Since 2004, WOUGNET has held an annual members meeting to review its programme activities and lay strategic direction on how to tap into the ever increasing ICT opportunities for sustainable development with its members. The 2009 Annual members meeting was held on the 11^th March 2009 at Nob View Hotel, located in Ntinda, a Kampala suburb.

Presentation of WOUGNET activities of the previous year are normally done at this forum. An overview of WOUGNET’s activities in 2008 was presented for all the three programmes. This is also the opportunity WOUGNET gets to review its 2009 plans with members. The plans are developed during a Strategic Planning Meeting held with some members from different parts of the country in November of the preceding year.

The theme for this year’s meeting was

“ICT Opportunities in Networking and Collaboration”.

The objectives were to:

• *Identify networking opportunities among WOUGNET members.

• *Explore tools for effective networking and collaboration.
• *Review the WOUGNET strategic plan for 2009

Invited Guest speaker Ms Racheal Kadama from the Danish Development Agency, also a member of the I-Network expertise Team gave a talk and discussed “ICTs for Poverty reduction”. Both wide topics, the guest gave a brief analysis of poverty, the reduction measures, and the challenges and linked this to the ICT opportunities that can be used to reduce poverty.  Other topics discussed included ICTs and Women, the status of women’s use of ICTs in Uganda by the Gender team from WOUGNET.
The “Speed Geek” was used in the practical session for identifying potential areas for collaboration and networking among members.

Some of the recommendations from this meeting included

*More emphasis should be put on training members on the emerging new ICT tools so as to minimize wastage of time.

*Field visits to Member organisations should be prioritized as this brought WOUGNET more in touch with what was happening in the various member organisations.

*Motivational strategies should be developed by WOUGNET to capture stories from members. This recommendation came because of the Citizen Journalism Project, where members have not been so active in capturing, recording and sharing stories on the CJ portal.

*Advocate for mainstreaming Gender in all activities that are carried out by members.

*The involvement and integration of Youth and Men in WOUGNET activities should be considered.

Networking opportunities and potential areas for collaboration were identified among members. ( the full list will be available in the main report) The skills sharing session by the Technical support on the three WOUGNET websites and the various tools associated with their use was the highlight of this meeting. Detailed proceedings of this meeting is available on request.