Leaders and experts around the world increasingly recognize human resource capacity development as one of the most crucial ingredients for developing countries to bridge the Digital Divide. It will also provide funding to enable trainers to participate in the programme and for additional tools and reference material. It will also coordinate the activities and help each Internet Training Centre develop a liaison with those providing the necessary national infrastructure. Following an appeal to the industry to contribute to this ambitious and important project, the first partner to have confirmed participation is Cisco Systems which will contribute, through the Cisco Networking Academy Program, in-kind contributions totalling several millions of dollars. The contributions, to be spread over three years, will take the form of staff training, Web-based curriculum and tools as well as networking lab equipment.
Discussions are under way with a number of other industry partners to join.
He also stressed that the Internet Training Centre initiative illustrates the new wave of ITU action in the field where programmes are tight, focused and limited in time and where benefits can be assessed concretely. In Africa, for instance, high costs force universities to restrict full Internet access to staff or, at most, graduate students. The programme objectives include finding ways to assist student placement in local companies, especially for the most successful students. In response to the call for concrete commitments of resources, programmes and initiatives by the third United Nations Conference on Least Developed Countries being held in Brussels from 14 to 20 May, priority will be given to these countries wherever training institutions have the appropriate infrastructure, such as routers, switches, computers and Internet access as well as available staff. Consistent with the recommendations of the ITU Gender Task Force, participation in this programme by women is encouraged.