The Community Development Portals
Background
The Egypt ICT Trust Fund (UNDP)
"www.ictfund.org.eg" and the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in Egypt (MCIT) established the Community Development Portal (CDP)
"www.kenanaonline.com" to promote sustainable human development and the integration of rural and urban communities into the knowledge society and information generation capacities.
"www.Kenanaonline.com" aims to act as repository of locally pertinent and valuable information that will center on assisting in the amelioration of viewers’ standard of living. The CDP addresses community needs by providing communities with information related to business, small industry, health, agriculture and farming, educational and vocational training, in addition to general information covering a broad spectrum of socially and economically constructive issues.
In 2006, the CDP portal
"Kenanaonline" grew significantly in both scope and popularity. From Jan 2007 – Jun 2007, Kenanaonline got over 15,000,000 searches and over 700,000 visits. The number of articles grew from 15,000 to 50,000. This increase illustrates the CDP’s ability to serve its user base by adding content according to their needs. CDP now has over 10,000 registered users. Pages have remained healthy throughout the project’s history with over 1,190,000 a month in 2005. During the current year this has increased to above 4,000,000. On average, the number of visitors has grown by 900% rising from 20,000 in 2005 to 180,000 in mid 2007.
About 50% of the users of Kenanaonline are Egyptian, 10% Saudi Arabian, 30% from other Arabic speaking countries and 10% from non-Arabic speaking countries. In Egypt the user base tends to be quite equally distributed among governorates, except for Cairo where it remains disproportionately high. The substantial number of overseas users illustrates how far the CDP has reached beyond national borders.
To date CDP has focused its activities on 5 core sections: agriculture, small and micro enterprises, family health, personal skills and career advice, and general culture and information. Participating IT clubs and NGOs play a crucial role in accumulation of applicable content and as a result, CDP continues to be responsive to its users. The agriculture section continues to be the most popular and employs 10 dedicated content professionals. The CDP staff pays close attention to improving the portal itself. Recent efforts have been focused on adding depth to each of the above sections and strengthening the collaborative aspects of the portal, for instance the ability to tag certain articles, allowing them to add keywords that assist other users searches and provide pertinent feedback based on user experiences.
Kenanaonline community portals empowering the community with a community driven platform to access And share knowledge creating Arabic virtual communities in several specialized fields with specialized portals;
Objectives
- Assisting citizens (in rural & urban areas) to use information technology to improve Skills, Job, Income, Health, Agriculture, General knowledge.
- • Helps communities move towards the Knowledge Society.
Achievements
Success Stories
Medhad Helmy and (Mosaic) (Mosaic) which the user Medhad Helmy uses as his pseudonym, has 11 years of professional experience in the designing and crafting of mosaics for people from all over the world. He is realty excited about the opportunity KenanaOnline has given to him.
(I am really happy that KenanaOnline exists), he tells me enthusiastically.
(I already received a lot of feedback from people from various countries.
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Kenanaonline and personal website service Kenanaonline has a personal website service where people can register, add their CV and fill in their personal profile.
Their personal webspace enables them to publish their subject of expertise. Krimo, who is a user from outside Egypt, has registered for such a space and writes about this involvement and treatment with pigeons. He wrote and published numerous feature articles and provided us with 55 pictures.
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