Papua New Guinea, Marshall Islands, Tonga and Nauru will be the beneficiaries of the first project to be implemented under this partnership between July 2008 and March 2009. The project aims to develop network infrastructure and to establish multipurpose community telecentres in these States’ rural and remote areas. As well as providing basic access to telecommunications, the telecentres will offer such services as e-education, e-health and e-agriculture to help address the developmental needs of local communities and institutions at an affordable cost. They will also integrate emergency telecommunication facilities, especially for early warnings and important announcements.

STA will contribute USD 186 915 towards the project. It will also make an in-kind contribution of television broadcasting equipment that will improve access to information, particularly for the rural and remote communities in the four States. Nauru, for example, lost the transmission capabilities of its only radio station in a fire in 2006. The station provided public and community announcements, including news. In Tonga, the radio equipment, which broadcasts news and warnings during hurricanes or emergency situations, is outdated.

"What makes STA’s contribution unique is that it comes from a small, mountainous land-locked country with the desire to help others with smaller economies, such as least developed countries and Small Island Developing States," said ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau Director Sami Al Basheer Al Morshid. "I encourage the rest of our development partners to co-finance telecommunication and ICT projects in developing countries as a way of assisting them to connect more people and to achieve the United Nations Millennium Development Goals by 2015," Mr Al Basheer added.

Jaume Salvat Font, Director General and Chief Executive Officer of Servei de Telecomunicacions d’Andorra commented that "high quality, affordable ICT can change the lives of people anywhere in the world." He underlined that the partnership with ITU was an opportunity to participate in international projects, particularly for the benefit of least developed countries and Small Island Developing States across the globe. "We are ready to share our experiences as a small land-locked country that has managed to lift all its population above the poverty line," Mr Font said.