WSIS Forum 2021 - Concluding Session of the Open Consultation Process: Outcomes of the WSIS Forum 2021 since January

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, welcome and thank you for joining us for this Concluding Session of the Open Consultation Process.

This is the second year that the WSIS Forum has been a fully digital event due to the pandemic. I has continued to provide a multistakeholder platform for enabling the power of ICTs to facilitate development. With the COVID-19 pandemic still ongoing, we have experienced and seen how ICTs are so important. The technology has become a bridge across physical distance and allows stakeholders to maintain the momentum of the annual WSIS Forum at this difficult time.  

Since the launch of the WSIS Forum 2021 in January we have hosted more than 80 virtual workshops where stakeholders have shared their excellent works, projects/initiatives, and best practices in implementing ICTs and the WSIS Action Lines for the Sustainable Development Goals as well as the COVID-19 response. Some of the tangible outcomes will be presented by our panellists today. 

This virtual environment has enabled the WSIS Forum to be more inclusive, more accessible than ever and reach a wider community. I am delighted that this innovative virtual Forum has been so well received by stakeholders. 

This year, we had a record number of participants in terms of inputs and submissions to the Open Consultation Process – we received around 500 contributions from stakeholders worldwide during online discussions and direct official submissions. It is nice to see that the contributions are once again almost equally distributed between the main stakeholder groups: International and regional organizations; governments; private sector; civil society and academia. There has also been a good regional distribution.

The WSIS Forum 2021 agenda and programme is based on the consultations and reflects the diverse interests that show a clear alignment of the WSIS Action Lines with the SDGs and our special effort to engage with diverse multistakeholders and present ICT solutions and innovations from around the world.  

We have initiated new special tracks this year including ICTs for Well-being and Happiness, Emerging Technologies for Sustainable Development and Cybersecurity special track. 

We were delighted to welcome more than 100 ministers, deputy ministers, ambassadors, and heads of regulatory bodies who joined us during the High-Level Policy Sessions. It was particularly nice to see a significant increase from the Americas regions including Trinidad and Tobago, Nicaragua, Guatemala, Uruguay, United States, Jamaica and Peru.

We are running our virtual hackathon on Ageing Better with ICTs with more than 1,000 registered participants. We have also launched a special prize this year entitled the WSIS Healthy Ageing Innovation Prize in collaboration with the Global Coalition on Aging.

Further, we congratulate the nominees of the WSIS Prizes for their excellent projects on the ground and we thank you for the innovative and creative promotional strategies used for the projects during the voting phase. Out of these, 18 Winners and 72 Champions will be acknowledged and awarded prizes during the final week of the WSIS Forum 2021 in May. 

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

 

And finally, I would like to thank the entire of WSIS community for your dedication and commitment towards this bottom-up consultation process.

I wish you a very enjoyable and fruitful session.

Thank you.