HLPF Side event - ICTs and Digital Transformation for Building Back Better and Accelerating SDG Achievement

HLPF Side event - ICTs and Digital Transformation for Building Back Better and Accelerating SDG Achievement

"Implementation of the WSIS Action Lines in COVID-19 Response and SDG Decade of Action"

Hosted by Saudi Arabia & co-organized by UNGIS

15 July 2020 - Virtual Meeting

Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen,
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening and thank you for joining us today at this HLPF side event which will look at how ICTs and the WSIS Actions lines can help accelerate the SDGs, learning from the COVID-19 experience to build back better.

Firstly let me thank the Government of Saudi Arabia for hosting this side event and co-organizing it with us. During last year’s HLPF we both hosted a side event at the UN Office for South-South Cooperation in New York, so we are very pleased to continue our collaboration this year. Hopefully next year we can repeat the event physically, but at least these virtual events make it easy for people to join from around the world at no cost.

And thank you also for the generous support and strong commitment to the WSIS process and WSIS Forum in particular. We are fortunate to have Saudi Arabia as a Gold Plus partner of the WSIS Forum this year which of course is also fully virtual. It will spread over the coming weeks to conclude in its final week from 7 to 10 September. During the course of the last 3 weeks 4,000 WSIS stakeholders have attended around 50 virtual sessions, and we look forward to even greater numbers in the weeks to come. I am sure this year’s WSIS Forum will have the highest participation ever. And its carbon footprint will surely be the lowest ever.

The COVID-19 crisis has demonstrated the power and the promise of ICTs as never before with literally billions of people relying on ICTs for news, teleworking, remote learning, shopping, and staying in touch with loved ones.

We must congratulate the telecom operators and platform providers for responding so successfully to the huge increase in demand over the past few months. It has shown just how resilient this technology is. As a result, many businesses have managed to continue their activities. In ITU we have continued our business working from home and through virtual meetings such as this.

But of course, not all have been able to benefit. Let’s remember that 3.6 billion people around the world are still not connected to the Internet, mostly those living in rural areas and remote communities, which is why our core mission must be to connect everyone everywhere.
 
Let’s hope that this increased recognition of the importance of being connected, as a result of the COVID-19 crisis, will make it sooner rather than later that that is achieved.

It is now well recognized that ICTs are a key part of building back better, for more inclusive healthcare and education, more sustainable business practices, and for the implementation of the SDGs.

This is a considerable challenge. Last September the UN General Assembly proclaimed the Decade of Action for the Sustainable Development Goals in response to the reality that the world was not on track to deliver them by 2030.

And last week the WMO released its latest rising temperature projections which show it increasingly unlikely we will achieve the international targets for carbon emissions in the Paris Agreement.

We therefore have to leverage the potential of ICTs as never before, to deliver on the sustainable development agenda and create a more sustainable future.

ITU as the lead UN organization for ICTs has a key role to play and we are fortunate in this that we have such a diverse membership of 193 Member States and uniquely over 900 sector members, mostly private sector companies in the telecommunication and Internet sectors. We are working with our membership and many other organizations to leverage the full power of ICTs to meet the challenges of COVID-19 and to advance progress towards the sustainable development goals, despite the pandemic.

The United Nations Group on the Information Society (UNGIS) also has a key role to play, and I congratulate UNCTAD on taking up its chairmanship and for initiating a Dialogue on the Role of Digitalization in the Decade of Action to raise awareness of both the importance of digitalization in achieving the SDGs, and the need for good collaboration between the various UN bodies to achieve maximum sustainable impact. It is important we each contribute our own specific competencies, avoid duplication of effort and pool our resources for the common good. ITU looks forward to fully supporting UNCTAD in this initiative.

The WSIS Action Lines offer a key framework for such progress, as all are now aligned with the SDGs.

The WSIS Forum has evolved into the key worldwide event on ICTs and development, an efficient mechanism for multi-stakeholder implementation of WSIS action lines and the SDGs focusing on gender equality, accessibility, youth and older persons, knowledge creation and the sharing of good practices, including coping with the COVID-19 challenges.

So, let’s all work together, public sector and private sector, to build back better and create a more sustainable world where everyone everywhere benefits from this technology.

I wish you all very enjoyable and fruitful discussions today, thank you.

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