World Dialogue on Regulation

The 11th LIRNE.NET course on “Telecom Reform: Strategies to achieve connectivity and convergence,” was held February 25th - March 3rd, 2007 in Singapore. It was attended by 33 people from 13 countries, ranging from Mongolia to Congo and South Africa to Bhutan. Following successful course, LIRNEasia plans regular offerings with the next course already scheduled for March 2008.

Read the full report on the LIRNEasia website.  

A LIRNEasia telecom reform course was successfully completed by 36 participants from 18 countries. The 10th telecom reform course was co-organised with LIRNE.NET, in association with the School of Communication and Information of Nanyang Technological University, and the Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore. Themed Catalyzing change:  Strategies to achieve connectivity and convergence, the course took place at the Elizabeth Hotel in Singapore on the 24th-29th September 2005.

A WDR Expert Forum was held on Friday 30th

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The World Dialogue on Regulation congratulates Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank for winning the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for their pioneering work on micro-credit lending schemes. In addition to Grameen's work on micro-credit in Bangladesh, the bank also introduced the Grameen Village Phone project, an innovative solution to extending telecommunications access to marginal customers. A LIRNEasia study last year looked at the fundamental problem of access to telecommunications -affordability- and analysed Grameen Telecom's solution.

Read the study An Investigation of the Replicability of a Microfinance Approach to Extending Telecommunications Access to Marginal Customers

The Economics of Infrastructures Section at Delft University of Technology, a founding partner of WDR, will be holding its 9th international conference on 15 and 16 June 2006. The theme of the conference is Risk and Infrastructures: An Issue of Governance? The conference will explicitly connect the issues of investment, risk and regulation.

Visit the conference website for more information and to register.

"This is a must-read book for regulators that continues the good work started by the first report in the series. The WDR team are masters at being able to develop detailed, policy-relevant information for the regulatory community."

Tim Kelly
Head, Strategy and Policy Unit
International Telecommunication Union

Order from AMAZON.COM

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WDR partner LIRNEasia has released a narrative report detailing the achivements of its 2005/06 research cycle. The research program laid bare the policy and regulatory conditions necessary for the successful mobilization of ICTs to serve the needs of people in specific emerging-economy contexts. It identified overlooked aspects of telecom use by low-income users, analyzed various non-optimal, but best-available, workaround options to connect people to access networks in the context of dysfunctional policy, regulatory and market environments, and provided critiques of large scale policy and regulatory actions for building out backbone and access networks.

Read the report on the lirneasia website

WDR regional partner LIRNEasia is co-organising the inaugural conference of Communication Policy Research South (CPRsouth) - Research for improving ICT governance in the Asia-Pacific. The conference will run from 19-21 January at the Asian Institute of Management in Manila, the Philippines. More information, including the conference agenda, is available on the LIRNEasia website.

LIRNEasia, WDR's partner in Asia, held a mid-cycle research review of two of its central research programs, the Six Country Indicators study and the Shoestrings2 project, at Habarana in central Sri Lanka. The meeting brought together LIRNEasia researchers from five countries, media experts, research partners from AC Nielsen and external observers from the ICT Agency of Sri Lanka for five intensive days of presentations, evaluation, discussion and planning.