Twelve years ago, a young Brazilian woman started a swimwear factory with an investment of US$1,000. Continuous improvement in managerial skills, and the use of such tools as e-commerce, has turned the undertaking into a successful enterprise that now has 20 employees and exports 35% of its products to Europe and the United States. The process has been boosted by Government policies intended to encourage the adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) by Brazilian firms, and Government officials have been monitoring the effectiveness of their policies by collecting and analyzing statistics.
To capitalize on the opportunities ICT offers, and to enable Governments to make informed decisions that increase ICT´s impact on economic growth, UNCTAD has expanded its efforts to help developing countries collect statistics and set up effective ICT policies.
The UNCTAD subsite http://measuring-ict.unctad.org has been redesigned to better match national statistical offices (NSOs) needs in offering key information on ICT data collection and dissemination.
The website also includes information on UNCTAD´s advisory missions and training courses. For example, most recently, in December 2006, an advisory mission on ICT statistics was carried out to Morocco, and in January 2007, UNCTAD provided a training course to the NSO of Thailand on applying econometric methods to ICT data analysis.
In addition, it shows the results of UNCTAD´s data collection, carried out every year, on the use of ICT in enterprises of developing countries and on their ICT sector (the 2007 data collection was launched in February 2007), as well as the highlights of the UNCTAD database on these indicators. Finally, the website contains comprehensive information on the many activities of the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development, of which UNCTAD is a leading partner (1).
UNCTAD helps monitor the digital divide by providing the tools to collect and compare ICT data on ICT use by enterprises and on the ICT sector. When data is comparable between countries, it can help Governments evaluate the digital gap between developed and developing nations. Much room remains for progress in the developing world, where both ICT and detailed information on its use remain in short supply. In 2006, while 116 developing countries had already set up national ICT master plans, only 28 had official data on ICT use in enterprises.
