Excellencies,

Distinguished guests,

Friends,

Ladies and Gentlemen

It is a great pleasure to be here and I would like to start with expressing my congratulations and appreciations to the ITU, particularly BTD team and theGovernment of the UAE for such a nice organization and hosting us again at this beautiful city of Dubai. I wish the conference great success. And thank you for this opportunity to speak and to share more awareness about Azerbaijan as the country is nominated for the next ITU Council Membership from the C Region.

Well, Azerbaijan joined the ITU in 1992 and has since been fully committed to the values of the Union. For last couple of years the country hosted several regional and global levels of the ITU thematic events and increased the amount of the financial contribution. These days Azerbaijan is represented in the TDAG and the ITU-T Study Group 2 and a candidate is nominated for the new composition of the RRB. Being a Council Member we look forward to involving more resources and to adding more values to further growth and strengthening the Union.

Azerbaijan essentially helps the ITU General Secretariat with striving to drive the broadband deployment across the world and is strongly involved in theactivity of the UN Broadband Commission for Digital Development. The Government of Azerbaijan has initiateda platform for improving connectivity in Eurasia and the ITU is one of the partners of the project. Digitalization of terrestrial television broadcasting was completed to cover the whole territory of the country and Azerbaijan is ahead of time meeting the 2015 ITU deadline. The first telecom satellite was successfully launched early last year covering Europe as well as significant part of Asia and Africa availing the transmission of TV/radio broadcasting and the internet connectivity for emerging markets.

Connecting schools is a priority task for the development of educational system so about 40 percent of schools is connected and 70 percent of teachers are trained with basic IT skills. About 60 percent of public services are now online. Azerbaijan is supporting the ITU initiatives on cybersecurity and child online protection and last December we hosted an international conference in Baku with kind support of the ITU. Emergency and public safety communications are becoming very critical these days and our aim is to have Internet and the cellular communications accessible in all the remote areas. The Government now invest about half a billion dollars to the development of broadband infrastructure which has to reach out to every single home across the country.

We stand for the deepening and expansion of the multilateral international collaboration and the ITU is the indisputably valuable platform to benefit, to learn and to share for most of the administrations and businesses in this room.

Thank you.