UNESCO in the Spotlight: Science and Communications

Written by Daniel Pimienta, Daniel Prado and Alvaro Blanco, this publication is an update to the previous UNESCO study on this subject that was issued for the World Summit on the Information Society in 2005.

FUNREDES and Union Latine have designed an original research method to measure linguistic diversity in cyberspace. The aim was to use search engines and a sample of word-concepts to measure the proportionate presence of these concepts in their various linguistic equivalences.

Research, undertaken from 1996 to 2008, enabled interesting indicators to be built to measure linguistic diversity. The paper describes the research method and its results, advantages and limitations. It also provides an overview of existing alternative methods and results, for comparison.

The paper concludes with the examination of different perspectives in the field which have in the past been considered to have been characterized by a lack of scientific rigor. This has led to some misinformation about the dominant presence of English on the Web. It is a topic that is only now slowly attracting due attention from international organizations and the academic world.

The Brain Gain initiative is a digital infrastructure linking African and Arab Region universities to global knowledge

The migration of highly-skilled people is having a significant impact on higher education and research, as universities and research centres have to adjust to increasingly mobile, competitive labour markets, and strive to retain highly-skilled professionals.

In an effort to change this trend, UNESCO and HP joined forces in 2003 to develop several projects, using innovative technology to create a “brain gain” for regions that are particularly impacted by the exodus of academics and scientists.

Many skilled expatriates, wherever they may be located, have the potential and the willingness to contribute to the development of their home country, and information and distributed computing technologies provide a new way to enable distance cooperation.

A digitally literate generation of young people will be able to take advantage of the opportunities provided by access to virtual classrooms and virtual laboratories. Remote access to rare or expensive resources can help small, low-budget universities enjoy access to infrastructure of the same quality as large, well-endowed ones.

In 2009 UNESCO and HP agreed to scale up the initiative to help create a sustainable university e-infrastructure for science, bringing together higher education institutions and research centres in Africa and the Arab States region and allowing them to pursue innovative education projects.

Read:

• More of the UNESCO webpage describing the project
• An article on SciDev.Net describing the projet

UNESCO will participate in the fourth Internet Governance Forum, to be held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, from 15 to 18 November 2009, to advocate the principles of freedom or expression and universal access as fundamental elements of the Internet Governance structures.

The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), UNESCO and the Intel Foundation have created a joint project to promote digital inclusion in Brazil. The project will provide courses on "Technology and the Community" and "Technology and in Work" in some 180 community education centers.

In an effort to help higher education institutions support economic stimulus efforts and work-force development strategies, Microsoft Corp. has committed up to $50 million through the Microsoft Education Alliance Program agreement. As part of the agreement, the company will provide resources and tools for short-term work-force training and higher education enhancements.

The announcement was made at the Education Leaders Forum, a one-day forum jointly organized by UNESCO and Microsoft, where more than 150 ministers of education, senior education officials and policy advisors discussed how governments and universities can take full advantage of e-technology's potential to address the current knowledge and skills challenges facing higher education.

Earlier this week, Microsoft and UNESCO announced a joint task force to help higher education institutions worldwide meet the growing challenge of supporting economic stimulus efforts and work-force development strategies. The UNESCO-Microsoft Task Force on Higher Education and ICT will develop a strategic plan of action to identify how ICT can be used by governments as a catalyst for change. Microsoft's $50 million commitment is supporting the mission of the new task force and enabling the implementation of critical UNESCO and Microsoft educational resources.

In an effort to support social and economic development, UNESCO and Sun Microsystems signed a Collaboration Agreement last week at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum 09. At the signing ceremony, UNESCO’s Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information, Abdul Waheed Khan, and Executive Vice President and Chairman, Europe, APAC and Emerging Markets for Sun Microsystems, Crawford Beveridge, outlined details of the initiative. The agreement recognizes open source technologies as key to increase access to information, communications technologies and ICT skills training in under-served communities throughout the world.

The agreement includes the use and promotion of Centers of Excellence for Adoption of Open Technologies. As part of these, Sun staff will provide expertise and training materials for the open technologies "stack", while UNESCO will focus on promoting adoption of open technologies and will work to identify institutions that would become partners for providing support and training on these technologies: the partners will be putting at the service of these communities a full range of open and free technologies that provide them with the ability to shape the ICT landscape, enabling transformation and modernization efforts.

The words of Mr. Koïchiro Matsuura, Director-General of UNESCO are encouraging.

“UNESCO values the possibilities offered by all software models and advocates a diversity of choice to ensure that all can benefit from information and knowledge. We are glad to work with Sun to harness the power of free and open source software for extending and disseminating knowledge and to foster community approaches to software development”

Directed and Produced series of documentaries for UNESCO on bridging the digital divide in Asia. Executive producer: Sharmini Boyle, Editor: Chami on the Avid

Farmers in the Coopeumo cooperative in Chile will be receiving SMS messages sent using the MIP (Mobile Information Project) technology being developed by DataDyne as part of the DatAgro project, with the technology funded by Knight Foundation. UNESCO and the Fund for Agricultural Innovation (FIA) are participating by providing content for for the four text messages which the cooperative members are to receive each day.

The evidence that developing information communication technology (ICT) is becoming an increasing priority around the world continues to mount. In illustrating this, the International Telecommunications Union (ITC) recently published its ICT Development Index (IDI) and indicated all but 1 of the 154 countries under study improved their levels of ICT from 2002 to 2007. These findings included data from UNESCO and were based off of 11 indicators that measured factors like ICT access as well as use and skills of the population.

Yet the war with Iran in the mid-1980s, the Gulf War, and the instability beginning in 2003 have left the educational system tattered to say the least. Class size can average in size of 100 students, teachers face constant threats of violence, and the scheduled curriculum may be rarely finished or addressed. Although many positive programs have been enacted, much more clearly needs to be done. It is initiatives such as IRAQ EDU that may provide another way to access this deserving population: the children of Iraq.

Scientists at the Cheikh Anta Diop University (UCAD) in Dakar (Senegal) are now better placed to cooperate with researchers overseas thanks to the installation of the first computing grid at the university, the fruit of a joint effort by the UNESCO/Hewlett-Packard project “Reversing Brain Drain into Brain Gain for Africa” and the Grid Computing Institute of France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS).

The project aims to provide universities in five African countries with grid computing technology so as to reduce migration of African university graduates by giving them the tools they need for their research.

The joint project “Reversing Brain Drain into Brain Gain for Africa” follows the successful implementation of a similar UNESCO/Hewlett-Packard initiative for Southeast Europe, launched in 2003.

Read more!

UNESCO's Communication and Information Sector’s audiovisual resources website offers a unique access point to audiovisual material in the area of communication and information, which has been produced, sponsored or supported by UNESCO: documentaries, audio recordings, speeches, podcasts of meetings, etc.


Welcome message by the Deputy Assistant Director-General for Communication and Information to the online version of the UNESCO’s stand at the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, December 2005.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development has published a new report titled

How Information and Communications Technologies Can Support Education for Sustainable Development: Current uses and trends

IISD describes the report in the following way:

As part of IISD's involvement with Manitoba Education, Citizenship and Youth and the UNESCO Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, this paper presents a brief history, and identifies current uses and trends for deploying ICTs, primarily in the formal Kindergarten to Grade 12 education system, with a focus on the online environment. It considers three main questions: (1) Why do ICTs need to be considered as a critical tool in education for sustainable development (ESD)?; (2) What ICTs are currently being used by educators and learners?; and (3) What can we expect to see in the near future?

UNESCO has a program on ICT and Education, which combines its expertise in Education and that in Communications and Information. That program produces information from UNESCO headquarters in Paris, from its Bangkok regional office, from the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education (IITE)in Moscow, and from other decentralized UNESCO Centers and Institutes.

However, as the IICD report indicates, UNESCO influences other organizations to produce information complementary to that which it can produce internally. Indeed, the global community involved in ICT in education dwarfs that internal to UNESCO, or even those who can be involved directly in UNESCO meetings and publications. Many members of this larger global community are influenced by UNESCO, producing materials in support of UNESCO's programs and activities.

UNESCO's Information for All Programme (IFAP) has released a paper providing a basic conceptual framework for measuring information literacy. The publication includes a definition of information literacy; a model that links information literacy with other adult competences, such as ICT skills; and a description of information literacy standards in education.

At the end of last year, UNESCO announced a new partnership agreement with Hewlett Packard to strengthen their collaboration around existing education projects. Through the partnership, UNESCO and HP will work together on several projects in the area of education, especially to support UNESCO’s priority of “Education for All". This includes an evaluation on the extension of the existing brain drain project to additional regions in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

UNESCO and HP started to collaborate five years ago in South East Europe to help key universities connect to global research networks. In 2006 the project was extended to Africa. The project fights brain drain by providing universities with an advanced technology called grid computing, which allows top quality researchers to play a key role in international research and contribute to economic development in their home countries.

“UNESCO’s education priorities are very much in line with the goals of HP’s education strategy. In Europe, the Middle East and Africa, HP has supported more than 200 education projects in over 20 countries, reaching over 50,000 young people in 2007. On a worldwide level, HP contributed grants to more than 850 schools in 36 countries, worth €30 million between 2004 and 2007,” said Gabriele Zedlmayer, vice president, Global Citizenship HP Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has recently joined forces with Hasselt University Library, Belgium, and the IODE (International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange) programme of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO (IOC) to develop a global Open Science Directory.

About 13000 scientific journals are now available in the 'Open Science Directory'. When all the special program journals will be included, the Open Science Directory will contain more than 20000 titles.

Forging innovations: Community Multimedia Centers in Nepal

This collection of case studies on the Community Multimedia Centres (CMCs) in Nepal is intended to showcase the interesting and diverse growth of this initiative in spite of conflict and the lack of community radio regulation in the country.

The publication introduces the CMCs and outlines the benefits and challenges that the centers have faced since they were established. Each CMC is discussed in four parts: location and context, organizational structure, programs and sustainability. The case studies show how local communities access and utilise newly available ICT tools in different ways.

In 2003 UNESCO supported the creation of Nepal's first pilot CMC in Tansen, Palpa. Since then, the Organisation has assisted in the creation of two additional CMCs in Nepal, one in Madanphokhara (Palpa District) and another in Lumbini (Rupandehi District). The three CMCs are now networked to five telecentres throughout Rupandehi and Palpa Districts.

The CMC media mix in Nepal consists of FM broadcasting services, cable TV network, design and desktop publishing software applications, audio and video editing, and public access points for Internet, telephone, fax, photocopiers and scanners.

In an effort to understand the social impact of CMCs the authors, Karma Tshering and Kirsty Martin, carried out field visits to the centers. They interviewed managers, staff, local researchers, community reporters, volunteers and community people. Unobtrusive observations of the centres were conducted to gain a sense of the normal daily activities.

By examining three centers concurrently, common themes emerged in the overall functionality of CMCs in Nepal. This study identifies some key issues which can assist CMCs towards their goal of providing ICT access to poor and marginalised communities in regional Nepal