Interconnected-Parliaments: Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan

The Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan is an Africa-wide initiative that aims to modernize African Parliaments’ information management capabilities and provide them with skills, services and applications that will allow them to become open, participatory, knowledge-based and learning organizations. Major activities of the Africa i-Parliaments Action Plan are the Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (www.apkn.org), and the development of Bungeni (www.bungeni.org) and Akoma Ntoso (www.akomantoso.org). The Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN) is a network that supports the work of African assemblies by establishing mechanisms and procedures for exchanging information and experience in areas of common interest. It also intends to strengthen cooperation for capacity building and staff training, and collaborate on technology development to serve parliamentary functions. Major areas of cooperation include legislative processes, information and research services, ICT tools, and communication with the public. The Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network (APKN) was officially launched in 2008. In October 2010, the first meeting of the APKN at the highest level, Speakers of Parliament, will take place in South Africa. Through the APKN portal (www.apkn.org), African parliamentary assemblies have access to tools and services that facilitate the sharing of information and documentation and promote collaboration. These tools include Legislative Drafting Guidelines, the Africa News Monitor (ANM), which gathers news from African countries, the Learning Resources Portal, which provides on-line capacity building on specific themes organized in modules and tutorials, and the Africa Parliamentary Information Exchange (APEX), which is meant to facilitate the flow of information among national parliaments and to expand the information available to national parliaments with regard to cross-national initiatives. Bungeni is an open source parliamentary information system that provides a world-leading solution for the drafting, revision, amendment, and publishing phases of the parliamentary document life-cycle. Bungeni is available in several languages (English, French, Portuguese, and Swahili) and, being fully internationalised, can be translated into others. The Bungeni pre-deployment phase began in February 2010 with testing by 14 parliaments. Features tuning and localisation following feedback from these parliaments will take place in the second quarter of 2010. The deployment is foreseen in the third quarter of 2010. Akoma Ntoso is a set of common XML standards for the management of digital parliamentary and legislative documents in order to ensure the effective exchange of machine readable parliamentary documents.

http://www.parliaments.info/

Regional implementation

Regions of implementation

• Africa

Ongoing from 2008 to 2011

Pan-African Parliament, African National Parliaments, African Regional Assemblies, Global Centre for ICT in Parliament, European Parliament, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa and United Nations agencies and programmes.

* The role of governments and all stakeholders in the promotion of ICTs for development
      * ICT in Parliaments
* Capacity building
* Enabling environment
* ICT applications: benefits in all aspects of life
* International and regional cooperation

• Goal 8: Develop a global partnership for development

• Programme