The high-level Strategy Council provides overall strategic guidance and priority setting.
It is composed of top-level policy makers, practitioners, experts and thinkers with balanced representation from all groups. The Council ensures engagement of high-level expertise and leadership, and facilitates outreach. The basic requirement for the members of this policy-setting group is commitment, experience and vision in ICT for development and traditional development fields.
Terms of Reference
Composition
The Strategy Council comprises 65 members, including 32 members representing Governments, 11 members from the private/not-for-profit sectors, 12 members from the civil society, and 10 members representing international organizations.
Members of the Council are designated on behalf of the Secretary-General of the United Nations in consultation with stakeholder networks, bearing in mind the need to ensure stakeholder, gender, geographical and institutional balances. Governments and international organizations that are members of the Alliance identify their representatives in the Council.
The term of office of the Strategy Council shall last until the Council's annual meeting of the second year of its term, when the next Strategy Council shall be formed on the basis of consultations with the outgoing Strategy Council and stakeholder networks, taking into account the criteria of stakeholder, gender, geographical and institutional balances. Members of the outgoing Strategy Council will be eligible for a new term. The procedures for consultations shall be adopted and publicised early enough by the Steering Committee to permit an open, transparent and inclusive process of nominations and selection of members of the Council.
Members of the Steering Committee are ex officio members of the Strategy Council.
Functions
The Strategy Council:
- Provides overall strategic guidance and vision to the Alliance, in particular by identifying priorities and themes to be addressed;
- Contributes to the development of an action-oriented policy platform that promotes the scalability, replicability and sustainability of the activities of the Alliance by providing stakeholder inputs through a consultative process;
- Undertakes and promotes awareness-raising and advocacy campaigns for ICT for development and for the Global Alliance, with the support of GAID Secretariat;
- Helps disseminate the results of policy dialogue and think tank functions of the Alliance to policymakers, practitioners and to wider stakeholder constituencies, with a view to capacity-building and strengthening feedback between policies, planning and programme implementation;
- Contributes to the formulation of advice to the Secretary-General and to the UN system on issues related to ICT for development;
- Promotes multi-stakeholder partnerships and initiatives with innovative networking and information-sharing approaches, with a view to improving coordination and enhancing impact;
- Promotes fundraising for GAID's core budget, activities, partnerships and events; and
- Reviews the annual report on the activities of the Alliance and the financial report from the Secretariat.
Members