Peer Water Exchange Receives UN-based Award In Cairo

Peer Water Exchange from India honoured with prize for world’s best e-Science & Technology website at Cairo ICT

Bangalore/Cairo/Salzburg
April 21, 2012

The Peer Water Exchange from India is among the world’s top 40 in outstanding e-Content. Together with the world’s best e-content producers Blue Planet Network's Peer Water Exchange will receive UN-based World Summit Award (WSA) on April, 27 at Cairo ICT trade fair in the e-Science & Technology category. The Peer Water Exchange was selected from 460 projects and 105 countries by a Jury of ICT Experts in Hong Kong in June 2011.

Currently, one billion people lack access to safe drinking water and 2.7 billion people lack access to a toilet. Blue Planet Network's Peer Water Exchange (PWX) is focused on addressing these two global crises. Launched in 2006, PWX has created an innovative and efficient model, bringing together all stakeholders in the water sector--funders, service providers, project implementers and even beneficiaries--to more effectively address today's water and sanitation crisis. Specifically, PWX's web-based multimedia platform serves as an exchange — a central clearinghouse — that enables stakeholders from around the world to collaborate on the reviewing, funding, managing and tracking the impact of community-based water and sanitation projects. The only scalable, map-driven, and transparent platform in the water sector, PWX is the first truly participatory decision-making system in development work, allowing stakeholders to use their diverse experiences to weigh in on funding decisions and divide a large task into tiny tasks.

Osama Manzar, Founder of the Digital Empowerment Foundation and board member of WSA says, “Among the natural resources for the existence of humanity and earth as a whole, it is important that we know how water as one of the most important necessities of life on earth is being used, saved, and exploited. Peer Water Exchange does exactly that. PWX provides a 360 degree view of all the information around water fed through crowdsourcing from across the world.”

Besides Peer Water Exchange, that will receive a World Summit Award in the e-Science & Technology, 39 other projects from 26 countries will be honoured in front of UN representatives, ICT ministries and the private sector. The WSA Winners’ Events will be hosted in the Middle East for the first time ever.

“With the winners from World Summit Award in e-Content, Cairo will host the best digital producers, interaction designers and content developers from all around the world. They will demonstrate the richness and diversity of the content industries. Cairo will be a special stage to highlight what can be done with modern ICT to develop local communities, national social strategies and meaningful jobs”, says WSA Chairman Peter A. Bruck.

The Winners were decided on by a Jury of ICT experts coming from all continents. Each UN Member State only nominates one product per category for the World Summit Award. Hence nominations resulted from national pre-selection awards prior to the international WSA Jury in Hong Kong in June 2011.

Hosted by the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA) and Cairo ICT under the patronage of H.E. Mohamed Salem, Egypt Minister of Communications and Information Technology, the WSA winners will showcase the best digital e-Content projects worldwide. Between April 26 and April 29 Cairo will see “a global panopticum of knowledge and spirit in e-content”, Peter Bruck says.

The Programme contains workshops, conferences with UN attendance and above all the Winners’ Ceremony on April 27th at 9 p.m at the Cairo ICT. The Winners’ Events will be life streamed on www.wsis-award.org and tv.wupy.org.

About the WSA

The World Summit Award (WSA) is the global follow-up initiative of the United Nations World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) organised by the International Center for New Media (ICNM), Salzburg, Austria. It partners with the key UN organisations and agencies in the framework of the UN Geneva Agenda and the Tunis Action Plan and selects and promotes the world's best e-Content and innovative ICT applications; to date more than 160 countries are actively involved. Through national pre-selections and contests together with a global jury process, WSA demonstrates the local diversity and rich creativity of ICT use. WSA is a global hub for everyone who values the crucial importance of local content to make today’s information society more inclusive.

Visit us on the web, facebook, and twitter, #WSACairo.

Media Contact World Summit Award:
Anna Gauto M.A.
Press and Communications Manager
World Summit Awards (WSA, WSA-mobile)
Email: gauto@icnm.net

About Peer Water Exchange

The Peer Water Exchange, a Bangalore based non-profit, is a pioneering effort to enforce collaboration marshaling resources cost-effectively to make decisions efficiently and transparently. A peer-run participatory decision-making system, PWX has proven that crowdsourcing the expertise in the field is extremely valuable and can be used within a robust network to scale up the management of thousands of diverse, customized grassroots water and sanitation projects. In addition, PWX is a cost-effective approach to monitor and measure the long-term impact of small projects to ensure that we are truly making a dent in the global water crisis.

For further information, please visit the PWX website or email the PWX team.