2017 ICT4D Conference

Brief and up-to-date:  this session will provide an overview of CE3, a community-based approach to SDG promotion, where  activities advancing SDGs are chosen in order to come together, rather than coming together to promote SDGs. CE3 in Northern Uganda promotes off-grid electrification, business development and global connectedness in an ecosystem approach founded on this community-based paradigm.  CE3 in Uganda is an activity of BOSCO-Uganda, developed in partnership with Notre Dame's Initiative for Global Development, and sponsored by Accenture with support from HP, Lenovo, The Fetzer Institute, the Loyola Foundation, and SunEdison.

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CE3 is an ecosystem approach to promoting off-grid business development, electrification, and ICT-supported connectivity. A comparison of CE3 with Sustainable Development Goals reveals an almost complete overlap: less so with SDGs concerned with health (3), water (6), and life on land (15), but even in these areas of relative exception, related initiatives prove the rule.

SDGs promote integral human development, required for dignified life on earth. BOSCO-Uganda’s mission is dignified globalization—a mutual welcoming, reaching across divides sharpened by the challenges of conflict and poverty, of colonialism and negligence. BOSCO promotes this mutual welcoming and collaboration, this solidarity, by connecting people in ways that value and preserve what collaborators find to be culturally authentic. Connecting people around all the SDGs is BOSCO’s pluripotent mission as an organization with roots in ICT4D. During its 10-year history, these ICT4D roots have nurtured a dynamic but stable web of collaborative opportunity, and enabled BOSCO to welcome other partners—Accenture, the Notre Dame Initiative for Global Development, HP and Lenovo most prominently in CE3—in promoting an ecosystem approach to development in Northern Uganda.

This session will 1) outline the CE3 project; 2) trace its roots in BOSCO’s experience of livelihood-development response by local communities to the introduction of off-grid communications and energy resources; 3) explore the role that an ICT-network-supported social infrastructure plays in the development and integration of various facets of CE3-styled ecosystems; 4) highlight particular ICT applications and strategies that have helped resolve roadblocks to CE3 progress; and 5) forecast the role that ICT will play in promotion of SDGs on the CE3 model in Northern Uganda over the next several years.