YouthMobile – Young female students from the UNRWA Refugee School learning mobile apps development, Ramallah, Palestine 19 May, 2014© UNESCO/Abel Caine
Universal access to information and knowledge is key to building peace, sustainable social and economic development, and intercultural dialogue. Open ICT Solutions enable information and knowledge to be freely and legally shared and reused.
Partners can join UNESCO in its efforts to promote universal access to information and knowledge. Together this can be achieved through :
- Open Educational Resources providing teachers and learners with high-quality teaching and learning materials that allow for free use, adaptation, and distribution;
- Open Access to scientific information enabling scientists and researchers to share and access scholarly information on the latest scientific advances;
- Free and Open Source Software providing a wide range of tools and processes for creating, exchanging, and sharing interoperable software and solutions efficiently and effectively.
- YouthMobile Initiative a project geared towards training over 25,000 young people to build mobile applications which can be used to solve local sustainable development problems.
- WorldMap Initiative to strengthen the resilience of local communities in crisis situations, through
a participative openly licensed GIS data infrastructure of educational, cultural and scientifically relevant installations, such as schools, water resources, public services.
UNESCO’s Open Solutions strategy has been focusing on policy development, capacity building, standard setting, partnerships UNESCO is the world’s leading education organization with excellent pedagogical and technological skills, 70 years of experience, a global network of Field Offices and Institutes, and the trust of Governments and partners to provide services to Governments to achieve sustainable development and peace. Its added value rests with intergovernmental functions in fields of standard setting, national and institutional capacity building, serving as a laboratory of new ideas, clearinghouse of knowledge, and being a catalyst for cross-country cooperation. This is supported by a strong understanding of the specific challenges facing stakeholders in the application of rapidly-changing Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to its member states and assisting them to meet the challenges caused by the digital divide to serve even the most disadvantaged populations.