ITU announced 90 Champions of the prestigious WSIS Prizes contest while the 18 Winners, out of these 90 Champions, will be recognized at a ceremony at Geneva International Conference Centre on the 9th of April, as part of the annual WSIS Forum 2020.

The International Telecommunication Union has announced the top 90 ICT-related projects recognized for implementing the WSIS Action Lines, competing for the prestigious WSIS Prizes 2020. With participants emerging from across the globe, 72 champions will be honoured and 18 winners will be awarded for each of the 18 categories at the WSIS Prizes 2020 Ceremony, to be held during the WSIS Forum 2020 in Geneva. Since 2012, WSIS Prizes has been recognizing remarkable efforts made by entities and organizations from around the globe that focus on accelerating the socio-economic progress of the whole world as a community.

The submission phase, which began on 2 July 2018 to 5 December 2018, received a record number of 1,140 submissions, out of which 1,062 exceptional projects were nominated for WSIS Prizes 2020. This is a 216% increase since WSIS Prizes 2018, where we had 492 nominated projects. From 21 December 2018 to 10 February 2019, over 2 million votes were cast for these projects, and following a comprehensive review by the Expert Group, 90 extraordinary ICT-related projects and initiatives were selected for the eighth edition of the WSIS Prizes contest.

Project submission this year was distributed by region as follows: 16.9% from Africa, 29% from Asia and the Pacific, 6.5% from Eastern Europe, 19.4% from Latin America and the Caribbean, 27.7% from Western Europe, and 0.5% are international projects.