In Tanzania, 11% of the population enjoys access to electricity. In Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, English is the official language of business and government; however, only the urban elite speak English as a second language and the great majority speak one of the over 500 indigenous languages - most of which have no written form. These are but two illustrations of the complications that delegates to the Africa Regional Conference on Access to Information wrestled with when the Carter Center convened the Conference last week in Accra, Ghana.

Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter chaired the meeting, which brought together over 100 regional and international representatives from governments, civil society, media, academia and the private sector. I and my Symantec colleague, Annie Goransen were invited to participate on behalf of Symantec to provide private sector insight on the challenges of effective management of records and use of technology to further the goals of development and government transparency.

Here in the United States, Symantec works with state and local governments to implement technology solutions that make governments more transparent and accessible to their citizens. Clearly, our expertise is information management in an online environment, an environment that is largely inaccessible not only to citizens of most African nations, but inaccessible to the governments themselves.

However, Annie and I were able to use our experiences in working with large enterprise customers and state and local governments to provide a vision of what records management protocols should be considered and more importantly, the steps that must be taken by governments as they seek to create a government infrastructure that will ultimately facilitate transparency and openness.

In his opening remarks to the conference, President Carter emphasized the importance of good governance and transparency in combating corruption and the culture of secrecy that pervades many of the post-colonial governments in Africa. The lack of transparency is what permits the chronic under-development of the continent despite the wealth of natural resources such as oil, diamonds and minerals used for manufacturing computers and other personal electronic devices.

It also leads to a lack of accountability for the waste and inefficient spending of foreign development aid - which makes up 75% of the government's budget in Rwanda, to provide but one example. This reality necessitates a rethinking of access to information that includes not only the governments themselves, since they are vulnerable to being merely agents of multilateral aid organizations or multinational corporations investing in mining or oil extraction.

The proceedings were highly interactive and required full participation of all the attendees. I participated in a working group that explored the roles and responsibilities of non-state actors, which included not only multi-national corporations and multilateral aid organizations such as the World Bank or USAID, but also what were referred to as "traditional authorities", being the leaders of the tribal groups and associations that often wield power over land rights and distribution of profits derived from the extraction of natural resources.

These are also often the authorities that govern the majority of those citizens who have only an oral tradition - making records management of any type a difficult obstacle to overcome with or without the benefit of modern technology. However, given these particularities of the African situation, I was surprised to find that many of the participants in my working group and in the plenary sessions identified the ICT sector as a key ally in Access to Information and transparency.

At the beginning of this article, I quoted a statistic that only 11% of Tanzanians had access to electricity. One could well wonder how the ICT sector, or a company like Symantec, can be helpful in such a situation. My colleague who shared that statistic with me, a social entrepreneur named Rakesh Rajani, executive director of Twaweza in Tanzania, also shared with me that roughly 90% of Tanzanians have access to mobile phones.

Entrepreneurs supported by Twaweza have utilized cell technology to share and disseminate information and Mr. Rajani can envision an environment where internet access completely leapfrogs current broadband technology and settles on a mobile platform that requires much less infrastructure investment. Mr. Rajani's organization, Twaweza, is currently working with private sector mobile service providers on projects that relate to access to information and government transparency.

The example of adoption of mobile technology illustrates the creative problem solving that was present at the conference. This vibrant problem solving and what we may refer to as "hustle" is present at all economic and social levels and indicates the great potential for growth and development in the region.

One final example.... Like me, you may be wondering how the 90% of cell phone users in Tanzania charged their cell phones when only 11% had access to electricity. Turns out, there is a cottage industry of individuals who own automobiles that have converted them into charging stations. They travel to rural villages and make their car batteries (often a number of them in each vehicle) available at a cost for villagers to charge their cell phone batteries. Now that's an idea Sand Hill can get behind!

*  Leslie Bar-Ness, Manager, state government relations, US