WSIS Forum 2020 - Highlights and Key Achievements to date

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Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, welcome and thank you for joining us for this review of WSIS Forum 2020 Highlights and Key Achievements with the help of some of our workshops organisers. 

I am very pleased that this new innovative virtual Forum has been so well received. It has given us an opportunity to scale the event to a wider community and be even more inclusive. It is a notable achievement to mark 15 years of cooperation between all WSIS Stakeholders to leverage ICTs as critical drivers of global development. 

Since the launch on 22 June the Forum has garnered a lot of interest and excitement from all regions of the world – with a cumulative attendance of over 12,000 attendees from around 150 countries participating in more than 130 virtual sessions which were organised by WSIS stakeholders with over 770 speakers. The Forum has had the best ever balance of participation both in terms of stakeholders, regions and gender.  

We have also hosted very successful regional WSIS Forum workshops conducted in the appropriate UN language for the region at a time convenient for the region, which have shown strong regional engagement to the WSIS process. 

During the Opening Ceremony for the final week on Monday we had more than 500 participants on Zoom and more than 3200 people viewing us on Facebook live.

An important priority for the WSIS Forum, which reflects the true spirit of the WSIS, is about collaboration and partnerships. This is more important today than ever and the WSIS Forum is an excellent example of bringing together so many different stakeholders for the common good.

So many thanks to the entire WSIS community, the WSIS Forum 2020 has been a great success.

I am very grateful to the workshop organisers who will present in this session the key highlights and outcomes of their virtual workshops. Thank you all for your continued support and commitment to WSIS Forum and its objective of building inclusive knowledge and information societies. We also have our WSIS Action Lines Facilitators with us who will share how their respective WSIS Action Lines can help achieve the SDGs. 

I am sure we are all encouraged to see such positive momentum for WSIS and I look forward to working with our ever-wider sphere of stakeholders to bring the benefits of today’s digital economy to everyone, everywhere.

Last but not least, I would like to thank our sponsors, without whom we would not be able to organise this Forum. 

So, thank you all once again for joining us and I wish you a very enjoyable and fruitful session. I look forward to seeing you later today for the launch of the WSIS Forum 2021 Open Consultation Process where we need to take account of the lessons learned from this novel experience to benefit future WSIS Forums, especially maintaining the momentum, participation and inclusiveness we achieved this year.

Thank you.