The ICT4D conference will take place this Tuesday, January 25th until Thursday, January 27th. The conference is a gathering of global actors involved in digital development and ICT use for humanitarian response to learn about best practices, opportunities and challenges when working in partnership with others.

The 2022 agenda will focus on the following key themes:

Day 1: Tech choices and collaborations

Day 2: Partnering locally

Day 3: Data sharing in partnerships

Inclusive Partnerships for Impact Panel

The Principles for Digital Development and the Digital Impact Alliance (DIAL) will participate in the Inclusive Digital Partnerships for Impact Panel. This panel will introduce multiple partnership models among various actors and stakeholders in the digital development space and examine each organization’s unique perspective on the promise of greater impact through more inclusive partnerships—as well as how to realize them.

Effective partnerships are a cornerstone of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development (OECD 2019), and likewise, collaboration is a key tenet of the Principles for Digital Development. Humanitarian and international development resources are limited, and governments are racing to keep pace with rapidly evolving digital solutions. By pooling resources and aligning efforts, partnerships can accelerate the development of effective, efficient solutions and expedite their adoption to deliver greater impact.

Partnerships that are diverse and collaborative in composition demonstrate the extraordinary multiplicity of stakeholders of national-level digital reform and motivate actors to consider perspectives other than their own, both across stakeholder groups and within them. Collaboration, underscored by the Digital Principles, also help digital development actors uphold the central, transformative promise of the 2030 Agenda and its Sustainable Development Goals: to leave no one behind.

While many innovative and impactful partnerships exist in the digital development space, the digital divide persists. Moreover, despite the synergistic potential of partnerships in digital development, development partners’ alignment to partner country priorities and country-owned results frameworks is declining and the forward visibility of development cooperation at the country level is weakening. (OECD 2019) If partnerships to date have failed to close this divide, does the answer to improving their impact lie not within traditional models and their comprising organizations, but outside of them?

Speakers