News 6 of 14

** Grants Awarded

The Committee on the ICT R&D Grants Programme, which is jointly sponsored by IDRC, APDIP, APNIC, ISOC and Microsoft and managed by AMIC, has completed the screening and evaluation of 82 proposals from 16 countries in the Asia-Pacific.

The proposals covered a wide array of topics, sectors, and issues, including ICTs for information access, rural governance, policy, bio-diversity, Development, Digital entry, media, information societies, health and education for women, knowledge management, e-readiness, e-learning, e-government, e-governance, e-commerce, rural connectivity, capacity building, networking, and web site development.

The proposed projects target the rural poor, women, youth, children, information access problems , entrepreneurs, SMEs, researchers, and policy-makers.

In the meeting, held on November 26-28 2004 in Mt. Lavinia, Sri Lanka, the Committee reviewed and discussed the submitted proposals thoroughly. The Committee was impressed by the quality and diversity of the proposals, for which applicants have put a great deal of effort into planning, development, and drafting.

All of the proponents were informed of the results via email by December 2004. Fourteen proposals were selected in this round of competition. The proposal themes varied from Online English-Nepali Machine Translation, Resource sharing system based on Grid Technology, Community Mesh Network , Building capacity of HIV/Aids services providers and SMS based Rice Stock inventory system for rice farmers. Kindly refer to full list of grants awarded for more details.

We thank you all for your interest in this programme. The next competition round is likely to be in March 2005. Please kindly revisit this website in mid January for future updates on the ICT R&D Grants Programme for Asia Pacific.

2005-01-04

News 6 of 14