Agriculture is an important economic sector, since it provides income and food for a large segment of the population in developing countries. Intensification of production and increased market orientation are the main processes that can contribute to the future viability of the sector and income for the people that depend on it.

The projects described in this booklet were carried out by IICD and its partners over a six-year period and provide examples of the many ways in which ICTs contribute to poverty alleviation in the agriculture sector.

M-PESA is a mobile phone-based service for sending and storing money offered by Safaricom, Kenya’s largest mobile service provider. Safaricom customers can register for M-PESA by visiting one of more than 10,000 merchants who act as “agents” for account opening, handling of deposits and withdrawals into the customer’s virtual “wallet,” and customer support. Customers can then use an application on their mobile phone to check their balance, send money to other people, pay bills, and purchase mobile phone airtime. Customer funds are held in a special trust account at the Commercial Bank of Africa.

Since its commercial launch in March 2007, M-PESA has achieved substantial scale along several key metrics. Nearly 7 million customers have registered with the service. An average of 150 million Ksh (US$1.96 million) is transferred through M-PESA per day, mostly in small amounts averaging just over 1,500 Ksh (US$20) per transaction. So far, the system has handled over 130 billion Ksh (US$1.7 billion).

This Brief presents 10 observations on how poor people use M-PESA and how it has impacted their lives.

The ITU Manual for Measuring ICT Access and Use by Households and Individuals has been prepared to support countries in their efforts to measure and monitor the developments towards becoming information societies. It aims at improving the availability and comparability of statistics on access to, and use of ICTs by households and individuals. Its main focus is on the core list of ICT indicators (as revised in 2008) agreed under the framework of the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development. The Manual can be used as basic reference material when preparing, designing and implementing ICT household surveys. It also serves as the basis for ITU''s training course on ICT household statistics.

While access to technology and associated electronic content has significantly changed the lives of many young people in wealthier economies, the same is not generally true of those in less developed economies.

The main purpose of this report is to shed light on the current situation by presenting and describing statistical information on the use of information and communication technology (ICT) by the children and youth of the world.

A secondary goal is to describe the limitations of existing statistics, and to present proposals to increase the availability and comparability of statistics on young people’s use of ICT. An important limitation, affecting both the data and the conclusions presented in this publication, is the small number of countries for which relevant data are available. While the majority of developed economies have rich datasets on individual use of ICT , data availability is poor for most developing and transition economies, and particularly poor for the least developed economies (only two of which collect any individual ICT use data).

The Kingdom of Bahrains eGovernment strategy is focused on ensuring the effective delivery of government services to citizens, residents, businesses and visitors (collectively, our customers). Our target is to be the leader in eGovernment in the GCC and at least 5th best in Asia by 2010.

Our aim is to improve the lives of a nations citizens by doing much more than simply implementing technology.

The United States has been focused on K-12 education reform for over two decades, with mixed results at best. One reason why progress has been slow is that the fundamental nature of pedagogy has largely been unchanged. Now in this decade, a small, but growing number of American high schools are using information technologies to redesign schools in fundamentally new ways.

In a new ITIF report, How IT Can Enable 21st Century Schools Tim McDonald and Ted Kolderie of the Education|Evolving, a Minnesota- based group of thought leaders in education reform discuss why the existing school reform movement has stalled, how information technology (including computers, software and communications) can enable the emergence of fundamentally new kinds of schools, particularly middle and high schools, and what the states and the federal government can do to drive the emergence of these new ways of educating our nation’s future generations.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) has proven to be a key enabler of socioeconomic progress and development, enhancing productivity and therefore economic growth, reducing poverty and improving living standards in many ways. ICT is increasingly revolutionizing production processes, access to markets, and information sources together with social interactions. ICT also has an impact on government efficiency, fostering transparency and better communication and services with and to citizens.

Among these new technologies, mobile telephony takes a special place in view of its exceptional diffusion in the last decade or so and its strong social and economic impact. In particular, mobile telephony has proven instrumental in raising prosperity and reducing poverty in developing countries, where it has boomed in recent years—thanks also to a number of facilitating factors, including an infrastructure fairly easy to deploy, a market generally open to new entrants, and the decreasing costs of mobile handsets and communication per minute, among others.

A new age of more flexible, less expensive, and more secure computing will emerge soon if governments act wisely.

The Internet is entering a new phase that represents a fundamental shift in how computing is done. This phase, called Cloud computing, includes activities such as Web 2.0, Web services, the Grid, and Software as a Service, which are enabling users to tap data and software residing on the Internet rather than on a personal computer or a local server. Some leading technologists have forecast that within 5 to 10 years, 80% or even 90% of the world’s computing and data storage will occur “in the Cloud.”

The following list of ICT tools was crowd sourced from individual educationalists and not companies when the question ''What Indispensable ICT tools do you use in education'' was asked and is not meant to be exhaustive in any way.

This particular wiki was d by Drew Buddie.