Thousands of children in Guatemala’s rural highlands are using computers to learn to read and write in their native Mayan language of K’iche', thanks to a local NGO’s support of intercultural/bilingual education and educational technology.

In 1993, the Mexican government embarked on an ambitious program to reform its public administration. The goal: to build a professional, stable, and nonpartisan public service. Part of its efforts is to offer training courses in good government, management, and technical areas to public servants. The courses will be delivered online, through a new portal — @Campus Mexico — launched on October 20. Canadian experience in Internet and Web-enabled technologies and online learning to improve public administration helped shape the new portal. The Institute for Connectivity in the Americas and Canada’s International Development Research Centre supported @Campus Mexico’s development.

What is a boon for many lawyers is also proving to be a liability for some individuals in Latin America. Judicial decisions are now being published, full-text on the Internet, making them easy to access and helping to open up the legal system in Latin America. The problem is that sensitive information about people’s private lives also ends up online. To address this issue, researchers, judges, and representatives from civil society as well as from the private sector met in Heredia, Costa Rica to develop voluntary guides for judicial bodies in the region to follow when putting information on the Internet. Known as the Heredia Rules, these guidelines are helping to strike a balance between judicial transparency and the protection of personal information.

Donated computers are making school much more interesting for more than 750 000 students in Colombia and are allowing students from technical colleges to gain valuable work experience. The program — similar to Canada’s Computers for Schools — is also helping teachers learn how to use computers and the Internet as educational tools. Key to the success of this project, supported by the Institute for Connectivity in the Americas (ICA), is political will — Computadores para Educar (CPE) enjoys presidential support.

Telecentres — community Internet access points — can help marginal groups in society to use the Internet to organize and influence wider thinking on the kinds of national policies, regulations, and human rights issues that affect them. This is the experience of Somos@Telecentros in Ecuador, launched in 1999 as a way to build regional and national communities through the Internet. Today it has about 1750 members in eight countries who share experiences and resources. The network also gives them a collective voice that enhances their participation and their influence in the discussion and formulation of broader public policies.

The Rede de informaçãoes para o terceiro setor (RITS), a nonprofit organization based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, has been working since 1997 to make computer technology and its powerful communication tools available to the poorest sectors of the population. It also wants to modernize civil society organizations and enable them to share information widely. And it's doing just that using such means as a Web portal, a "webzine," and a directory of organizations.

Vilma Almendra, an Indigenous person from Colombia, is part of a growing movement to use Internet communications as an antidote to violence against Indigenous peoples. She says that information and communication technologies (ICTs) are playing a key role in denouncing human rights abuses in Colombia. The community information service that she coordinates is also helping other Indigenous communities to further their own social and economic development, for example, through programs to improve education, health, land management, and legal protection for Indigenous people.