Ben Barka made the call on Wednesday while opening the First International Conference on African Digital Libraries and Archives, taking place at ECA head office in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
The conference will explore ways of capturing and disseminating knowledge in the service of development, from the grassroots level to senior policy makers.
It is being attended by about 250 participants from around the world, including senior programme managers from international and inter-governmental organisations, universities, research centres, and national knowledge institutions such as libraries and archives.
“The most successful route to building knowledge societies is through building strong knowledge institutions and spreading awareness of new technical and cultural possibilities for sharing of information and resources,” Ms Ben Barka said.
“In this regard, promoting knowledge for development is a vast undertaking, requiring multi-stakeholder processes and partnership, and a coordinated approach,” she added.
She said ECA, as a knowledge institution, was working with other partners in order to realize this goal.
The chairperson of the conference, Dr. Buhle Mbambo-Thata, from the University of South Africa, said African countries should use the opportunity brought by South Africa’s hosting of the FIFA World Cup in 2010, to expand access to digital sources of knowledge.
“A lot of infrastructure is being developed in order to transmit the World Cup across the globe. After the World Cup is over, the infrastructure will remain and can be used to expand internet access within Africa,” she said.
ECA Chief Librarian, Abraham Azubuike, called on African governments to institute programmes that assist in closing the digital divide.
He gave an example of the US, where people without private access to the internet can use public libraries free of charge.
He said that even though African countries were poor, they could still afford to subsidise public access to the internet in public libraries and schools.
He reiterated the importance of knowledge, saying “development plans without an emphasis on access to, and utilization of knowledge are bound to fail as development itself is a learning process”.
Addis Ababa - 02/07/2009
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