Bulgaria Development Gateway
The Initiative
The Bulgaria Development Gateway (BgDG) is a civil society led initiative aimed at facilitating the country's transition into an information, or knowledge-based society by consolidating the national dialogue on ICT for development and promoting a common vision among the relevant stakeholders in government, business, civil society, academic and research communities, and international donor organizations.
This initiative began with a planning phase completed in the period March-November 2001 under the leadership of the Center for the Study of Democracy (www.csd.bg), an influential Bulgarian think-tank. Since then a wide coalition of development stakeholders has been forged in support of BgDG's mission. In September 2002 Bulgaria Development Gateway was awarded an implementation grant by the Development Gateway Foundation (www.developmentgateway.org/). This phase is coordinated by the Applied Research and Communications Fund (www.arc.online.bg) under the umbrella of the Bulgarian Internet Alliance for Economic Development (www.online.bg/iaed), a public-private coalition established in mid-1999 to foster wider use of Internet and related technologies to the benefit of economic and social development in the country. The Alliance brings together Members of Parliament, cabinet ministers, public sector officials, representatives of large IT companies, private business associations and major Bulgarian NGOs.

Objectives

The Bulgaria Development Gateway is about:

establishing a virtual community of government, civil society, and private sector organizations having common interests in promoting democratic reform, sustainable development, poverty reduction or any combination of these developmental themes;
empowering local stakeholders to use the Internet as a cost-effective tool for knowledge-sharing, networking and collaboration;
assisting these stakeholders by providing links to ideas and good practices, information about development activities and trends, funding and commercial opportunities; and
increasing global access to locally-generated development knowledge.

Activities

The Bulgaria Development Gateway implements a broad range of activities, including:

developing a knowledge sharing portal to serve as a one-stop-shop repository for development stakeholders in Bulgaria (www.bulgaria-gateway.org);
informing and assisting policy-making in the field of ICT by conducting relevant studies and promoting coalition-building among stakeholders;
raising public awareness on the importance of ICT as an instrument for development;
testing and implementing specific pilot projects which can demonstrate the practical impact of ICT on increasing transparency and accountability of government, development of SMEs and e-commerce, coordination of international donor assistance, knowledge-sharing among civil society organizations, and development of e-learning applications.

BgDG is also strongly focused on enhancing regional cooperation and transfer of good practices among country gateway teams and other e-development partners in Southeast Europe.