Digital for development (D4D)

Africa is at the heart of these developments and it is widely recognised that information and communication technologies (ICTs) will play a vital role for its populations as they seek to become emerging states.

Within this context, the Directorate for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Affairs has formally signed up to the “9 Principles for Digital Development”, the result of a concerted dialogue among the main digital actors in the international community.

In 2021, Luxembourg Development Cooperation made a commitment to greater mobilisation of innovative partnerships, approaches and instruments in the areas where Luxembourg has a specific comparative advantage, particularly in the ICT sector. The emphasis placed on digitisation within Luxembourg Development Cooperation is not a new development, but the topic has gained fresh impetus in recent years. This is in line with the European Commission’s wish to make D4D a priority for international partnerships in the coming years.

Currently, Luxembourg Development Cooperation is implementing about 40 projects dedicated to the digital and ICT sector. The D4D projects target, above all, digital financial services, telecommunications, telemedicine and cybersecurity.

Among the collaborations between Luxembourg Development Cooperation and research institutes in the D4D field are those with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) of the University of Luxembourg, launched in late 2020. A prime instance of this partnership is the LuxWays project, the aim of which is to train a cohort of West African experts in cybersecurity in partnership with the universities of Burkina Faso and Senegal. The ministry and the SnT plan to deepen their collaboration, building on these first promising developments. For example, LuxDev has been given a mandate to carry out a study exploring the transposition of the collaborative research model. This model aligns the activities arising from the research needs of the local private sector and seeks to make them converge with research projects to create leading-edge expertise that is firmly rooted in the economic fabric of partner countries in the West African region. In the field of cybersecurity, it should be noted that in 2021 Luxembourg joined the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise (GFCE). The purpose of this multi-stakeholder platform is to build capacity and expertise in cybersecurity. The Forum has more than 115 members and partners, including governments, international organisations and other civil society and private-sector operators, as well as the academic community. The idea is to strengthen global cybersecurity capabilities through knowledge-sharing, including through working groups, a cyber knowledge portal and its function as an information exchange centre, as well as through practical initiatives. The GFCE aims to be a pragmatic, action-oriented and flexible platform for international collaboration. Luxembourg has been an official member of the GFCE since October 2021. This membership allows representatives of the Luxembourg government to participate in the dialogue and thus benefit from the knowledge shared within the framework of this forum. After it joined, Luxembourg also took the opportunity to send a letter of support for Cybersecurity for Development (Cyber4Dev), an economic interest grouping (EIG) that wishes to be recognised as a partner by the GFCE, and whose application requires support from Luxembourg as a member of the Global Forum on Cyber Expertise.

In addition, Luxembourg supported Estonia for the second time to organise a hackathon. The product in 2020 of a challenging health situation that required innovative tools to contain the pandemic and inform authorities’ decision-making processes, the second edition of this hackathon aims once again to support the search for innovative solutions to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.