MDG, Global Issues

The Millennium Development Goals are eight goals that a 192 United Nations menber states have agreed to try to achieve them by the year 2015, and they are the followings:

1)- Get rid of extreme poverty and hunger: In some cuntries people cannot meet the basic needs for survival, like food, water, clothing,shelter, sanitation, education,and health care, and based on the World Bank those people who live in a severe state of poverty, they live on US $1 per day,or even less than that. The goal here is to reduce by half the propotion of those people who live on less than one U.S dollar a day, and who suffer from hunger

2)- Achieve universal primary education: a lot of children are hobbled by disease, malnutrition or developmental delays which make the learning capacities restricted for them, and the goal here is to ensure that all boys and girls complete a full course of primary schooling, which will speed progress toward every other Millennium Goal.

3)- Promote gender equality and empower women: Not every where we see that women are equal to men in rights, a lot of women do not have the same rights as men do,and one of these rights is aceess to education, according to UNICEF “Two-thirds of the world’s 799 million illiterate adults ages 15 and over are women”. In order to achieve other MDG, the number of boys in school should equal the number of girls in school. In order to combat poverty, disease, ensure enviromental sustainability….etc, we should eliminate gender disparity in primary and secondary education.

4)- Reduce child mortality: In some population there are a lot of children die in their 5 years of life because they start their life with no adequate means of nutrition, diarrhoea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth, measles, tetanus, HIV/AIDS…etc. Some of these illnesses are preventable, like measles, malaria, tetanus, but those deaths still occurs specifically on devoloping world. The goal here is to reduce the morality rate among children under five by two thirds, and as you see bellow I provided a map that I took from CIA World Factbook that discribe crude death rate by country (the Death rate (deaths/1,000 population)) :

Death rate world map

5)- Improve maternal health: A lot of women die during or just after a pregnancy, these deaths have been medically preventable, but it is still happening in developed world, and it is caused by hemorrhage, infection, obstructed labor, hypertensive disorders in pregnancy, and complications of unsafe abortion. The united Nations estimated global maternatl mortality at 529,000. Maternal deaths occur in the same countries that have high rates of infant mortality reflecting generally poor nutrition and medical care, so the United Nation put maternal health as goal to achieve, there goal is to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by three quarters.

6)- Combat HIV/AIDS: AIDS has taken millions lives and it will take more if trends continue, and because ill parents are unable to work they cannot support their families, and their children drop out of school to help, and they may also fall to diseases, HIV/AIDS. Another killer disease is malaria, it kills children under five year, and if it is contructed during a pregnancy, it will seriously affect the size of a newborn., so the United Nation decide to halt and begin to reverse the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the incidence of malaria and other major diseases.

7)- Ensure environmental sustainability: Too many kids die and get diseases because of unsafe drinking water, deplorable sanitation, and poor hygiene. According to UNICEF, “in countries like Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda, four out of five children either use surface water or have to walk more than 15 minutes to find a protected water source”. Unmet needs like this is the cause of spread diseases like cholera, and infant diarrhoea. The United Nations goal is to Integrate the principles of sustainable development into country policies and programmes; reverse loss of environmental resources, and Reduce by half the proportion of people without sustainable access to safe drinking water, and Achieve significant improvement in lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers, by 2020. Concerning sanitation, and as you see bellow it’s a map from the UNICEF website that shows that half of the developing countries are still without the improved sanitation:

8)- Develop a global partnership for development: according to the United Nations this goal has the following targets:
a)Develop further an open trading and financial system that is rule-based, predictable and non-discriminatory, includes a commitment to good governance, development and poverty reduction— nationally and internationally

b)Address the least developed countries' special needs. This includes tariff- and quota-free access for their exports; enhanced debt relief for heavily indebted poor countries; cancellation of official bilateral debt; and more generous official development assistance for countries committed to poverty reduction

c)Address the special needs of landlocked and small island developing States

d)Deal comprehensively with developing countries' debt problems through national and international measures to make debt sustainable in the long term

e)In cooperation with the developing countries, develop decent and productive work for youth

f)In cooperation with pharmaceutical companies, provide access to affordable essential drugs in developing countries

g)In cooperation with the private sector, make available the benefits of new technologies— especially information and communications technologies

References:

[http://mdgs.un.org/unsd/mdg/Metadata.aspx? ]

[http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/# ]

[http://www.unicef.org/mdg/disease.html]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDG]

[http://www.unicef.org/wes/mdgreport/sanitation1.php]

Sustainable Development

In my opinion sustainable development is something like a “Goal”, because if we look at a dictionary we find that the word “Goal” can be defined as target area, aim, score or race’s end, which has a start and end, and it’s almost the same thing to me as sustainable development. Sustainable development is something like the end toward which effort is directed, it is something that we start and work on it over time until we achieve it, and there is always a progress and maintenance.

Sustainable development is not just a goal it is a combination between sustainability and the process of change that enables human needs that should be met effectively. According to the United Nation it is hard to measure sustainable development; it requires using a variety of tools, indicators. “These indicators are relevant to monitor particular policy concerns and targeted at particular audiences, and it does also requires frameworks: Conceptual frameworks, which reflect the integrated nature of sustainable development while organizing the core indicators. Statistical frameworks that help to ensure that the statistical basis is of sufficient quality and sufficiently coherent to allow basic data set covering different aspects to be linked together”.

The following graph is a scheme of sustainable development: at the confluence of three preoccupations:





References:


[http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/natlinfo/indicators/isd.htm]

[http://unstats.un.org/unsd/statcom/doc99/framwork.pdf ]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Sustainable_development]

Globalization and Collaborative and Social Networking Technologies

Globalization is a result of a lot of things like advances in transport, information technology, and communication that causes a political, economical, and cultural convergence. Globalization affect the world in different ways like: access to a range of foreign products for consumers and companies, creat a world government which regulates the relationships among nations, growth of cross-cultural contacts, increase in information flows between geographically remote locations, solve global issues like environmental challenges, development of a global telecommunication infrastructure…etc.

Advance technologies has helped a lot in facilitating global development, and reduced the costs of trade. Technologies address the global issues that I talked about previously, plus with the technologies that we have and experience in nowadays it allows us to be connected with each other from all over the world and express ourselves in a global world, a small example of that is wikipidia, which is a free encyclopedia that you or anyone else from all over the world can edit in too many different languages.

Globalization and collaborative and social networking technologies have advantage of increasing opportunity as well as the economics, especially in the developed world, plus outsourcing, and a small example of outsourcing is when you call your phone service provider or internet provider for a technical support, the people who talk to you solving your technical issue may be in another part of the world, nowadays a lot of companies who are based on the united state but they have their outsourced sectors in other countries in the other part of the world.

References:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globalization#_note-The_End_of_Poverty]

[Tapscott, Don and Williams Anthony D. Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changed Everything. New York: Penguin Group, 2006]

Role of ICT in Building Sustainable Development

As it is defined by wekipidia Sustainable Development is a socio-ecological process characterized by the fulfillment of human needs while maintaining the quality of the natural environment indefinitely, in another word if we want to reach our role, economic, societal and environmental advancement, development must be managed by a comprehensive approach, and if the environment is degraded and the natural resources are abused, then the rate of economic growth cannot be sustained.

Today we live in a world that a lot of people call it “The Information Age”. Information and Communication Technology plays a big role in sustainable development. ICT’s can help and be applied in a lot of sectors, it can help and benefit government or non-governmental organizations to improve the world socio-economic conditions, it helps increasing opportunities for equality, improve the performance of business and the efficiency of markets, as it empower citizens and communities, and increase their access to knowledge, and I think that it is possible, because technology can help developing countries to catch up without doing the same mistakes that developed countries had, and as examples of the possibility of ICT in helping Sustainable Development is two stories about china.

The first story or example is the “SDNP” (Sustainable Development Networking Programme). SDNP has helped China build the very first node for the country’s programme and has facilitated a network among local communities, and the Chinese Government has invested a large amount through a national science and technology programme to encourage information-sharing, and as a result, a substantial quantity of information, contributed by ten ministerial information agencies, has become available on Internet regarding China’s overall status in natural resources, environmental protection and natural disasters, plus that the UN helped china to facilitate the development of information technology, using local language, in order to serve the needs of local people. The second example or story is also about china.

This time this example will show the benefits of applying ICT in speeding up development. As the most of us know china has a big problem concerning the environment, which is associated with development itself, and because of that they decide to use new technologies to transformtraditional industries that extensively consume energy, and materials and pollute heavily, plus they are planning to be out of extreme poverty in the near future. Because of ICT in Sustainable development, they learned that if the environment is degraded and thenatural resources are abused, then the rate of economic growth cannot be sustained, they learnt it the hard way, but now they got it, and other developing counties will learn too and they will not have or repeat the same problems.

Another good example that I found online on the "development gateway" website by john Daly is: Radio - since the development of transistors, radios have become pervasive in developing countries. There are more than 800 community radio stations in Africa alone. The obvious indicator of the impact of radio is that radios are so widely owned and used. Examples of the dissemination of agricultural market information and health information via radio have documented narrower benefits.

References:

[http://topics.developmentgateway.org/ict/sdm/previewDocument.do~activeDocumentId=604856?activeDocumentId=604856]

[http://www.sdnp.undp.org/stories/china.html]

[http://www.acca21.org.cn/swang.html]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Sustainable_development]

[http://old.developmentgateway.org/node/133831/bboard/message?message_id=161581&forum_id=225450]

Our Role in Promoting ICT and Sustainable Development

As it is stated in wikipedia a Global citizen is “both a moral and ethical disposition which might guide an individual or groups' understanding of the local and global contexts — and their relative responsibilities within different communities”.

As global citizens we should help in promoting ICT and sustainable development, we can involve in some volunteer network of teachers or educator, and spend some times to empower someone to learn to empower the others and so on.

We should get involved more and more, and there are plenty of places where we can be involved, for example you can go to the “dg Communities” website and you can join the ICT for Development Community on the Gateway to discuss the hot issues about ICT and Development and many more.

There is also ICT 4D, which empower citizens and communities to increase their access to knowledge, strengthen and redefine governance. There is many ways how you can participate, and some of it is that you can participate by promoting the alliance among your networks, become involved in a regional center, and support the alliance through expertise, financial and in-kind contributions. We should all band together, be more productive, have a sense of responsibility and share opportunity with each other. It is up to us to build an ICT society.

Reference:

[http://topics.developmentgateway.org/ict/sdm/previewDocument.do~activeDocumentId=569545]

[http://www.un-gaid.org/en/about/participate]

Recommendation & overview Document: MDG, Sustainable Development, Globalization & Collaboration, & the Role of ICT in building Sustainable Development

Before I start to talk about the recommendations, and how to use Information and Communication Technology, let’s have a little overview about MDG, Sustainable Development, Globalization and Collaborative and Social Networking Technologies, and the Role of ICT in Building Sustainable Development.

The Millennium Development Goals are goals that have agreed to try to achieve them by the year 2015 and they are the following: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, Achieve universal primary education, Promote gender equality and empower women, Reduce child mortality, Improve maternal health, Combat HIV/AIDS, malaria, and other diseases, Ensure environmental sustainability, and Develop a global partnership for development.

These eight goals were originally developed by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development which is an international organization of thirty countries that accept the principles of representative democracy and a free market economy, and they were highlighted out of the eight chapters of the United Nation Millennium Declaration, signed in September 2000.

Concerning Sustainable Development, if you go and search in “The World Conservation Strategy” published by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, you will see that they have a linkage between environment and development, which was globally recognized since the beginning of the 80’s. When you go to wikipidia they define Sustainable development as a socio-ecological process characterized by the fulfillment of human needs while maintaining the quality of the natural environment indefinitely, and in the United Nations General Assembly, sustainable development is defined as development that "meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

" According to the Portal of Sustainable Development, The field of sustainable development can be conceptually divided into four general dimensions because sustainable development does not focus just on environmental issues. More broadly, sustainable development policies encompass three general policy areas: economic, environmental and social. The four general dimensions are: social, economic, environmental and institutional. The first three dimensions address key principles of sustainability, while the final dimension as I stated before addresses key institutional policy and capacity issues; here is a scheme of sustainable development at the confluence of threepreoccupations below:

Globalization and Collaborative and Social Networking Technologies, let us ignore all the boundaries that exist in the world wide, either it is physical or geographical boundaries.

These three things (Globalization and Collaborative and Social Networking Technologies) bring a variation in life in many things, it let us recognize too many things that we never acknowledged, like new culture, businesses….etc.

In nowadays businesses should operate and think global in order to control the competition and provide a variation in their productions for their citizens or customers all over the world, as they should use IT tools to collaborate, and be open with the other world to benefit themselves and everybody around.

When we come to the role of ICT in building sustainable development we can say that Information and Communication Technology plays a big role in sustainable development. ICT’s can help and be applied in a lot of sectors, it can help and benefit government or non-governmental organizations to improve the world socio-economic conditions, it helps increasing opportunities for equality, improve the performance of business and the efficiency of markets, as it empower citizens and communities, and increase their access to knowledge.

As global citizens we should help in promoting ICT and sustainable development, we can involve in some volunteer network of teachers or educator, and spend some times to empower someone to learn to empower the others and so on.

Now, from all what I stated erlier, I can now state my recommendations, which is the followings:

1) First of all we should have a very good understanding about the global issues.

2) Each individual country should create its ouwn development strategies, and put a list of what they need in order to fully or at least partially achieve the MDG targets, which is schedualed to be achieved in 2015.

3) Each country should have a good governance that provide human rights

4) Countries who have anti-malaria medicine should help other countries and distribute it for free for all children in regions of malaria transmission.

5) Create more centers for AIDS research

6) Wealthy countries or even private corporations should collaborate with poor or devoloping countries, and create small Institutions in poor coutries to help in education, we need a global education so everybody can work with ICT to benefit and improve their conditions.

7) Education should be mondatory in each country, because if people don’t know how to read or write, how they are going to sit in front of a computer or learn anything about computer.

8) Create a global funding agencies to help the poor in all over the world to start their small businesses, and fight poverty.

9) As it was stated in Hans Rosling video published by the “TED”, Data should be accessible for everybody,so we can examine the technological, economic, and geographic forces that are at work on the world, and know who is doing good, and who still need help.

10) Information Tachnology industries should help in providing connection globally, because a large parts of the world are technologically disconnected (World Economic Forum)

11) Increase collaboration between public and private sectors.

12) Improve and enable open markets, rule of law, protection of property rights, energy supply and access

13) Stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

14) Organize international workshop or seminars about ICT education in different countries, especially the ones that need education about information and communication technology.

15) We should have a global strategy on ICT for development to help whoever is interested to bring ICT to developing countries.



Reference:

[Tapscott, Don and Williams Anthony D. Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changed Everything. New York: Penguin Group, 2006. ]

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Sustainable_development ]


[http://ec.europa.eu/sustainable/welcome/index_en.htm ]


[http://www.iucn.org/ ]


[http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/documents/docs_sdissues.htm ]


[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_and_Communication_Technologies_for_Development]


[http://usforeignpolicy.about.com/ ]


[http://mikeg.typepad.com/perceptions/social_networking_collaboration/index.html ]


[http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/apcity/unpan001465.pdf ]


[http://www.ncrs.fs.fed.us/pubs/gtr/other/gtr-nc217/gtr_nc217page116.pdf ]


[http://www.eurodad.org/whatsnew/reports.aspx?id=810 ]


[http://oneworldprojects.blogspot.com/ ]

E-Government

E-Government or electronic government is when the government use information technology to exchange information and services either with its citizens, or businesses to improve the internal efficiency, public services, and processes of democratic governance.

E-Government has four types of an online non-commercial interactions, which are G2C, G2B, G2G, and G2E.

1-G2C refers to Government-to-Customer, which is an interaction between local and central Government and private individuals

2- G2B refers to Government-to-Business, it is an interaction between local and central government and the comercial business sector.

3- G2G refers to Government-to-Government, which is an interaction between Government organizations, departments, and authorities and other Government.

4-G2E is an online non-commercial interaction between Government and the employees.

E-Government is very important in nowadays, because it’s very convenient, and it provide a better accessibility of public services. It will improve the delivery of goods and services, and it will facilitate a lot of things between businesses and citizens as between government and employees.

Phases of E-Government:

The process of E-Government implimentation was devided into three phases as the followings:

Publish: the first process of E-Government starts by publishing government information online, starting with the rules and regulations, documents, and forms, which it enable the citizens and businesses to access government information without without commuting to government offices, and stand in long lines.

Interact: is the second step where E-Government involves citizens in the governance process by engaging them in interaction with policymakers throughout the policy cycle. Interactive E-Government involves two-way communications, bigining with the basics like email contact information for government officials, or feedback forms that enable citizens to send their comments, in adition this phase can also include the creation of government/citizens forums.

Transact: in the past government services required long waits, but now transact website offers a direct link to government services, which are available anytime, and which enhence productivity in both public and private sector.

The Importance of E-Government:

Today if we look around, and if we think a little bit about few decates ago, we can find out or notice that everything has been changed in all aspects, like the way how we work, how we shop, how we take our classes, how we communicate with each other….etc, and this changes are due to the influence and rise of the digital economy and governments, which themselves should meet the expectations of their citizens, businesses, and employees.

E-Government is all about transforming the relationship between government and businesses and the citizens that they serve, plus transforming the relationship and interaction within the government itself. The followings indicate why E-Government is important:

• The use of ICT and establishing E-Government help create a better business environment.

• Using ICT to promtE-Government open the door for the citizens to be more involved in the policy, and decision-making processes of government.

• Effictive delivery of goods and services to citizens.

• Increase the government’s employees productivity and efficiency.

• Improve quality of life in general.

Conclusion:

In Conclusion I can say that the “Compendium of Innovative E-government Practices” PDF files, that were posted on Pace Blackboard are good examples of this entire thing. It shows why E-Government is important and how it did benefit many countries, not only just the developed countries, but it helps and empowers the other undeveloped countries in many aspects as well.
For example in Ghana, the ministry, and some other institutions like United Nations Information Technology Service; United Nations Volunteers; World Summit on the Information Society, they create a project called “Health Net project”, where they can reveal information on the digital maps that can be used for a better decision making in the future, and to educate the population.

Another good example is of Mozambique where they create a government portal called “Government Electronic Networking: Pre-implementation Phase (GovNet)”. This government portal helped them to improve services, strengthen the policy formulation, Enhance professionalism in the public service, and improve financial management and accountability, and Promote good governance.

References for E-Government Paper

[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=e-government ]

[http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=A+Better+Portugal+-+eGovernement+&search=Search ]

[http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/E-government/The_Goals_of_E-Government ]

[http://egovernancenepal.blogspot.com/2007/02/why-e-government.html ]

[http://www2.nortel.com/go/solution_content.jsp?segId=0&catId=0&parId=0&prod_id=43600&locale=en-US ]

[http://www.ejisdc.org/ojs2/index.php/ejisdc/article/viewFile/277/176 ]

[http://unpan1.un.org/intradoc/groups/public/documents/un/unpan023997.pdf]