Young people in Cuba are anxiously awaiting an acceleration of the informatisation of society, which is apparently moving ahead at the same pace as the current reform process, “without haste, but without pause,” according to the authorities.
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) will include targets for information and communication technologies, such as strengthening the Internet. And Latin America will be behind from the start in aspects that are key to increasing its educational and medical uses, bolster security and expand bandwidth.
New technologies can transform society, and the role of women in using these tools to promote change was clearly seen at the first ICT Congress for Peace in this city in northern Spain.
The success of cooperatives, values-based associations owned and managed by their own clients and hailed as an alternative business model, is highly dependent on their use of information and communications technologies (ICTs), experts say.
In Latin America, the distribution of laptops in public schools, an effort that has enjoyed success in countries like Argentina, Uruguay and Venezuela, is being studied by the governments of other nations interested in learning from their experience about the challenges that can be expected.
On a continent of over one billion people, where half the population have mobile phones, the use of mobile communication and internet technologies is crucial to boost development in Africa.
"We're making a three-dimensional educational video game. The idea is to create virtual worlds where children can explore and interact with other people and objects," said Carlos Villagrán, seated at a computer in the Campus Tecnológico in the Guatemalan capital.
The capital of Uruguay has become the headquarters of Latin America’s six leading Internet organisations, brought together in the same building.
The rapid currents moving the centre of economic influence towards an emerging global order headquartered in Asia were evident at the PanIIT’s 2012 annual conference of alumni of the highly prestigious Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), which took place in Singapore over the Easter weekend.
The lack of adequate management of electronic waste in Guatemala is posing a serious threat to the environment and health, as demand for electronic devices has soared to the point that there are more cell phones than people.
In the last 25 years, there has been an explosion of commercial radio stations in what Jamaican broadcast professionals describe as "a revolution" that has extended the "mobility of radio".
"I want my own computer so that I can talk to my cousins who live in Italy," says eight-year-old Camila Ojeda, sitting in front of a computer monitor on a bus that acts as a mobile cybercafé in the Paraguayan capital.
Community radio stations in Brazil are finding the internet and user-friendly information technologies to be valuable allies for their broadcasts, which focus on citizenship, social equity and human rights.
A unique campaign in the Philippines is using stylised online photos to raise awareness on HIV/AIDS. Fashion and conceptual photographer Niccolo Cosme first initiated Project Headshot Clinic in 2007 as a way of merging profile photos online and advertising.
Francis Mburu used to keep indigenous cattle in Entasopia village in the semi- arid Kajiado region, 160 kilometres southwest of Nairobi. However, increasing temperatures and frequent droughts in Kenya have made this difficult in recent years.
The shop is filled to bursting with buyers. One by one, customers follow a salesperson to one of a row of booths where they are provided with a wealth of information on the mobile phones for sale. But nobody tells them what to do with the old phones they are replacing.
Collecting the monthly subscriptions for her co-operative has always been a headache for Thelma Nare, 41. This is because Nare lives in Tshitshi, Plumtree in rural Zimbabwe, about 60 kilometres away from the humdrum of the nearest town centre where banks are located.
War brings economic development, we're told at times. Like the cliché or not, in their case, Israelis have become a successful start-up nation by building a powerful start-up military.
Every student and teacher has a laptop with Internet connection in half of the public secondary schools in Argentina, even in remote rural villages or on islands.
In a remote Indian village in the Western state of Maharashtra, a fourth-grader named Suraj Balu Zore proudly told IPS that he can now effortlessly operate a laptop computer.