A note from the Director

As 2011 is drawing to a close, we wish to thank all our partners for your support and collaboration. We wish you happy holidays and look forward to working with you in 2012.

Looking back, 2011 has been an eventful year for Spider, as we have charted a new direction and remodeled our operations. After careful preparations, we have launched 13 new projects in Bolivia, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda. We have also allocated research and travel grants for researchers and students at our Swedish partner universities. The videos from our Democrazy workshop in June are now available online, and we are launching the Spider ICT4D Seminar series on 19 December.  Three publications are in the pipeline, capturing results and lessons learned from past Spider projects.

We expect 2012 to be a hectic year, so we are happy to welcome Dr Gudrun Wicander to our team. Gudrun successfully defended her PhD thesis Mobile Supported e-Government Systems: Analysis of the Education Management Information System (EMIS) in Tanzania at Karlstad University on 2011/11/11. We congratulate Gudrun on her accomplishment and look forward to her ICT4D work at Spider. We would also like to congratulate Dr Caroline Wamala to her upcoming postdoc at Karlstad University, and appreciate her continued work at Spider on a part-time basis. Petra Pålsson joined the team in September and will continue helping us with the administration of Spider. 

I am writing this note in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where Spider is exploring new partnerships. Our ICT4D workshop organized with the help of Open Institute on 8 December was well attended, with 9 participating organizations. We look forward to strengthening the work of local ICT4D actors in democracy, education, and health.  We also hope to involve Swedish and Cambodian researchers in building ICT4D knowledge.

The thematic focus of this newsletter is corruption, in recognition of 9 December as the international anti-corruption day.  This day has been observed annually since the signing of the United Nations Convention against Corruption in 2003. As the Secretary-General of the United Nations underlined in 2009, it is the world's vulnerable who suffer "first and worst" from corruption, a social malaise that is "not some vast impersonal force" but "the result of personal decisions, most often motivated by greed." Having ourselves dealt with a case of financial mismanagement in one of our old projects, we are currently supporting two innovative anti-corruption projects in East Africa. Through these efforts we hope to make it clear that we do not hesitate to tackle one of the most problematic challenges facing global development, and we hope others will do the same.

Paula Uimonen, Director of Spider