Eduardo Nuñez, Director of the Brazilian Institute of Statistics, Marthin Hilbert, Coordinator of the Information Society Programme of UN-ECLAC, and Mansour Farah, Team Leader of the ICT Division of UN-ESCWA, all made presentations at the IGF Panel Discussion on the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development. The presentations focused on describing the partnership and its current activities.
The Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development includes the ITU, the OECD, UNCTAD, UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), four UN Regional Commissions (ECA, ECLAC, ESCAP, and ESCWA), the UN ICT Task Force and the World Bank as partners, as well as some National Statistical Offices.
Its objectives are; to achieve a common set of core ICT indicators, to be harmonized and agreed upon internationally, which will constitute the basis for an ICT statistics database; to enhance the capacities of national statistical offices in developing countries and to build competence in the development of statistical compilation programmes on the information society, based on internationally agreed upon indicators; and to develop a global database on ICT indicators, to be available on the Internet.
The partnership is aimed at accommodating and further developing existing initiatives regarding the availability and measurement of ICT indicators at the national, regional and international levels. It provides an open framework for coordinating ongoing and future activities, and for developing a coherent and structured approach to advancing the development of ICT indicators globally, with a focus on developing countries.
Panelists also discussed the fact that Latin American countries perform better in terms of incorporating ICT indicators in the regular surveys made by their National Statistics Offices, a process is coordinated by the ECLAC through the OSILAC initiative.
It was asked why some indicators that could be relevant to evaluate the health of the national-level ICT economy (such as domain names and IP addresses) are lacking from core set developed by the partnership. Panelists responded that their goal is to develop an initial set of core ICT indicators, fully comparable at the international level. Given this limitation, compromises had to be made, resulting in some indicators being excluded.