2.7. Awareness raising and capacity development of all development stakeholders

Despite the direct application of the current approaches to integrate ICTs as a strategic tool into development sectors (education, health, agriculture, governance, etc.), the status quo in the current development discourse indicates that there is an insufficient awareness and understanding among development stakeholders about the added value ICTs can contribute to climate change programmes. As indicated in Figure 4, there are three principal stages to achieve the integration of ICTs as a strategic tool in climate change programmes through awareness raising and capacity development. Currently, the development community is in the first stage with some momentum gathering for the second stage. There is a need to build a critical mass of experts and policy makers to link the potential of ICTs to adaptation strategies and subsequent systematic implementation. To achieve this objective, good practices and lessons learned from ongoing ICT for development programmes should be utilised and specific approaches to climate change programmes built around them. Challenges will include the political will of decision makers to embrace ICTs (including outside-the-box thinking) and limited understanding of ICTs as a strategic tool beyond infrastructure.

Figure 4: ICTs and climate change learning curve

Regarding capacity development, it is strongly recommended to utilise a holistic and systemic approach, such as the one depicted in the “Capacity Development Butterfly” (see Annex 2), which covers the four key dimensions of “individual competencies”, “organisational development”, “development of networks” and “development of systems” among all development stakeholders.

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