Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to this STI side event, co-organized by ITU and the United Nations Group on the Information Society (UNGIS).
Our homes, families, friends, health and work are all core elements of our wellbeing, and all have been under tremendous stress since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet despite its many challenges, the pandemic has also acted as a catalyst—accelerating digital transformation and more flexible and sustainable ways of working.
It has seen the emergence of digital technologies that promise to tackle humanity’s most pressing challenges and accelerate progress on the UN’s SDGs. The challenge is to ensure these technologies are universal and that their benefits are available fairly and equally around the world.
Everything we do at ITU is focused on achieving this. Our last World Telecommunication and ICT Policy Forum in December was dedicated to finding ways to mobilize these new technologies for sustainable development. The recent ITU World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly focused on international standards development that can bring the world affordable and sustainable devices and services, and the upcoming ITU World Telecommunication Development Conference in June in Kigali will look at the policies and strategies to take advantage of these technologies including in the poorest countries and communities. The ITU Plenipotentiary Conference in Bucharest in September will adopt the strategic and financial plans for ITU to pursue its objectives over the coming four years that will put digital technologies at the very heart of every nation’s future growth and prosperity.
To achieve this all stakeholders, public and private, national, regional and international will need to work together collaboratively. This of course, is epitomized in the WSIS community. Almost 20 years ago, the World Summit on the Information Society laid out a farsighted vision for a world where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowledge.
We have come a long way since then, but there are still close to 3 billion people worldwide that are not yet connected, so there is much more to be done to achieve this vision.
Our task, at ITU and through UNGIS, is to ensure that ICTs and the WSIS Action Lines put us back on track to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Many thanks to the distinguished panelists for joining us today. I look forward to hearing your insights on how we can better make use of ICTs to make the world safer, stronger, more resilient and sustainable, and ultimately improve people’s well-being.
Finally I would like to invite everyone to join us for our upcoming WSIS Forum 2022 final week from 30 May to 3 June 2022, which will be held physically, but with extended remote participation, at the ITU Headquarters in Geneva. I hope to see you there.
Thank you, and I wish you very fruitful discussions today.