Your Excellency, Dr. Atif Ebeid, Prime Minister of Egypt
Your Excellency, Mr. YoUshio Utsumi, Secretary General of ITU,
Your excellences Ministers and Ambassadors, Distinguished Guests

As TELECOM AFRICA convenes for the second time in Cairo, after 10 years of its first gathering here at the banks of the river Nile, it is indeed an honor and a pleasure to welcome you to Cairo, and to the sixth conference on telecommunications in the African continent.

There is no doubt that African nations have managed to enhance the continent's telecommunications infrastructure, multiplying the number of fixed and mobile lines from almost 6 million lines in 1994 to more than 30 million in 2002. Tele-accessibility among African nations has increased from 2.5% in 1994 to 9.4% in 2002. Despite such remarkable growth, we still have a lot to achieve. A recent study by the World Economic Forum about the status of ICT in Africa reflects that out of more than 800 million people living in Africa in 2001: one in four have a radio (200 million); one in 13 have a television (62 million); one in 35 have a mobile telephone (24 million); one in 39 have a fixed line (21 million); one in 130 have a personal computer (6 million); one in 160 use the Internet (5 million).

Thus, we convene today at TELECOM AFRICA 2004, to draw our strength by gathering participants and businesses from all over the world with one and only objective: support Africa's development through active participation; this objective was reaffirmed in the e-message sent last December by H. E. President Hosny Mubarak, H. E. Mr. Kofi Annan, and Mr. Yoshio Utsumi during the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society.

We believe that all African countries are now qualified to actively and positively contribute to the attainment of this goal, we believe that TELECOM AFRICA 2004 could and should be a landmark on our march to the second phase of WSIS in Tunis 2005. Problems in Africa are severe, and even more difficult to overcome, but success stories are also found, and sincere intentions to cooperate are the main key for solving such entrenched troubles.

Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

When Egypt started its National Program for ICT Development back in 1999, we were faced with a situation that is not uncommon elsewhere in the African continent: long lists of citizens waiting to install telephone lines, rather low utilization of IT in various activities of the government and business sectors, and lack of qualified human resources who can lead the change. Over the last 5 years, and with close cooperation between various stakeholders, we were able to facilitate deployment of infrastructure, develop ICT human resources, and create market opportunities. The Egyptian business sector has actively and indispensably contributed to the implementation - and even the formulation - of Egypt's national ICT plans over the past decade.

Very recently, Egypt has articulated its experience with the development of ICT into an Information Society Initiative: a 7-axis national plan for promoting the ICT sector and laying the foundations for a national Information Society. The 7 axes of Egypt's Information Society Initiative deals with various constituents of an e-enabled society: access, education, government, business, health, culture, and industry development.

Over the last few years, we have initiated a set of integrated initiatives to raise the accessibility, affordability and availability of ICT in Egypt that were executed through a variety of forms of public-private partnerships: licenses to build-own-operate, joint-ventures between public and private institutions, or simply by coordinating the efforts and creating favorable investment climate.

The results were encouraging as reflected in the indicators as of the first quarter of 2004: active fixed phones reached over 9 million with the capability to install a new phone within 14 days from its request, public phones mounted to 50,000 phones, mobile phone subscribers rocketed to over 6 million, and Internet users exceeded 3 million with the largest international capacity in Africa. PC penetration scored 1.7 million PCs.

This morning, H.E. President Mubarak inaugurated the most recent of our initiatives, that is the 'Broadband Initiative'. As we realize the convergence of media taking place in the form of growing utilization of online media applications, the need for high-speed broadband access is becoming as vital as traditional telecommunication basic infrastructure. The government is leading a national plan to increase the broadband penetration. The 3-year initiative would multiply ADSL lines by a factor of 20 times and introduce Wi-Fi hotspots in public areas.

As education is becoming one of Egypt's top national projects in order to raise the competitive capabilities of the Egyptian workforce, we started a program for spreading e-knowledge using advanced interactive systems via information networks. To ensure sustainability of this mission critical networks, we started in cooperation with leading technology providers worldwide special programs aiming towards creating a pool of professionals who are highly specialized in ICT.

Early this year, we launched a unified portal for delivering governmental services to citizens, and our target is to have all services online by 2007. We also started programs towards improving the healthcare delivery mechanisms especially in remote and deprived areas using ICT. In cooperation with Bibliotheca Alexandrina, we setup a specialized center for documenting the cultural and natural heritage of Egypt.

Finally, an important component of our information society initiative focuses on the development of an indigenous, export-oriented ICT industry utilizing Egypt's competitive advantage in trained human resources. The Government of Egypt has adopted further investment incentives, ratified Acts for Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), Telecommunications and most recently E-signature. We also established regulatory and development institutions to regulate and develop the ICT industry.

Establishing the "Smart Village", as a state-of-art high-tech park, stands as a landmark to introduce technology and attract investments by establishing a zone where multinational businesses and Egyptian small-and-medium enterprises can settle benefiting from the advanced infrastructure, in a way that creates the nucleus for an evolving regional industry.

Distinguished Guests,
Ladies and Gentlemen:

Egypt believes that the digital gap is turning into digital opportunities. This event comes as a very timely opportunity to launch a long-waited process of regional cooperation in the field of ICT. Egypt commitment to ICT development efforts in Africa comes at various forms: bilateral, multilateral, and within the context of regional frameworks; such as the African Union and NEPAD. We have been active in the steering committee of the E-Africa commission and worked with all its members to present the African vision at the WSIS in Geneva 2003. The presence of H.E. President Mubarak in Geneva and his inauguration of the exhibition today symbolizes Egypt's commitment and support for ICT in Africa.

We started the first step here at AFRICA TELECOM, for we are indeed honored to graduate the first group of African ICT professionals from a program sponsored by MCIT to support capacity building. We are also pleased to have been able to sponsor the hosting of 25 African SMEs at the TELECOM AFRICA exhibition. In addition, we are presenting 4 Egyptian success stories in ICT: PC for Every Home, Free Internet, IT-Clubs, and Broadband, in an effort to share our experiences in the design and implementation of these successful initiatives, documenting the critical success factors and lessons learned for possible replication on the African level. We invite African countries to exchange their stories and urge the international community to support these different initiatives regionally. We shall always support such programs by a profound determination to succeed, and to create new channels of cooperation with all our development partners. We shall always be ready to provide a gateway and launch-pad for initiatives for cooperation among African and Arab region.

TELECOM AFRICA comes as an unmatched opportunity to find more about the latest technologies and applications that best suit our needs. Networking is a main component of the conference, and time has been neatly organized to make this option available. The event comes as an opportunity for more attention towards the African businesses sector as it has a pivotal role in development in general, and in ICT sector in specific. Practice has proved that businesses should lead the implementation of ICT projects.

In this regard, we invite all countries of the world and all stakeholders in development to reach an agreement on fresh, newly-generated mechanisms to fund projects and share their experiences and success stories.

At the end, I can not but thank and commend the ITU for entrusting Egypt with such a high-profile event, and thank you all for your interest in attending its proceedings.