Connect a School, Connect a Community is a new public-private partnership effort to promote broadband school connectivity to serve both students and the communities in which they live. Connected schools have the potential to serve as community ICT centres to provide access to services for persons living in rural, marginal urban and isolated areas, with a particular focus on disadvantaged and vulnerable groups such as women and girls, indigenous people, persons with disabilities and youth and children.

Through Connect a School, Connect a Community, ITU will work with a range of partners to identify and compile best practices on polices, regulation, applications, services and practical experiences to be shared with interested countries through the development of an online Toolkit and related capacity-building activities.

The ITU Wireless Broadband Partnership will mobilize key stakeholders to finance, plan, build, operate and maintain wireless broadband infrastructure within beneficiary countries.

ITU will work with governments and other partners to identify specific areas to be covered within each participating country and determine and mobilize the resources required for implementation. The initiative seeks to balance social and economic development aims with the need for investors and industry participants to yield sufficient returns as part of a long term sustainable business model that can be widely replicated.

Connecting Villages aims to help expand access to basic connectivity – including voice and SMS/text services – in rural and remote areas. Connecting Villages will apply innovative low-cost solutions, while leveraging flexible bottom-up business models and public-private partnerships to reach the remaining unconnected.

As a guiding principle, Connecting Villages aims to build practical, affordable and sustainable networks and services for rural and remote communities. To achieve this, all relevant partners will be engaged, including network operators and service providers, equipment manufacturers, governments (at all levels), regulators, local entrepreneurs and the communities involved.

The ITU Academy Partnership offers you a unique opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to supporting education and training.

It is imperative to avoid that the “digital divide” also becomes a “knowledge divide” between those who have access to the information and learning tools of the 21st century and those who do not.  Recognizing this, global leaders at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), held in 2003 and 2005, agreed that everyone should have the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills and benefit fully from the emerging Information Society. Fulfilling this vision requires extensive efforts in the areas of education, technology know-how and access to information, all major factors in determining sustainable development and national competitiveness in an increasingly globalized economy.

As the United Nations’ lead agency for telecommunication and information technology, identified as lead moderator/facilitator of WSIS Action Line C5 “Building confidence and security in the use of ICTs” and within the framework of the Global Cybersecurity Agenda (GCA), the ITU and the International Multilateral Partnership Against Cyber Threats (IMPACT) are pioneering the deployment of solutions and services to address cyber threats at a global scale, together with ITU Member States and leading global partners from industry and academia.