Last year the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs started a new, promising-sounding program for development cooperation. Inter-institutional development cooperation - Institutional Cooperation Instrument, to be more precise – makes interaction between Finnish public agency and its counterpart in the partner country possible. Thanks to the ICI, Finnish institutions can share their knowledge and know-how with their partner institutions in developing countries and thus strengthen their skills.
According to the Foreign Ministry, years 2008 and 2009 will be the monitoring years, when the Department for Development Cooperation will follow ICIs use and results. If the pilot projects turn out successfully there should be no reason why ICI wouldn’t become even larger-scale program for development cooperation.
Should this be the case, Finnish data management and archiving professionals could take the advantage and distribute their knowledge for the cause of development cooperation. Finnish standards for record keeping and archiving are internationally highly valued and data management an essential part of functional and democratic civic society.
If there is an opportunity to enhance the level of freedom of information and thus the level of democratic civic society we should use it. Active and efficient cooperation between historians and archiving specialists in Finland and the partner country would be a truly intriguing scenario.
It will be interesting to follow the development of ICI. Right now it seems, that it would be a great opportunity for Finnish archivists and other information specialists to enhance their professional reputation significantly and give a new dimension to existing development policy.
Posted by Antti Halonen 
