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It is a pleasure for me, as the newly-elected
Secretary-General of the International Telecommunication
Union (ITU), to join this distinguished company to discuss
education, research and innovation. As a technical agency
and a standards-making body, ITU is committed to promoting
research and innovation, especially in the field of
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs).
Over the last few years, ITU had the honour of playing the
leading managerial role in the organization of the World
Summit on the Information Society (WSIS); a UN Summit held
in two phases in Geneva in December 2003 and Tunis in
November 2005. ITU is now working with UNESCO and other
stakeholders on the implementation of the WSIS outcomes.
The WSIS is important in the context of this meeting because
it has established, at the highest level, an agenda for
coordinated work by all stakeholders, aimed at building the
Information Society. The WSIS outcome documents provide a
framework for our work and creates a
mechanism—multi-stakeholder partnership—for establishing our
shared goals.
Over the next two weeks, in Geneva, we will be holding a
cluster of WSIS-related meetings, open to all stakeholders,
for implementing the WSIS. In particular, several of the
action lines that are relevant to the topic of this
meeting—for instance, C3 on access to information; C4 on
capacity building, C8 on multilingualism and the C7 themes
on e-learning and e-science—will hold facilitation meetings.
I am very happy with the cooperation between ITU and UNESCO
in facilitating this work and I would invite you all to
Geneva to participate.
As part of this cluster of meetings, ITU is hosting a
ceremony to commemorate World Telecommunication and
Information Society Day, when we will be making awards to a
number of innovators and thought-leaders for their personal
contribution to building the Information Society.
But, building the Information Society is not enough. We must
go beyond this to create “knowledge societies”. What is the
difference between the two concepts? An “Information
Society” is one in which everyone, everywhere, has access to
ICTs and access to information. But a “knowledge society” is
one in which people are able to make optimal use of that
information, to shape a better world.
If ITU’s focus is on the “supply side” of the Information
Society; then UNESCO’s emphasis is on the “demand side”;
looking at ICT applications and how information is used. The
good news is that, over the last few years, we have made
tremendous strides in making ICTs available to more and more
of the world’s inhabitants. Since the first PrepCom of the
Geneva phase of WSIS, more than one billion new mobile phone
users have been added to the world’s networks. Now, the
challenge is to help those new users to become “knowledge
workers”, “power users”, or just simply “connected” to the
global village.
In conclusion, as we move from the Information Society to
knowledge societies, the challenge is to engage all the
world’s skills and resources. Historically, a country’s
“Information Service” has been the preserve of spies and
code-breakers, using secret information to gain competitive
or military advantage. By contrast, a country’s “knowledge
base” refers to the sharing of information, through schools,
universities and lifelong learning. Let us commit today to
building a society which is based on shared knowledge,
global solidarity and a better mutual understanding between
nations and peoples.
Thank you.
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