ITU announces partnership agreement with Canada
to increase developing countries' access to information and knowledge

Valletta, Malta, 30 March 1998 — The International Telecommunication Union announced today that it had agreed to establish a strategic partnership agreement with Canada to help developing countries participate actively in the global information society.

Partnership arrangements are one of the most promising potential strategies for telecommunications development and have naturally taken centre-stage at WTDC 98. The ITU Telecommunication Development Sector strives to promote partnerships which benefit all partners, avoiding purely commercial approaches and concentrating on long-term benefits as opposed to short-term gains. Together, the partners each bring elements necessary to the success of the venture. It is by making use of all these resources that "inhibited" potential markets in the developing world can be made to flourish, thus creating a truly universal global information infrastructure.

Mr Ahmed Laouyane, Director of ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT), welcomed this well-timed initiative. "In an increasingly liberalized and deregulated marketplace, new forms of cooperation must be found and traditional mechanisms that did not yield results must give way to true partnerships between the various players, he said. "This new type of agreement is hoped to be the first of a series and should send strong signals to the industry on the way to move development forward", Mr Laouyane added. "The BDT has made it a key priority of its action to provide new opportunities that will ultimately speed up their telecoms development worldwide and this agreement is a tangible outcome of this pro-active approach", he concluded.

For the Honourable Diane Marleau, Canada's Minister for International Cooperation and Minister responsible for La Francophonie and for the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) which will lead Canada’s participation in the partnership, "this is a concrete step to start narrowing the gap between rich and poor countries in access to information and knowledge". "It is also an expression of Canada's commitment to deliver on the promise of the Global Knowledge 97 conference, which we co-sponsored with the World Bank in Toronto last June, and where participants agreed on the importance of universal access to information and communication technologies", the Minister said.

Ms Marleau's announcement coincided with the 2nd World Telecommunication Development Conference in Malta, where the agreement to establish the partnership was also made public by the Head of the Canadian delegation, Mr David Mulcaster, Director-General with Industry Canada.

The partnership agreement is expected to cover Canada’s cooperation with the ITU and in particular:

• pursuing universal access
• executive training
• capacity-building
• joint pilot projects to encourage rural communications and applications in social, education and health services, especially in Least Developed Countries (LDCs)
• regional seminars on best practices and
• promotion of private sector, government and ITU partnerships

Canadian government participants including CIDA, the International Development Research Centre and Industry Canada will work with private Canadian companies.

Canada's participation in this new partnership is the latest in a series of programmes undertaken by Canadian instititutions to work with private companies, international agencies and financial institutions and non-governmental organizations to broaden access to knowledge technologies towards strengthening the global information society.

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