Jean-Marie Blanchard is presently Business Development Director for Africa, Middle East , Central and South Asia.

He has been working in the Alcatel organization successively as R&D manager, Product Line manager in Corporate Data Network domain; he left Alcatel in 90 to start up, inside an independent consulting company, the Marketing and Management Telecom department and managed it , until coming back to Alcatel group in 95 . From this date, first he was involved in the world-wide promotion of Turnkey Network solutions to incumbent operators in developing world; during Telecom 99 in Geneva, he introduced an innovative solution to enable Universal Access dedicated to low and medium density population and presented it in the following months to more than 50 operator representatives mainly located in Africa and Asia. He also actively participated, as speaker, to many International Telecom conferences such as ITU symposium in Kampala (Uganda) and Cairo (Egypt), RuralCom 99 in Cotonou (Benin), Bamako 2000 in Mali, ….

Since beginning of 2000, he has been leading a large strategic analysis dedicated to emerging markets from what it has been decided to investigate more deeply in “ Digital Divide “ issue and to define relevant solutions enabling affordable and sustainable access to Internet services; he is now managing local partnerships and pilot projects to reach such an ambitious objective. Alcatel approach regarding how to bridge the Digital Divide is
presently introduced in front of a lot of governmental authorities and telecom operators in developing countries, and international public and private institutions as well; one of the last presentation has been given, last July, during ECOSOC Commission summit of United Nations in Geneva.