SPIDER –

Program for ICT in Developing Regions and Countries

Background
Two of the basic pillars in the SIDA Policy for ICT in development cooperation,
approved by the Director General of SIDA in 1999 are:
• SIDA will develop ICT in development cooperation as a Swedish profile issue.
• SIDA participates actively in international development cooperation and seeks
partnership with other donors and with institutions/companies in Sweden and in the
collaborating countries.

In the action plan of the abovementioned document, it is recommended to investigate the

possibilities to create a coordinated resource base for ICT in development cooperation in
Sweden to meet the need for access to competence in the ICT area in the development
cooperation that SIDA is pursuing. During the years that have elapsed since this policy
was approved, a number of important changes have occurred regarding the role of ICT in
development cooperation:
• In the framework of SIDA bilateral research cooperation, large programs have been
initiated in a number of countries aiming at providing universities in developing
countries the possibility to establish and manage Campus-wide computer networks
connected to the Internet, including local area networks at almost all departments.
SIDA has supported this cooperation with about 170 MSEK since 1998. Support has
been given to infrastructure development as well as content development and human
capacity building.
• In order to realize these complex projects, SIDA has established contacts with most
Swedish universities having the competence and interest for working with developing
countries. The capacity is reinforced on different levels in the developing countries so
that the established networks can be fully exploited.
• ICT has become a profile issue on the UN agenda. An UNICT Task Force has been
established in order to bridge the digital divide.
• A focussed effort has been made in the ICT-area in Sweden leading to the
establishment of an IT-university in Kista. The IT-university is an umbrella
organization for all academic activities in Kista with KTH and Stockholm University
as principals and including cooperation with Karolinska Institute and the Royal
School of Music.

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• The importance of ICT as a facilitator for the progress of the developing countries has
been generally recognized within SIDA and the demand for ICT development
services has increased significantly.
• A number of countries in the north have established programs for incorporating ICT
in development cooperation.
• There is also an increased awareness of the importance of ICT for development in the
international donor community. Organisations such as UN, IDRC, UNDP, OECD,
WHO, ITU, World Bank and many others are actively supporting projects and
activities in this area extensively. Also academic organisations such as the
International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) demonstrate an increasing
activity in the area.

Already in December1999, the importance of an ICT centre of excellence was stressed in

a report on ICT in Swedish development cooperation, commissioned by SIDA and UD.
In April 2002, a workshop was held in Maputo with project leaders for projects
introducing ICT at universities in some 20 developing countries during the last three
years. The experiences were discussed and conclusions drawn:
• Currently, there are a number of local initiatives at the universities in many
developing countries that can be of use for institutions in neighbouring countries. It
is therefore important to organize cooperation between the universities in the
developing countries to share experiences and resources, organize common courses
and to negotiate common prices for connections to the Internet and procurement of
hardware and software.
• No single university in Sweden has all the resources and competence necessary to
cover all needs when introducing ICT at universities in developing countries.
• There is a need to establish an ICT competence resource in Sweden with a
guaranteed funding for at least five years. Such a resource should act as a
coordinating partner for Swedish universities in collaboration with SIDA and others
in projects related to the introduction and development of ICT in developing
countries in general and at universities in developing countries in particular.
• There is a need for cooperation between such common resource in the Swedish
academic environment in order to share, use synergies and complement the
competence at collaborating universities.

• Information technology is the same in developed and developing countries and

regions. However, the environment in which it is deployed in developing countries
makes it unique in terms of the challenges in the process of acquisition, deployment,
exploitation and maintenance.

As a conclusion from the discussion above, it is proposed to establish a resource centre,

which would address issues, related to the introduction, development, exploitation and
management of information technology in developing countries in a sustainable way. The
Program should be organized at an appropriate Swedish university to benefit from the

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open and neutral character of the academic environment, existing competence and
resources for research and education, subject to quality control via peer review of the
global academic community.

Purpose
The mission of the Swedish Program for Information Technology in Developing
Countries is to support the formation and dissemination of knowledge and competence in
the area of information and communication technologies, allowing developing countries
to meet the challenges of deploying ICT resources in such a way that they are sustainable
and contribute to the economical development, the efficiency of organizations and the
quality of life of their people. In particular, the Program will

• promote ICT as a powerful means for poverty alleviation and human resource
development
• establish close cooperation and partnerships with donor agencies in the “ICT for
development” field.
• support awareness-creating activities on the importance of ICT for development.
• support the development of ICT strategies in developing countries.
• support a number of projects in carefully selected areas, preferably in cooperation
with other organizations.
• play an active part in national telecommunication infrastructure projects, such as the
current SIDA/SAREC university network programme.
• initiate and implement projects in close cooperation with local initiatives.
• function as a link between development cooperation agencies and industry.
• form partnerships with Swedish industrial enterprises.

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Activities

The activities of the Program are partitioned in five major areas. These are education,
research, services and consultation, public relations and project support. A key element is
a strong Program management, which can act as a representative contact to external
partners and also establish and co-ordinate truly joint inter-university projects. Since the
Program exists in a strong academic environment, research and education are the natural
main components with consultation and public relations as complementary and
supporting activities. The Program will also provide funding for support for relevant and
important projects in line with the other activities.

The proposed structure of the Program is described in figure 1.

Education
One of the main functions of the Program is to arrange courses or facilitate the access to
educational and training programmes for participants from developing countries involved
in ICT work. Such activities could include:
• International master’s educations
• Summer schools
• Graduate schools
• PhD programs for students enrolled at Swedish universities
• Technical training and short courses
• Exchange of lecturers
• Curriculum development
• E-learning and distance education

Research
Another important role of the Program is to support and stimulate research activities in
the area of ICTs with particular applicability for developing countries. These activities
should promote research at Swedish universities focussing on such issues as well as
collaboration between research groups in Sweden and in developing countries. Potential
topics would be
• Technical challenges and solutions specific for developing countries, including both
global connectivity and access in remote areas
• Low-cost, low-bandwidth solutions for a number of application areas, such as, e.g.,
distance education and tele-medicine
• Socio-economic consequences of introducing ICTs in developing countries, e.g.
gender related issues

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Services
The Program will also provide general ICT know-how and technical expertise which
could act as a resource for special services as required by authorities in Sweden as well as
in developing countries. Topic could include:
• Technical consultancy services
• ICT master plans
• National ICT policy establishment
• Evaluations of research applications
• Project management
• Feasibility studies and special investigations
• Enable contacts with Swedish industrial partners
• Function as a coordinating node between collaborating institutes and partners

Public relations
Another function of the Program is to promote general awareness of the importance of
ICT as a tool for development and make visible the Swedish efforts in this area.
• Arrange visits for foreign delegates
• Arrange national and international conferences and seminars
• Attract funding and sponsorships from industry as well as national and international
organisations

• Provide visibility within the Swedish society

Project Support
The Program will also provide direct project support to partners in developing countries
for initiatives in priority areas. Such support could be directed to
• the establishment of national Programs of excellence in the area of ICTs at
universities in developing countries
• joint ventures with universities and industrial actors in developing countries
• initial funding for larger local joint project proposals
• funding for project applications
• smaller research initiatives of high relevance

The items education, research, services and public relations are described in further detail
in the following sections.

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Education and Training
In most universities in developing countries, there is a lack of educated teachers and
practitioners in the ICT area. Furthermore, there is a substantial brain drain from the
universities to industry. Contrary to the current situation in Sweden, the few existing
teachers are outnumbered by the huge amount of students willing to study ICT topics. For
instance, in Ethiopia, where ICT has been regarded as a priority area, the university is
expected to provide education in ICTs to well over 1000 students at the undergraduate
level.

There are some initiatives to solve this situation, such as the recently established BIT
education at University of Colombo for using new technologies for education, but
globally there are still an enormous need for efficient methods and organisation of
teaching efforts. Regarding this, substantial achievements can be made by using distance
education and e-learning, teacher exchange programs, curriculum development support,
etc. Given the current situation in Sweden, where many universities suffer from a lack of
students in the ICT area, this also provides an excellent opportunity for Swedish
universities to exploit results and experiences from several years of activities.
Rationales
There is a number of already existing adequate activities in this respect at many Swedish
universities, even in developing countries. However, these efforts are not coordinated and
are more or less depending on local initiatives. Consequently, a large amount of gains
from earlier experiences are unnecessarily lost as well as the possibilities of reusing
teaching material and other resources. Furthermore, no single university has the
necessary capability to efficiently cover all aspects of ICT education in developing
countries. Thus, an important function of the Program is to pull together and coordinate
relevant resources from Swedish and other universities, companies and state agencies in
Sweden as well as abroad, and a wide variety of educational activities and training could
be offered. These could be offered in collaboration with academic institutions as well as
in professional training contexts. In this respect, many prevailing courses and modules
that are already given in English at Swedish universities could be used be made available,
and to some extent adapted, to participants from developing countries. In particular,
many master’s programs in English are of relevance in this context. See for instance,

• http://www.kth.se/eng/education/programmes/master_english/index.html and
• http://www.ipd.bth.se/master%5Fprogrammes/.

One further important task for the Program is to educate Swedish students in the
specific needs of ICT as a tool for sustainable development and to stimulate and educate
IT professionals in the specific conditions for ICT in developing countries.
There is also a need for promoting the use of ICT as an enabling technology in other
disciplines, such as medicine, geography, agriculture, etc. Thus, the activities are not
necessarily limited to pure IT- education only, but will also benefit from collaboration
with other disciplines. Appendix 2 contains examples of such.

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 In addition to this, the Program should support the development of new international
Master’s degree programmes and stimulate the universities to provide them.

Higher Education
The courses should cover relevant areas of computer and network engineering and
management of information systems, particularly addressing the needs of developing
countries and relating to their social and economic development.
The Master’s programmes arranged through the Program could also start as a three-
semester education, requiring a BSc, but could conceivably be extended to a four and a
half year complete education, focused on these ICT-related subjects, relevant to
international development.

Topics of particular relevance to international development could be the following:

• E-Government
• Flexible Learning and Distance Education
• Medical informatics
• Information System Management
• IT-Management
• Multi Purpose Community Tele-Programs
• Internetworking
• Low Cost System Development
• Computer Security
• Wireless Systems

Most likely, this specialisation on ICT issues related to international development would
also be of interest for a number of Swedish students.
The Program could actively promote the cooperation between IT-institutions at
universities in Sweden and in developing countries through the following activities:
• Support and provision of expertise in course design and curricula development at
universities in developing countries.
• Exchange of teachers and students (e.g. through the Linnaeus-Palme and MFS
programs).

Technical Training
With its unique position within the Swedish ICT competence resources, the Program can
offer professional training to satisfy very specific needs of capacity building. It would
therefore constitute an ideal organiser of courses, tailor-made for professionals holding
strategically key positions in developing countries, who need to enhance their IT
technical and managerial skills.

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For example, such courses could cover the following areas:

• ICT policy planning

• ICT Master Plan design
• Telecom markets
• Internet connectivity
• Telecom regulations – role of the state
• Potentials for tele medicine
• Tools, requirements and support for distance education
• ICT-project management

The target group for these courses are usually busy professionals with time constraints,
working at institutions or companies in far apart counties in the world. Under ordinary
conditions, the cost of their participation in courses is high for all parts involved. For this
reason, the proposed training should be arranged in the form of distant learning, using the
most advanced and successful internet-based pedagogical methods and platforms.
These courses should be seen from a perspective that it is of vital importance for the
success of ICT-projects, that a high level of expertise in project management is
established and maintained as well. It is usually not desirable to leave these endeavours
entirely to the private or to the public sector. Ideally, ICT investments in developing
countries should be undertaken in cooperation between the private sector and competent
public sector personnel, with a focus on sustainable development.
These training courses could be organised in the framework of SIDA’s International
Training Programme, and follow the course design’s criteria and guidelines, as well as
the participants’ selection process.

Research
The international development ICT-related issues present challenging questions relevant
to technology, management, the social and behavioural sciences, and are therefore of
high interest for the academic world. New problem areas are waiting to be investigated,
creative solutions and applications are craving to be implemented, unexpected networks
of are there to be contacted. The Program could provide opportunities for researchers, to
be involved in and to influence a new, growing area of ICT-development.
Even though ICT in developing counties is in principle the same as in the
industrialised world, the environment in which these techniques are deployed in the
former present challenges of a different nature. The processes and of acquisition, building
up, exploitation and maintenance of ICTs, as well as the associated problems, require
creative solutions that would not be not thought of under more stable conditions of
development.

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Role of the Program
The Program could constitute an ideal key focal point - both in Sweden and
internationally - for the promotion of research on ICT-issues related to international
development. Research supported by the Program could purposely be oriented so that it
contributes to a rational and sustainable development of ICT capacities, strategies and
infrastructures in several developing countries, focusing on technical, managerial, socio-
economic and cultural factors.
These areas of research could explore the relations between technique and social
development, as well as new ICT implementation strategies and applications. It would be
appropriate that research projects are conducted in collaboration with other sectors in
which ICT can be useful. Such sectors could be health, education, rural development,
agricultural development, local language support, and disaster prevention.
Ideally, the research projects should use synergies from other existing research
endeavours and be strongly correlated with the MSc programs offered.
Currently, there are about 30 students from developing countries, participating in
SIDA-financed programmes, enrolled in graduate education at several Swedish
universities for their PhD or MSc in ICT related subjects. This group is expected to
increase by more than 50% in the near future.
These scholars constitute an excellent point of departure for building up a network of
researchers engaged in ICT in questions related to developing countries. Through the
Program, this network could be extended to other groups, including PhD candidates and
their supervisors at different Swedish universities. Their research could further stimulate
the interest on ICT for international development among other researchers, students,
teachers, and the industry.
In this context, the Program could maintain an updated survey of the Swedish research
resources of interest for developing countries, as well as identify research areas of special
importance for international development that could attract the interest Swedish
researchers.
The Program should create and maintain a web page for research in ICT for
international development. It could provide up-to-date and relevant information on the
research front in ICT, creating conditions for developing countries to leap-frog in the
current technological development. The Program should in various ways and on different
levels contribute to the full exploitation of the established research networks that
cooperate with developing countries.
The Program could also provide support to some administrative activities related to
research, such as establishing guidelines, and formulating research applications for
Swedish and foreign researchers and research institutions. It could as well provide
expertise for the evaluation of such applications.
The Program could be instrumental in promoting research cooperation among
scientists at universities in developing countries (South-South co-operation). An example
of this could be to facilitate the arrangement of PhD or MSc programs where students
from the south can get a PhD in another country in the south.
The Program should be an ideal basis for attracting various types of funding. The
extensive networks established by the Program will constitute an important advantage in
connection with applications for funds to, for example, the European Commission.
Furthermore, the total funding of projects can be arranged so that adequate matching

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funding can be provided. The Program would also promote synergies between the various
fields and projects. Systematic coordination of such efforts could also be facilitated and
related to the usual university framework. These functions are a vital for the sustainability
of the Program.
Another role for the Program would be to identify joint projects with other sectors and
projects in which ICT investments would make a valuable contribution. Natural
candidates in this respect are projects in medicine, education, and agriculture, for
instance. Thus the Program should also promote cross-disciplinary research, focusing on
broader perspectives for the enabling of ICTs in developing countries. It should as well as
establish and organise contacts with people in other sectors working with development
issues, and to promote technical discussions and seminars with other actors, including the
development cooperation agencies.
Finally, the Program should contribute to raising the awareness of the global academic
community, about the challenges that developing countries are facing in the ICT area. It
should work actively with the dissemination of research results and the promotion of
applications and solutions developed.

Relevant research areas

The following is a brief, non-exhaustive description of some relevant ICT-research areas.
The actual projects supported by the program are determined in a “bottom-up” process
taking proposals from the developing countries in account.

Tele-medicine
In most developing countries, access to health care in general and to medical specialists
in particular is insufficient. Long waiting periods and the need to travel long distances to
see a specialist result in high mortality rates and spread of epidemics which could have
been avoided if stopped in time. These effects are costly to the country and individuals
may have to bear the cost of travelling to a hospital (if they can afford it) and suffer
longer (often life-long) and even die from illnesses that could have been cured if treated
timely.

In many developing countries, computer technology and tele-medicine can be used to

reduce mortality, as well as the cost and the waiting times to see a specialist. Current
applications include diffusion of medical information through the Internet, tele-radiology
(sending digitised X-ray MR pictures for remote diagnosis), exchange of medical records,
sending digitised lab analysis results, digital pictures of tissue samples, etc and signals
from blood pressure and other sensors for remote diagnosis. Just the possibility for health
workers in isolated areas to get access to health care information and distance learning
courses through the Internet and to reach qualified doctors by phone or email to get
counselling make a tremendous difference and could also be considered telemedicine
applications.

Research should focus on low-cost technology solutions to such applications and

development of software and support systems for other tele-medicine applications of

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relevance to developing countries. In this research the IT University could draw upon the
extensive experience of tele-medicine applications in northern Sweden.

E-Government
E-Government has the potential to improve Governments’ efficiency and enhance
democracy by improving service delivery, increasing transparency and enhancing
community development and citizen participation, improving access to government
information, improving effectiveness and efficiency of disaster prevention, and by
providing development opportunities, especially benefiting rural and underserved
communities. Research areas include strategies to surmount the technical challenges of e-
government as well as effective models and implementations thereof. Sweden is one of
the most advanced countries in this respect, which warrants a favourable environment for
such research.

E-Learning
The effective use of ICTs as tools in delivering distance education and training is a
challenge both in industrialised and in developing countries. It is however in the latter
where the need to expand educational opportunities is most imperative.

The appropriate and effective use of e-Learning can contribute to that expansion. But E-
learning is a complex system that involves several actors and presents a number of facets
The full realisation of the potential educational benefits of ICTs does not depend only on
technology – which, advanced as it is, constitutes perhaps the easiest component of E-
Learning. It also involves as essential aspects curriculum development, pedagogy,
institutional readiness and teacher’s competence development, among other soft issues.
Actually, the degree by which the student’s attention, motivation and communication can
be increased highly depends on the way an e-learning system is organised and designed.
There is therefore a need of research material to understand which are the factors of
success in this complex interplay of actors, methods and technologies.

The IT University and University of Colombo School of Computing (UCSC) are already
collaborating in a project for the establishment of a national Program for E-Learning in
Sri Lanka. This project focuses on developing training/learning methodologies and
pedagogically designed teaching/learning materials for an external degree in IT at UCSC.
Knowledge transfer from Sweden will mainly be within the area of soft skills, e.g.
educational technology theory, instructional design, digital learning environments, as
well as the pedagogic and methodology and management of e-learning. This project will
constitute a most valuable environment for conducting research that can give answers to a
number of very interesting questions raised by the use of e-Learning methods.

Multi Purpose Community Tele Centres

In many developing countries, the majority of the population live in rural and remote
areas, and are deprived of communications and of public services. One great challenge is
to provide access to modern means of communications and to public services such as
education and health care to the population in such areas. ICT offers the means to reach
out to these populations with E-government, e-learning, tele-medicine, etc. The concept

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of so called Multipurpose Community Telecentres (MCT), are currently being tested in
many developing countries as a potential means of providing access to ICT on a shared
bases to the vast majority of people who cannot afford to have their own telephones and
computers. Research in this field is complementary to the research identified above and
would include technical aspects (telecommunications and IT) as well as development of
applications and content if relevance to rural populations, ICT-based vocational and
literacy training courses, etc.
The first community telecentre in rural areas (“telestuga”) was established in
Vemdalen in Sweden in 1985. Sweden has a long experience of telecentres in rural areas
and therefore provides a favourable environment for this type of research.

Open universal access

The purpose of this research is to identify effective solutions and standards for access
networks providing open universal access (First Mile), as well as sustainable business
models for operation and maintenance of such networks that could be disseminated as
best practices. This includes a survey and analyses of existing successful examples of
communication applications in developing countries and rural areas. The focus is on
regional prerequisites, communication needs, choice of technology, business model,
competence for operation and maintenance and other factors that affect the sustainability.
A special emphasis is put on schools and small businesses and their roles as primary
adopters in communities.
The research also includes open communication architectures allowing user-
communities and user agents to deploy local access networks, based on local economical
opportunities, and regulatory frameworks that allow connection of such networks to
several operators to make them operator-neutral. A component in this research is the
entrepreneurship required to make such local developments happen.

Bridging the digital divide

The IT-university is located in one of the most multi-ethnical areas of Stockholm with
huge differences between the high-tech wired population, always on-line, and the low-
tech unwired population with very limited possibilities to get access to communication
resources. Recent anthropological studies have created a broader awareness and started a
discussion and planning process to formulate an action plan integrating several isolated
and under-critical programs into a larger program. As a part of this process, a survey of
different initiatives in developing countries is conducted, which in a few cases has led to
a fruitful cooperation illustrating that a developed country has a lot to learn about how to
organize sustainable activities involving unwired user communities with no resources.
One pilot study involves a Somalian community in Rinkeby and another involves Tensta
Gymnasium, a high school challenged by the multi-ethnical environment. A cooperative
study is being planned in cooperation between the IT-university, the Sita/MitraMandal
effort in New Delhi and the Wougnet and Uconnect projects in Uganda.

Natural Language Processing

The amount of work required to start from scratch in developing all aspects of natural
language processing for a language, where no computational linguistic resources exists, is
huge. At the same time there is an urgent need for a variety of applications including

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local language spell-checkers, word processors, machine translation systems, search
engines, etc. For these applications to be developed, the existence of computerized
language resources and a well-developed framework for research in this area is required.
Tree-banks, Part-of-speech taggers, computerized grammars, and lexica, are all
necessary parts of this framework. We see it as essential that this should begin with the
development of a broad foundation based on corpora, lexicon and morphology. The
challenge is to develop these resources in a way that they are easily extended for full
coverage and make them reusable by any other tool or application as central component.
It is better to build foundation resources useful to develop general and specific tools and
also applications and end-user products in the language. Such resources, would provide
the foundation for present and future developments of work related to natural language
processing in many developing countries where no such resources currently exists.

Localization and Internationalization

The needs of bringing cultural diversity to ICT systems are not just limited to the
language and sometimes will require deep analysis of user interfaces, hardware encoding
devices or human-machine interaction. Localization includes areas as displaying,
inputting and printing characters innative languages, handling files and file's name I
native languages, displaying messages in native languages, adapt graphical interfaces to
local preferences etc.

While it might be safe to assume that character encoding problems will disappear in
future applications in developed countries where most of the companies of the IT market
are based, it is still uncertain how much time and effort will be devoted to implement
localized software solutions including the operative systems themselves. An important
goal of the Program would be to help developing countries in their effort to adapt and
develop local software and could significantly contribute to research and development in
the area of localization of ICT systems in developing countries. This work will have to
be conducted in close contact with the international organisations promoting the
definition of new mechanisms that will provide for interoperability at a global scale, e.g.
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Internationalization Working Group and the
Localization Industry Standards Association.

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Public relations
Public relations include activities related to
• General awareness of the Program at universities and agencies in developing
countries
• High visibility in the scientific and expert community and among financing
bodies
• General appreciation among the Swedish public, companies and organisations

It is anticipated that an annual Program Conference will be arranged to disseminate

results, exchange experiences and discuss future directions. With proper content such an
event could be a powerful vehicle for high public visibility, within Sweden as well as
internationally. An example scenario of how this could be accomplished is a coupling of
the well established “Stockholm Challenge Award competition to the Program.

Affiliates program
Industry and other organizations are invited to join an affiliates program, including both
government and non-government organizations, non-profit and for profit companies,
public and private. An example of useful projects together with affiliates is the
development of a robust communication support system for relief actions in emergency
situations supporting efficient communication between different organizations like the
UN, Red Cross, World Food program etc. Such a system is interesting also as a first
infrastructure in rural off-grid areas.

Modes of operation

The centre will have a national scope and will focus resources from the Swedish
universities and will function as a resource broker for ICT in development cooperation.
The Program structure is built on long term partnerships with universities,
organizations, governments, and industry in the developing countries.
To provide a network of ICT expertise is an important part of the concept. The Program
should enable project partners access to high-level competence in ICT-related issues. In
addition, the Program should provide support via technical consultants, training and
education in ICT-related areas. It could also function as a link between development
cooperation agencies and industry.
The Program will also work with affiliate organizations and raise the awareness in
general about the challenges that developing countries are facing in the information
technology area.
The general collaborating structure is illustrated in Figure 2.

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Thus the Swedish university partners will adjoin their activities to the Program
database of available projects forming a network connecting to the appropriate
expertise at Swedish universities. This network is jointly “marketed” within the
Program framework providing information and access to both relevant education
and scientific expertise as well as established channels to partners in the
developing countries.
The Swedish universities will coordinate their educational efforts on all levels.
Examples of activities include:
• A spectrum of “International Masters” programs will be offered and
jointly marketed, covering both core ICT programs (e.g. the
Internetworking and Information security programs at the IT-university in
Kista) and various applied ICT programs (such as the Geoinformatics and
Traffic environment) program at Univ. of Linköping).
• Ph.D. education in sandwich programs will have a coordinated structure
and will be complemented with annual Summer (or Winter!) schools in
basic and applied ICT.
• A set of short “executive” courses (to be given in Sweden as well as in
developing countries) will be developed where senior staffs from the
different groups contribute with their expertise.

In terms of research the coordination provided by the Program will result in

• Efficient and fast response to arising needs and project requests by
providing a tight network connecting to the expertise needed.
• Possibilities to run larger projects encompassing many different aspects of
ICT deployment in new environments. Such capabilities is anticipated to
be particularly important in order to participate in internationally funded
programs.
• Increased awareness and closer networking among the Swedish research
groups.
• The program would also provide SIDA with a comprehensive overview of
the relevant Swedish research projects and the involved persons.

It is very important to ensure that the Program projects will backed up by sufficient
efforts to create beneficial conditions locally for sustainable implementation of ICT
projects. The coordinated Program support for small projects in the developing countries
will result in greater efficiency in the field work since it provides a means of promoting
joint efforts to build supercritical nodes of operation rather than a number of isolated
small activities.

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Organisation
It is proposed that the activities described in this document are organized in the form of a
Network Program with its Secretariat located at KTH. Formally KTH treats the
Program as a separate operational and business unit equivalent to a “Center”. Such
“Centers” constitute a well established model for thematic and project collaboration
between KTH departments and external parties, including other universities and schools.
Content and finances of a “Center” are independent from KTH departments and
administration, while still benefiting from the support of KTH as a legal entity.

NOTE: The term Program is used in this section with the same meaning as Center in the
KTH administrative terminology.

The Program activities are governed by a Program Board both appointed by the Rector of
KTH. A Program Director, also appointed by the Rector of KTH after discussions with
the board, acts as executive manager. One department at KTH acts as “host” department
in terms of legal and administrative issues, e.g. employment. In this case the Department
of Systems and Computer Science is proposed as the host department for the Program.

The Program Board is responsible for

• Strategic vision
• Scientific content and direction
• Modes of collaboration
• Yearly activity plans
• Yearly budget and financial control (within the KTH administrative framework)

The Program board should have nine members appointed.

The Program board will organise an International advisory board including

representatives from

• The main Swedish university partners

• The main international university partners
• Leading international scientists and experts in the area
• International organisations

The Internationally advisory board should meet at least annually and review the Program
activities and give recommendations to the Board and Director.

The Program board may appoint other groups and task forces as needed.

The Program Director reports to the Board and is responsible for

• Execution of the Program Board decisions

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 • Daily Program operation
• Pursuing funding initiatives
• Coordination of scientific collaborations among partners
• Establishment of suitable model contracts for collaboration and other activities
within the Program
• Maintaining national and international contact networks
• Public relations activities
• Proposal of Program budget
• Financial reports to the Board and to the host Department as required

It is further proposed that a four member management group should be appointed among
the Program partner faculty at Swedish university partners to assist the Director in the
Program operations and networking.

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