Geneva, Switzerland, 29 September 2014

Opening Remarks

There have been many developments in the ICT industry over the last few years demanding ever-closer collaboration between the ITU Sectors and particularly ITU-T and ITU-D.

Many of these go back to the WTSA 2008 in Johannesburg – especially the conformance and interoperability programme which is now well established, with BDT taking the lead on capacity building and establishment of test centres, and TSB leading on conformance and interoperability testing. Another example is bridging the standards gap where we hold join capacity building events on the implementation of ITU-T standards and regional forums which have been successful in attracting over 40 new countries to ITU-T work since 2006, as well as security, climate change, e-waste, accessibility, and many more. One recent area is digital financial services.

ITU-T has also been working on standards on mobile money since 2008 and recently TSAG established a new Focus Group on Digital Financial Services to encourage more participation in this work, especially on the security aspects and the architecture framework for interoperability. The FG is instructed to collaborate with ITU-D on related policies and regulatory frameworks, protection against fraud and business models. So I very much encourage ITU-D participation in the Focus Group. It is open to anyone – regardless of whether they are ITU members or not. Another new area for collaboration is on combatting counterfeiting and substandard devices with a joint workshop (as are all ITU workshops now) on this subject scheduled for 17-18 November in Geneva.

I would like to thank Director BDT for this excellent collaboration, which I am sure will continue in the future and which is very important for our membership and the future of ITU.  I wish you a very successful TDAG meeting.