This report's recommendations should not meet the fate of so many other efforts whose thoughtful recommendations garnered political declarations and lip service but little else. It is essential that this report lead to real action,
that things really happen on the ground. To that end, the Study Panel proposes that the InterAcademy Council (IAC) - in consultation with other relevant international and national organizations - develop an 'implementation strategy' that identifies concrete actions for helping international, national, and local actors bring about reforms and introduce the necessary innovations.

The implementation strategy would include an action plan for the following:

1. Monitoring the implementation of programs. Experienced people should work with international, regional, and national entities - in the science and technology, academic, political, private-sector, and funding communities - to ensure that words are translated into deeds.
2. Promoting action networks. Many national and regional efforts to strengthen S&T capacity, including those organized and supported by various Scandinavian agencies, the European Community, Canada's International Development Research Centre, U.S. Agency for International Development, the HIV/AIDS Global Fund, the World Bank, and Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), already exist. The latent synergies between such efforts have not been fully realized. The implementation strategy would seek to bring together promising possibilities for coordination, with a view to producing more significant results.
3. Establishing a clearinghouse for knowledge derived from new information and communications technologies. The use of information and communications technologies is essential for modern scientists and engineers, yet such technologies in most developing nations are inadequate. For that reason, many groups are either gathering information about the state of these technologies in those countries or trying to add to their information and communications capacity, though there is little coordination between such efforts. An implementation strategy should recommend such a coordination mechanism, while identifying gaps in access to information and communications technologies and keeping governments and funders informed of emerging ideas.
4. Mining the most useful S&T data, and rendering it more accessible. Good data about S&T in developing nations is scarce. The United Nations, the World Bank, and other excellent sources of information exist, but a coordinator
   needs to identify appropriate data within these institutions and distribute it to decisionmakers in easily usable form.
5. Networking among academies. National academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine are important for upholding the quality of S&T activity in a country, for guiding national policies based on science and technology, and for maintaining dialogue with other countries, often through their counterpart academies.

The implementation strategy should identify specific milestones to achieve, together with 'road maps' to help countries and S&T communities implement their programs. Such road maps, which could be coordinated through the InterAcademy Council (IAC), would be based on the following principles:

• Design or adopt a sound policy framework.
• Work with local scientific leaders to design relevant and achievable projects, in consultation with relevant government departments, potential funders, and groups such as professional associations and nongovernmental organizations.
• Design an objective mechanism for selecting and evaluating candidate projects.
• Begin to develop steady support through meetings with relevant government departments and other stakeholders.
• Identify a champion entity within government (such as a lead ministry); organize meetings of involved parties/stakeholders and the World Bank, the regional development banks, foundations, and such bilateral donor agencies in the European Union, Canada, Japan, Scandinavia, and the United States, among others.
• Work with the champion entity to place each project within a nation's budget and development plan.

The strategy should include a prospectus for creating a small, flexible, and agile 'implementation office' to translate words into action. Essential to the operation of such an implementation office will be the voluntary participation of national and regional academies. Even a small office could multiply its effect many times over if members of the academies are willing to carry out much of the actual implementation work. Similarly, participating academies could ensure access to governments, funding agencies, and aid groups with which the implementation office would have to interact in order to carry out its charge.

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