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ITU Office For Europe - Contribution to the UN System

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) form the backbone of today's digital economy and play a key role as development enablers to achieve the goals and targets set out in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Emerging technologies like 5G, Big Data, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, together with highspeed broadband connectivity, create new avenues for addressing global challenges in the fields of education, employment, health, agriculture, inequalities, climate change, governance and many more.

With the objective to strengthen the role of ICTs as development enablers that can facilitate countries' capabilities to reach all the 17 SDGs, as well as aligning with the repositioning of the United Nations development system around the SDGs and the adoption of a “One UN" approach, ITU Office for Europe is taking part of various regional and national coordination mechanisms reporting at the UN level.

REGIONAL ENGAGEMENT

United Nations Digital Transformation Group for Europe and Central Asia (#UNDTG4ECA)

The role of Information and Communication Technologies, and the digital infrastcuture and services that countries ride and scale on have become central to maintaining economic and societal activity, and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To ensure that the full transformative power of digital development and ICTs is being captured, it is necessary to foster multi-stakeholder cooperation and inter-agency coordination. Joint actions related to ICTs for achieving the SDGs should be targeted to regional needs and priorities, in the view of strengthening the implementation of cross-cutting interventions by diverse agencies operating within the UN system. This ambitious purpose set the foundations for the creation of the United Nations Digital Transformation Group for Europe and Central Asia (UNDTG4ECA). The Group is co-chaired by ITU and UNECE and is composed of representatives of FAO, ILO, IOM, UNDP, UNEP, UNESCO, UNFPA, UN Habitat, UNICEF, UNIDO, UNWTO, UN Women, WHO, WIPO, WMO, IFAD.

More information on UNDTG4ECA can be found here.

United Nations Brussels Team (UNBT) and the Digital Task Force

With the objective to strengthen its cooperation with the EU structures and collaboration on the information and communication technologies projects advancing the achievement of SDGs, ITU joined the UN Brussels Team (UNBT). The UNBT includes 27 expressions of the UN across the development, humanitarian and political mandate, and is composed of agencies, regional offices, and departments of the Secretariat. This mechanism is driven by the UN/UNDP. Considering the overarching priorities of the European Commission, the UNBT created various Tasks Forces, allowing the agencies to have an informed and coherent engagement. Among the different task forces, the “UN Brussels Task Force on Digitalization for the SDGs" (September 2020 – hereafter Digital TF) is co-facilitated by ITU Office for Europe together with UNESCO Office in Brussels and includes about 20 UN organizations. The UN Brussels Office also supports UN-EU high-level engagement and RCs/HCs missions to Brussels.

More information on the UNBT Digital Task Force can be found here.

COUNTRY ENGAGEMENT

ITU Office for Europe collaborates with the UN Country Teams (UNCT), strengthening their capacities in digital and ICT development. As of today, the UN operates in nine non-EU countries, as follows: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Georgia, North Macedonia, Moldova, Montenegro, Serbia, Türkiye, and Ukraine.

More information on ITU's engagement with the UNCT can be found here.

Within this context, ITU is developing a series of “Digital Development Country Profile", which seeks to equip the UNCT, and other decision-makers at the national level and international stakeholders with an overview of the various components of digital development at the country level. The Digital Development Country Profiles seeks to be a crowdsourced document with UNCTs and thus benefit from inputs of the UN system, becoming the guiding tool for future collaborative work on digital transformation issues.

More information on Digital Development Country Profiles can be found here.