By Brenda Zulu

Indigenous groups are not at all well represented at the on-going WSIS Africa preparatory conference taking place in Accra.
A check by Highway Africa News Agency (HANA) revealed that a delegation of seven men and one women, representing the royalty of Osu Alata, are the only indigenous groups at the conference.
Leader of the Osu Alata Dzasetse, Hansen Nii Nortey Palm said they were invited by the Ghanian government to witness the opening ceremony and to find out about ICT development opportunities.
"We hope by the end this conference we will see and know what development is there in technology," said Hansen Nii Nortey Palm.
He added that, as royalty, they have mobile phones which have helped facilitate communications, but acknowledged that the phones were still very expensive for an average person.
The director of the Foundation for Contemporary art in Ghana, Joe Nkrumah said that property right owners such as chiefs from other African countries have not been taken on board.
He said there is a need to consult in the information society about the balancing of the rights of those who own intellectual property and the need to develop an enabling environment necessary for protection against the misappropriation of traditional knowledge.
He said art was an important form of knowledge, and that positive protection of traditional knowledge is very important to Africa. “It is rather unfortunate that we are badly structured as indigenous people. We are still stuck in the traditional mood,” observed Nkrumah.
He also observed that the African genius is still dormant and that our heritage has not even been touched.He added that African communities share in the value of the knowledge they hold as groups because there is no single creator or discoverer of the information. “Communities hold indigenous knowledge which is information and wisdom that is locally held and unique to an African culture or community,” said Nkrumah.
Meanwhile, Bornwell Mwewa, coordinator of the Open Knowledge Network (OKN) said there is a need to have structures on the ground for indigenous knowledge groups or networks.
OKN is a network that attempts to improve the livelihood of local communities through the use of information networks sharing locally generated development content among several access points.
Mwewa said more concerted efforts should be made by organisers of the event to get the indigenous knowledge groups to participate in the WSIS process to talk about their views on local content.
“There is no-one who is here who does not have access,” observed Mwewa.