Speech by Malcolm Johnson, ITU Deputy Secretary-General
2nd BRICS Communications Ministers' Meeting - High Level Session
11 November 2016, Bangalore, India
Excellencies,
Distinguished delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is estimated by World Bank that for every 10% increase in broadband penetration in the developing world, GDP will be boosted by 1.38% on average.
As I stressed in my opening speech, we need to ensure that all nations and all people – and especially the most disadvantaged and vulnerable people – have equitable access to this vital resource which is vital for the sustainable growth of the Digital Economy.
Access to the information and knowledge society is essential to encourage innovation and entrepreneurs, create new jobs and nurture small and medium size companies - SMEs.
Last year the ITU Secretary- General launched ITU’s Emerge Initiative creating an international platform for supporting and promoting SMEs, in particular those from emerging markets and with social impact. The Emerge Partnership brings together a network of stakeholders that are working to support local, regional and international innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystems, to increase dialogue with government policy-makers and regulators to provide a vital enabling environment for private enterprise. We encourage the BRICS countries to actively participate in the Emerge initiative with ITU.
ITU has always enjoyed a large private sector membership – over 700 companies. However, the membership fee for sector members is too costly for SMEs. We were very pleased that Argentina proposed to this year’s ITU Council a new category of membership for SMEs with a substantially reduced membership fee similar to that for academia which has proved popular with now around 140 universities academia members of ITU. We believe that SMEs’ membership of ITU will benefit them and ITU since most innovation now comes from SMEs and startups, if not from academia, and it would encourage partnerships with the larger companies that are ITU members: telecom companies and IT companies.
The population of the BRICS countries is over 40% of the world’s population. For these people to be able to participate in the digital economy they must be able to carry out financial transactions online. It is estimated that there are 2 billion people without a bank account. Of these 2 billion 1.6 billion are mobile phone subscribers.
To address this issue ITU formed a Focus Group on Digital Financial Inclusion. It is the unique forum which brings together regulators from both Financial Services and Telecommunications sectors, digital financial service (DFS) operators, mobile network operators, payment service providers, consumer protection organizations, international organizations and standards setting bodies together to share lessons learned on DFS implementations and come up with solutions to boost access and usage of DFS in developing countries.
The Focus Group is completing its work at its final meeting on 6-8 December in ITU Geneva. The meeting will consider establishing a global collaboration on DFS focusing on the implementation aspect of the recommendations so that they are adopted at country level.
One of the factors which prevents growth in digital financial services usage and adoption of digital payments is the process for authentication and KYC (Know Your Customer) which can be quite complex and cumbersome. The adoption of digital identity at a national level is recommended by the Focus Group. For instance, India through the Aadhaar programme has deployed over 1 billion digital IDs for citizens as a replacement for paper proof of identification and for authentication purposes.
One objective of future work would be to standardize identity schemes and authentication methods to ensure interoperability. This fits with the work ITU does on security and building trust. ITU is the sole facilitator for WSIS Action Line C5, building confidence and security in the use of ICTs, and serves as a platform for international dialogue on this important issue. ITU has made significant efforts in helping nations to define their national cybersecurity strategy, set up their computer incident response teams, develop international security standards, guidelines on the protection of children online, and building human capacity.
In closing, I would like to bring to your attention a public online consultation being carried out by the ITU Council Working Group on international Internet related public policy on matters related to developmental aspects of the Internet, especially considering its importance to the global digital economy. I invite you all to participate in it by providing your views and comments on the group’s website.
Thank you.