Information and communication services are as important as other basics of social well-being and civilization, for collective and individual fulfilment. These changes may be as great as those of the industrial revolution, with far reaching effects we cannot even envision today. No country or region can afford to be left out. Governments, private firms, NGOs and others are strongly urged to recognize the critical, core importance of these new technologies. The ICT revolution is especially important and essential for developing societies and their people More and more information and communication services and technologies are being embedded in the everyday processes and activities of modern life.
Information processing is embedded everywhere in developed and in developing societies.
It should be thought of as a requirement for equitable and sustained economic development and social development, through education, training, health care, culture, leisure, employment and so forth. While a modern imperative for all countries, diffusing ICT effectively and equitably, is neither easy nor automatic To be effective, ICT diffusion and popular acceptance requires top leadership, effective vision to mobilize new behaviours, wider participation, and major organizational changes in the ways that governments, NGOs and firms are organized internally and to interact with one another. In the main, it will be diffused as much or more through the private sector as the public. We have taken stock of Africa's position within the emerging global economic system at the threshold of the twenty-first century. We have deliberated on the appropriate orientation of the development of our countries in the era of a liberalizing and integrating world economy, and the necessary measures that we need to implement in Africa at the level of government, with support from bilateral and multilateral development partners, and in full partnership with African and foreign private enterprise.