The UN ICT taskforce established GeSCI to help ministries of education in developing countries to define their strategies, policies and implementation plans for large-scale ICT education programmes. GeSCI has supported ICT in education through national programmes in India, Bolivia, Namibia, Rwanda and Ghana, and through regional activities. In Africa, GeSCI has organised roundtables for ministers of education, and hundreds of ministry officials from 16 African countries have joined the African Knowledge Exchange community and attended seminars initiated by GeSCI. We are advisors; we do not do implementation, but we can help governments to build capacities for implementation and then create partnerships for the implementation phase. These partners can be development partners, funding partners or industrial partners that help the governments with implementation.

We also initiate and facilitate research programmes and projects that support policy makers in order to understand which ICT innovations work the best in developing countries and what kind of problems can be solved with ICT: what works, what doesn’t work. In addition, we create knowledge tools that can be used in planning and implementing national ICT educational initiatives, such as total cost-of-ownership tools that help governments to calculate the overall costs of ICT implementation programmes or auditing tools for institutions to look at what kind of capacity they lack and what they should build on.

Moreover, we facilitate research to advise policy makers on creating environments that are more conducive to those ICT innovations that are to be upscaled. For example, evaluation research can help a ministry to understand the current situation in its country. Often policy makers are not aware of innovative solutions that might be available or whether the solutions are feasible in their own country. Therefore, GeSCI is trying to create so-called 'living labs', research-driven pilots that help the policy makers to understand what works in practice and what kind of policy environment is needed to sustain these solutions. Many governments want to upscale only one solution that fits all the

schools and they don’t necessarily see the different ways of upscaling to facilitate different processes in education. Current mainstream research doesn’t really look at the problems in developing countries but, rather, it looks at problems in developed countries, such as the capacity of the broadband networks in high-end educational applications like video conferencing and video-based learning materials, or the methodologies in a classroom environment where there are only 20 students with a wealth of learning resources or personal access to ICT.

From the beginning GeSCI has been funded by government donors including Ireland, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland. Now, new funding partners are coming in and we are broadening our funding base to include private sector partners for the first time.

We would like to engage the private sector to help create Knowledge Partnerships with GeSCI, to facilitate applied innovative research or knowledge-sharing programmes to advise policy makers on the uses of ICT in education. One area of interest is the accessibility of educational services in rural areas, especially by utilising mobile/ wireless networks that are widely available in developing countries. Another area is training teachers on ICT in education, new skills development and quality of learning. Obviously, we don't use private sector funding directly for the policy work that we do with governments.

Yes. One of the biggest issues in the last few years has been the global recession. Many of our current funding agencies are facing financial difficulties themselves so the development funds from public donors have gone down. The private sector is having the same problems. What we want to do is combine different funding now and broaden our donor base to make our operations more sustainable in the long run.

Unfortunately, public sector donors have not been very committed to the funding of the development goals and principles they agreed to at the World Summit on the Information Society [WSIS]. There has been commitment at the political level rather than the funding level. Now governments seem to have a new commitment: the environment and climate change. Funds, at least for the near future, are following those political initiatives; donors seem to have forgotten what they promised for the information society and many initiatives established by the donors themselves have been suffering. However, GeSCI has survived fairly well through the recession and the prospects for the future look good at the moment.

Exactly: there is evidence to support that idea and the growth strategies of developed countries are based on this understanding. However, if you look at the country level, particularly in developing countries, there are fewer donor agencies that are supporting the education sector as such. A few years ago, most of the big donors were supporting education initiatives in most of the countries. Now many of them are reducing the number of countries receiving support for the education sector and perhaps are funding other sectors like environment, governance and economic development. Abandoning the education sector may be short sighted, as education contributes to all the other sectors by providing the required skills and know-how for economic development, especially if ICT is used in education in the appropriate ways.

If you look at the mainstream ICT in education debates online, it is quite shocking that they don’t speak about accessibility any more. In Africa and many other developing countries, the accessibility to education is still a problem, and accessibility to education goes hand-in-hand with accessibility to ICT and other communication services that are needed in society. When an education system faces accessibility problems, usually there is a lack of electricity and a lack of communication networks as well. This is the case in rural Africa and in some of the big slums in big cities.

Mobile communications could help solve some of the accessibility problems in rural areas because the coverage is already there; people have mobile phones and penetration is very high. However, most of the educational applications are designed for PCs and fit for a classroom environment rather than for helping children and students to reach educational services outside the classroom. That is one of the problems that the debate seems to have forgotten: education for all. This is an area where GeSCI wants to make a difference. We would be interested in working together with the industry to define the needs and possibilities for mobile and wireless technologies to transform education to be more inclusive. We have even chosen the motto for our new strategy, 'Building a Knowledge Society for All', which means that we need to explore how ICT can provide more inclusive access to education, knowledge and innovation in society, because they are all cornerstones for development.

At the moment, mobile technologies play only a marginal role in education. It really is a pity, because mobile technologies are widely available among the young people in developing countries. Almost half of the population in Sub-Saharan Africa are under 20 years old. They are eager to use mobile phones for accessing all kinds of services online. However, the cost of mobile services is an issue, specifically for the young population, as they may not have jobs and money to pay for the services themselves. Through education and skills development they can solve both of these problems: get a job and earn income for themselves. This is a problem that could be seen as an investment opportunity from the telecom operators' perspective. If operators invest in expanding the customer base in a country, they could subsidise educational use of mobile phones. This would create a new, wealthier generation that is ready and willing to use online services through mobile technology.

Mobile operators should have more long-term goals in their business and contribute to the building of a more inclusive knowledge society where all can afford mobile Internet services. Essentially, communications costs are just too high for educational purposes in developing countries. It seems to me that the telecom operators are not willing to look at this market sector for the long term. I don't think they appreciate that they can grow a stable new client base by investing a little bit in this sector.

If you talk to the different sectors of the telecommunications industry, they all claim they are doing what they can to reduce costs and they point a finger at someone else in the sector as being the problem. The manufacturers of mobile phones and devices say they try to push the price of handhelds very low in emerging markets, but they blame the telecommunications companies. If you speak to the telecommunications companies, they have a different answer. There seem to be some aspects of telecommunications that don't really allow the prices for educational use to go lower than the market rate at the moment—in developed and developing countries.

With telecommunications liberalisation, the idea is reduced regulation allows the market to set prices. That has been working quite well in many cases. Regulation can also be used to steer the markets to deliver the services where they are needed and at affordable prices. If there is a national interest that is also of long-term interest to the industry, some of the regulations could be used to steer services in the right direction. While they may not be the best business initiatives for the industry in the short term, over the long run they could prove to create a broader, more affordable market and a larger, wealthier customer base.

There are many; however a number of them are pilots where there is no intention to upgrade them to larger-scale implementations. Unfortunately, that is something we see often due to the lack of funding.

Some solutions that could have a great impact include combining mobile technology and satellitebased Internet provision for delivering support and learning materials for teachers in remote rural schools.

This has been piloted already in some countries and could be useful in many others. Also, the creation of independent GSM cells providing free mobile data connectivity in rural villages could be useful for educational institutions and their students, if allowed by the telcos.

There are also good practices in the area of policy-making processes on ICT in education. In Namibia, GeSCI helped create multi-stakeholder partnerships that involved different sectors of society working together. The Ministry of Education had a very ambitious national plan for ICT and education. GeSCI helped it to create partnerships with public sector donors, including the development banks. There were partnerships with private sector companies to help implement various solutions, and civil society and academic partners to help advise the ministry. The result was that the Namibian Minister for Education was able to multiply the resources he initially had for the implementation process. It was very successful not only in creating helpful knowledge partnerships but also in mobilising the resources for the implementation phase.

Another example is in Rwanda where GeSCI has been providing strategic advice to the government. They are using the development of a knowledge society as a cornerstone for the development of the whole country. Rwanda is a small country and political consensus on knowledge society development seems to be easy to achieve, not only within the Ministry of Education, but also the other ministries, which have the same understanding and goal of developing Rwanda as a knowledge society. The policy drive, policy coordination and the national vision set a good example for others.

That’s an interesting question. I have a personal view on this because more than 10 years ago, in Finland, I had a dotcom company that started to provide online learning management services for Finnish educational organisations, universities and schools. At that time, the sector was not established and there were a lot of debates on the concept and who should do what.

Today, the business is more established and has gone in the service direction that we anticipated more than 10 years ago. Together with cloud computing technology, the service model will be even stronger in the future. The main question for the future may be the accessibility of these services. Where and with which technologies can the services be accessed? Should students come to the classroom in order to access online services, or can they access services from home or some other location? All this is possible with current mobile and wireless technologies, but the education system is not necessarily ready for it yet.

We need to figure out how to transform the educational system to be more inclusive but also more open in society. We need to break down the walls between the classrooms and work places, so that lifelong learning is made possible in practice. If a worker is able to upgrade his or her standards in secondary education or in vocational education from the workplace via ICT, the same educational services would also allow the dropouts and poor students from rural areas and slums to participate in the same education. This is not a technical problem. It is a problem with the openness of the educational system and, again, with the cost of telecommunications services in the educational domain.

What will be the impact? The impact, apart from a more relevant educational system, will be that the private sector can also participate in educational markets without focusing on educational content provision. The publishing companies are doing that piece very well. But the telecommunication companies could find a role in service provision of learning management systems and other systems and services that education may need.

Exactly. If the telcos aren't willing to subsidise the line costs, as such, they could actually develop more comprehensive services so the line cost is not the issue anymore. They could make the whole service package more affordable. That would solve some of the affordability problems in developing countries. Affordability is just as likely to be a problem in established markets, too. The educational institutions in Europe don’t have huge amounts of money for these kind of services. Telcos have to look at this sector once again and lower the prices. In the late '90s, when my company developed SMS data reminders for parents, nobody wanted to pay for this service because the SMS cost alone was already too high without the content development costs. Developing content is not commercially viable if telecommunication costs are too high. This could be one way of addressing all markets to develop more comprehensive and affordable services for education.

Many telecom operators, especially the mobile companies, have been thinking about this already and they have pilot programmes in place. At the conceptual level, I believe that many of these companies that are trying to get into the education market have asked the wrong questions and so they have the wrong answers. They try to compete with the computers and traditional classroom-based ICT implementation. They have not really looked at how they can change the educational systems and make education more accessible for the rest of the people who are not in the classroom. That still remains a problem in developing countries, and developed countries as well. It’s a pity that some telecommunication companies have withdrawn from the idea of going into this sector at all because of the conceptual problems. GeSCI has realised this problem and that’s why we are now trying to get some of the private sector companies involved in our knowledge partnership research programmes and knowledge sharing programmes to target this specific issue.

We do have an interest in developing new gadgets and concepts through our knowledge partnerships with the private sector. This is exactly what we want to find out through innovative research conducted jointly with the private sector. We are looking especially at the social and process innovations that the industry is exploring, because we may have a different perspective on these innovations.

In my discussions with educators and other developers of ICT services, the most usable device for the current education system in a classroom context could be a tablet, like an e-book reader, but more comprehensive: a device that has all the basic functions to read, write, calculate and draw, as well as includes the required communications feeds in order to access books online and traditional learning materials and for total interaction facilitated by the teacher and educators for learning. It needs two-way communication facilities, whether they are voice- or databased. You need communications capability in order to learn, as learning is social by nature. You also need access to interesting materials. You need some tools to process the information. And both the device and the connectivity have to be affordable.

However, we should also question the relevance of classroom-based education and the technology that fits in that context. Is a classroom the best way to organise education in an inclusive knowledge society? What is the technology that can transform the education system to be more inclusive, more relevant and more responsive for the needs of the learners and the development of the whole society? This might be a more relevant question, rather than asking what technology fits traditional classroom teaching. Just imagine: in the banking sector this question resulted in online banking that is available worldwide. If they had followed the traditional processes and a 'classroom approach', we would have banks with loads of computers on desks, but still serving the customers in the traditional ways. The same applies in education: ICT can only help education if the basic processes are developed at the same time.