October
1999
Update: Palestinian Territories
|
Update: Palestinian Territories |
Background:
The government has undergone a program of installing Internet connections in high schools and universities and this is eminent in the figures shown below. The government’s aim is to introduce and expose the concept of the Internet to the secondary level of education and for the students to obtain research data on-line. Furthermore, the various Ministries are steadily creating websites so as to make themselves publicly accessible.
Through many informal discussions, it has been noted that there is an increased understanding of the importance of WWW in distributing information, however, many organizations still devote little resources to its maintenance and regular updating. It is estimated that about 35% of websites have not been updated within the last year. This is because very few organizations employ technical experts to maintain the website. For those organizations that actually do employ these experts the quality of their website is quite noticeable. Examples of such organizations are Birzeit University and the Palestine Central Bureau of Statistics. Such quality is recognised by the Golden Olive Awards which is a Palestinian based award for website excellence. The examples mentioned above are winners of these awards.
Several Palestinian organizations have concentrated their efforts in expanding their presence on the Internet over the last 12 months. BADIL, The Palestinian Society for the Protection of Human Rights and the Environment (LAW), The Palestinian Human Rights Centre (PHRC), the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group (PHRMG) and MIFTAH all send out regular press releases by email and simultaneously put them on the WWW. Furthermore, these organizations all publish their reports online. Today, it is possible to find important statistics, documents and maps on the Palestinian websites - something not possible 1 year ago. Key websites are: the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics and the Centre for Palestinian Research and Studies (census and opinion polls); SHAML, BADIL (refugee information); PASSIA, ARIJ and the Health, Development, Information and Policy Institute (maps); ARIJ and Maan Development Centre (environmental issues); JMCC and the Jerusalem Quarterly File (analysis); and the websites mentioned early for human rights related information.
Two factors need to be taken into consideration. One factor is that there is no centralised source of information upon which the data has been collected and made available within the country, thus making it difficult to know how to find this information. A Complete Guide has been created aiming at guiding people in the right direction. The other factor is apart from the PCBS none of the above mentioned organizations are official Palestinian Authority websites. Although a large majority of websites are still "brochure" sites (one or two pages with little information, a phone number, and rarely updated) there has been progress in the types of information presented on the WWW in Palestine. There has been an increasing number of Palestinian websites utilizing video and audio rather than just text based information.
Total number of "population" |
Total number of Web sites |
% of website / total number of "population" |
Source |
|
Primary and secondary schools |
527 |
1 |
0.2 |
Ministry of Education, CGPW, PCBS |
High schools and universities |
1054 |
12 |
1.1 |
Ministry of Education, CGPW, PCBS |
National ministries |
28 |
9 |
32.1 |
PASSIA, CGPW, PCBS |
Regional and local authorities (regions, departments/counties, municipalities) |
114 |
5 |
4.4 |
PASSIA, CGPW |
Hospitals/clinics |
76 |
2 |
2.6 |
PASSIA, CGPW |
Museums |
5 |
0 |
0 |
PASSIA, CGPW |
Libraries |
16 |
1 |
6.25 |
PASSIA, CGPW |
|
