively recent indicators on the Pacific Islands were shared by
Franck Martin at INET 2001. His paper is available at:

http://www.isoc.org/inet2001/CD_proceedings/G29/Report2001.htm

ITU's most recent Internet indocators, several Telecommunication
Indicators Update, a few country profiles and some charts comparing
Internet access prices (from the IP are respectively available here:

http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/statistics/at_glance/Internet00.pdf
http://www.itu.int/journal/200102/E/html/indicat.htm
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/update/
http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/cs/material/IPTelephony.pdf

At OECD's website you can find the "Measuring the ICT Sector" report and
an interesting document on Local Access Pricing and E-commerce:

http://www1.oecd.org/dsti/sti/it/prod/measuring_ict.pdf
http://www.olis.oecd.org/olis/2000doc.nsf/linkto/dsti-iccp-tisp(2000)1-final

Some interesting charts comparing Internet access costs and other
figures are also available:

http://www1.oecd.org/dsti/sti/it/cm/stats/isp-always.htm
http://www1.oecd.org/dsti/sti/it/cm/

I am sure you are familiar with Netsizer (from Telcordia Technologies):

http://www.netsizer.com/

Kind regards,

Rafael

___
Information for Development Program - infoDev & Telecom Policy Division
Global Information and Communications Technology Department
The World Bank
1818 H Street NW
Washington, DC 20433, United States
tel. 202-473-1342
fax 202-522-3186
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.infodev.org




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