Geneva — In Kampala, 30 Ugandans among them government officials, business people from the private sector, civil society organisations and the academia will be going to the Tunisian capital for the summit.

Uganda participated in all WSIS preparatory meetings leading to the Tunis summit, which were held at both regional and international levels. "We invested in the process well aware of the potential importance of the outcome of WSIS," works, housing and communications minister John Nasasira told a WSIS preparatory meet in Kampala.

While the minister acknowledged that the issues involved in the WSIS process are complex, he agrees that the challenge for all sovereign states is to translate the, "visions and broad range of issues into tangible results for our people".

"We need to move from mere words to actions. We need to progress from declarations to actions. We have to make the concept of the Information Society relevant to our people," Nasasira noted. We need to make every Ugandan wherever they may be realise the benefits of this complex discussion."

Nasasira said Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) are enablers and not an end in themselves. "Our challenge is to harness ICTs for human development. We therefore need to surmount barriers such as universal access and socio-cultural differences, which prohibit full utilisation of ICTs," he noted. This, he said requires awareness raising and consensus building across all levels of society.

Key decision makers and stakeholders need to make informed decisions about technologies that are most appropriate for their contexts and needs. He said understanding how ICTs can service specific development goals requires both knowledge of appropriate technologies and a grounded appreciation of how these technologies can be deployed to address concrete problems.

The Uganda government he said recognised the importance of ICTs in the development process and embarked on formulating a national ICT policy to guide the country in as far as leveraging the use of ICTs towards the achievement of the national goals.

He said the deployment of ICTs calls for partnership between government and the private sector. As partners, government and the private sector need to involve the beneficiaries from the first stages of programme planning to creating awareness amongst the people of the likely benefits of these ICT initiatives.

Without a private/public partnership, Nasasira believes there is likely to be a danger of having ICTs in place whereas the population is completely ignorant of any practical benefits they might offer.

In Uganda, as in most developing countries, ICTs are dominated by the tiny educated and primarily urban elite while direct use of ICTs usually requires literacy and often-English literacy. He said such barriers are formidable for the large percentage of the population that is of low-income and illiterate. He explained there is a danger of non-use of service such as tele-centres by the targeted local population due to lack of understandable and relevant content.

He acknowledged that as leaders and champions of ICT at various levels, "we need to develop local content and embark on aggressive demystification of the ICT facilities among our people for their benefit." He said the Internet can be combined with old technologies like community radio to effectively overcome barriers of physical access, affordability, illiteracy while also appealing to orally based cultures.

Community radio stations Nasasira said can operate as local broadcasting centres for Internet content, which they are able to download and re-broadcast to thousands of listeners. "We need to move away from stereotyping. We need to be proactive and respond to the peculiar needs of our people so as to meet their demands," he said.

ICTs have great potential for developing more democratic, transparent and participative process of governance from the local to national level. In Uganda, this has been quite evident in the use of radio talk show programmes on FM stations throughout the country.