Speech by Malcolm Johnson, ITU Deputy Secretary-GeneralOpening remarks - ITU Council Working Group on WSIS (CWG-WSIS)
7 February 2017, ITU Headquarters, Geneva
Distinguished colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,
On behalf of the Secretary-General and my fellow elected officials it is a pleasure to welcome you to this thirtieth meeting of the Council Working Group on WSIS both in the room and online.
The Council decided that ITU's contribution to the achievement of the 2030 Development Agenda will be within the context of the WSIS framework.
The WSIS follows an outcome-oriented approach by focussing on evidence based policy making and highlighting best practices and impact.
It emphasises multistakeholder collaboration and cooperation across all regions and sectors and is strengthened at the international, regional and national level by three main pillars - the WSIS Forum, the Regional Reviews, WSIS Prizes and Stocktaking.
The ITU is working with the regional UN commissions to strengthening the overall WSIS implementation process through the Regional Reviews.
Last October ITU assisted UNESCAP with the regional review for the Asia Pacific Region. We invited some WSIS Prize winners from the region to showcase their winning projects, which provided real examples of the impact of ICTs in achieving the SDGs. It was particularly gratifying to learn that the award of the WSIS prizes greatly assisted the development and success of these projects.
The annual WSIS Forum co-organized by ITU, UNESCO, UNCTAD and UNDP is proving to be an increasingly successful platform for discussion and sharing of best practices in the use of ICTs for development. It is the largest such event with last year close to 2000 participants including 85 government ministers and 250 high–level representatives.
The overall theme for this year's Forum is "Information and Knowledge Societies for SDGs". It will be held from 12-17 June at the ITU Headquarters in Geneva. I invite you to block these dates in your calendar if you have not already done so!
The WSIS prizes and WSIS Stocktaking database, currently with around 8,000 entries, and a growing community of 200,000 stakeholders, provides case studies and a mechanism for validating evidence based practices on ICTs for SDGs.
In this regard, we are also in the process of linking the WSIS Action Line and SDGs Matrix, to the real case studies submitted to the Stocktaking process. In this is way we will start moving to evidence based policy making relying on the lessons learned and achievements of the WSIS stakeholders.
I would like to take this opportunity to thank the early bird contributions to the WSIS Fund in Trust and for the confirmation of partnerships for the WSIS Forum 2017 by Government of Poland, Government of Philippines, GeSI, Vimplecom, ICANN, IFIP, CMAI and TEMA India and Swiss Engineering. WSIS forum relies entirely on voluntary contributions and so we are very grateful for this support and would encourage others to contribute. The Secretariat has only a small team to support WSIS Forum and they do an incredible job with such limited resources.
I wish you a very productive and successful meeting.