Good morning excellencies, distinguished delegates.
It is a pleasure to be here again for this Sixth session of the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway Steering Committee and the Regional Review of the World Summit on the Information Society. Many thanks to ESCAP for inviting me and congratulations on the progress on the Action Plan despite the challenges faced during the last three years, and many thanks also for ESCAP’s continuous support in reviewing and implementing the WSIS Action Lines in this region.
It is almost 3 years to the day since we last met face to face. Back then, no one could possibly have foreseen the devastation that COVID-19 would inflict here and across the world.
On the positive side, however, the pandemic has made everyone appreciate the role of digital technologies like never before, even if it has also exposed and intensified inequalities within and between countries and highlighted the gap between the most connected countries and the least connected countries, something which is very evident in the Asia-Pacific region. No one questions now that digital technology will be essential for the implementation of the UN sustainable development agenda, so we must continue our efforts to bridge this digital divide.
These efforts go back to the report prepared by Donald Maitland for ITU’s first World Telecommunication Development Conference in Tanzania in 1985. The report, officially titled “The Missing Link”, but more widely known as the “Maitland Report” first drew international attention to the huge imbalance in telephone access between developed and developing countries and underlined the direct correlation between this and a country's economic growth. It proposed concrete solutions to address this imbalance. In the 37 years since then, although tremendous progress has been made in connecting the world, we still have almost 3 billion people offline, most of them living in rural and remote isolated communities.
In Asia-Pacific, ITU has been supporting the development, update and implementation of digital transformation policies and strategies that place digital connectivity, capacity development, digital applications, and cybersecurity at their centre. ITU supports a whole-of-government multi-stakeholder approach placing emphasis on public-private sector partnerships. Something that ITU is well placed to do thanks to our extensive private sector membership.
I am very pleased to inform you that with India’s support, ITU is going to open a new Area Office and Innovation Centre in New Delhi. The Host Country Agreement was signed in March this year and we are now starting to recruit the staff. I am sure this office will greatly increase ITU’s private sector membership in South Asia, as well as our academia membership.
Three years ago, I informed you of the Joint Task Force between ITU, the Intergovernmental Oceano-graphic Commission of UNESCO, and the World Meteorological Organization on
SMART Subsea cables. The objective is to integrate environmental sensors into the submarine telecommunications cable networks spanning the world so as to provide vital measurements on ocean climate, sea level rise and tsunami warnings in addition to telecommunications.
I am pleased to report this work is progressing well and the first SMART system will soon be operational linking Europe with the Azores and Madeira, and others are planned including connecting Europe and Asia via the Antarctic, with connections through New Zealand, and Vanuatu to New Caledonia.
Small island developing states are on the frontline of climate change and sustainability challenges and we work with them to develop their ICT infrastructure, and especially emergency telecommunications and disaster response capability.
ITU has a
Smart Islands initiative to help boost connectivity and services and we expect the G20 Digital Economy Ministers meeting in Bali this week, to recognize this landmark initiative in its declaration.
To help identify and address these connectivity gaps, ITU produces interactive transmission maps which illustrate the effort needed to close connectivity gaps to communities, schools, financial hubs, etc. This is one of many areas of close collaboration between ITU’s Regional Office in Bangkok and ESCAP, with the intention to use these maps on ESCAP’s disaster risk reduction platform.
Multi-stakeholder partnerships and cooperation are central to the success of all this work, which is embodied in the Asia-Pacific Information Superhighway action plan. And it also lies at the heart of both the WSIS Process and the WSIS Forum, which, I am pleased to say, continues to go from strength to strength. This year the Forum convened physically for the first time since the start of COVID and we were pleased to have over 1,000 physical participants during the final week in June. However, we are continuing with the possibility of remote participation in the Forum which proved so successful in 2020 and 2021. This year we had over 30,000 remote participants.
Different and new initiatives, such as the WSIS Stocktaking Repository of Women in Technology, and the WSIS Multistakeholder Alliance on ICTs and Older Persons – to name just two – attracted a lot of interest.
This year has been a challenging one for ITU as we had two world conferences postponed to this year due to COVID – the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly, and the World Telecommunication Development Conference – and we have coming in just a month’s time our Plenipotentiary Conference in Bucharest. This conference will shape the future direction for ITU with the adoption of the Strategic and Financial Plans as well as a number of resolutions on the future work of ITU. It will have an impact on digital transformation in the Asia-Pacific region, and so I encourage you to participate.
We have many challenges to overcome, and so I believe more than ever before the keywords are collaboration, coordination, and cooperation.
I wish us all a very productive session.
Thank you.