African Parliaments have been urged to take advantage of mechanisms that are in place to foster collaboration and inter parliamentary cooperation. Speaking at the official opening of the APKN Conference hosted by the Pan African Parliament the PAP President Hon. Dr. Idriss Ndele Moussa emphasized the need for better collaboration and parliamentary cooperation to ensure that the people of Africa are well represented in their socio political and economic spheres of life. The APKN Conference attracted the participation of over 40 Clerks and Secretary Generals from across Africa and over 100 MPs of the Pan African Parliament.

The APKN Conference on Open and Learning Parliaments gave parliaments the opportunity to discuss some of the key issues affecting parliaments in Africa today. One of the critical messages  coming from the conference is that inter-parliamentary cooperation at regional level is highly valuable and potentially the most effective way for legislatures to strengthen their capacity  and further dialogue amongst themselves  regardless of each country's development path and economic and social environment. The importance of the APKN in building the capacities and providing common information services to African parliaments was thus clearly emphasised and especially so with the realisation that many of the capacity gaps that exist are similar and can be addressed through a common approach.

Participants were also exposed to how ICT can serve the purposes of APKN and how much parliaments can achieve by using technologies to strengthen their representative, oversight and legislative responsibilities.  In particular, the Conference addressed three issues of relevance in today's complex parliamentary environment;

• That of strategic planning as parliaments cannot implement new technologies in a vacuum and thus the need to integrated ICTS in the broader institutional development plans through a strategic planning process. In this regard participants were grateful that UNDESA is developing Guidelines to Strategic Planning in Parliaments as this will be a useful tool for all parliaments in Africa;

• That of the importance of accessing free legislation on line as this can go a long way in supporting the rule of law and citizens' rights to legal knowledge.  In this regard the conference commended the work of Kenya Law Reports and AFRLL and proposed that an initiative be established to promote access to legal information and assistance to the deployment of tools required to build and support a digital legal collections for Africa;

• Those of using open source information systems and open standards for managing parliamentary documents. To this end parliaments were encouraged to test and implement the Bungeni Parliamentary Information System and adopt Akoma Ntoso standards for parliamentary documents.

The Africa i-Parliaments Action plan reiterated its continued support for the APKN and was tasked by the APKN Executive Committee to explore  a coordinated approach to building  and resourcing a sustainable programme for the Africa Parliamentary Knowledge Network  with development partners and parliamentary centric networks.