similarly large digital divides persist within countries women the elderly and people with lower education or living in rural areas have disproportionately less access to icts if countries are to have the opportunity to leapfrog development stages then it is not only important for oda to continue to assist countries to overcome basic development challenges but also to support countries to improve productivity through better use of new technologies and to help build capacity and incentives for further innovation the paper seeks to complement analyses made by the united nations interagency task team on science technology and innovation in mapping existing sti initiatives mechanisms and programmes by for the first time analysing development finance data at activity level using the dac creditor reporting system crs it is intended to highlight the possibilities and challenges in using the crs as a source for tracking international government support to sti in an international development assistance context the analysis on technology is somewhat biased towards international support for ict development however efforts have been made to also include technology transfers in other sectors in particular relating to green technologies and renewable energy