CE-Digital is a partnership between CAF - Development bank of Latin America, the GSMA and eLAC 2020. It is an extensive telecommunications capacity-building programme for national regulatory authorities and policymakers from Latin America and the Caribbean. Established in 2016, its work is ongoing.

CE-Digital’s main goal is to deliver free training opportunities, via 14 face-to-face and online courses offered in Spanish, to help keep policymakers and regulators abreast of current industry trends and how they affect the telecommunications services offered to their country’s citizens.

Despite significant development of the digital ecosystem in Latin America, the region still faces great challenges in progressing current digital transformation programmes and initiatives. By providing a supportive capacity-building environment, CE-Digital aims to promote knowledge generation and sharing in the region to develop and consolidate regulatory and institutional skills and knowledge within telecommunication authorities.

As a result, these authorities will be better placed to meet the challenges presented by the new digital ecosystem via the provision of enhanced policy and regulatory frameworks, helping expand and strengthen the telecommunications landscape in Latin America. This programme is a combined effort of three international organisations to contribute towards achieving the WSIS capacity building action line.

So far, CE-Digital has delivered more than 900 days of training to over 450 regulators and policymakers from 19 countries across the region, representing 24 ministries and government entities and 15 telecommunications regulatory agencies. CE-Digital’s great challenges for the future are in looking for ways to extend the reach of the programme even further and working to ensure our courses continue to be highly relevant to course participants.

https://www.cedigitaleduca.org

• Latin America and the Caribbean

This programme is a combined effort of three international organisations to contribute towards achieving the WSIS capacity building action line. As such, it is promoting the development of a dynamic and healthy telecommunications sector through training on appropriate regulatory frameworks for today’s digital communications landscape. This also means the CE-Digital partnerships promotes a range of WSIS principles, including, but not limited to WSIS principles 39, 40, 45, 49 and 50.

This programme is a strong example of the collaborative efforts CAF has put into the programme. By collaborating with eLAC 2020 and the GSMA, it has created a robust partnership between high quality international institutions to bring in-depth regulatory training to the region, which can be replicated by other organisations around the world.

Moreover, CE-Digital continues to develop additional partnerships with regulatory agencies in countries across Latin America and the Caribbean to expand the reach of its training, gather information on good practice throughout the region and analyse the policy and regulatory landscape within these countries.

There is strong potential for this partnership model to be replicated around the world. It serves as a strong example of what can be achieved when organizations from the public and/or private sector would together to improve the telecommunications ecosystem within a fast developing region in order to promote sustained economic growth.

The securing of additional funding for the programme over the last three years, plus the high demand for training opportunities from regulatory authorities in countries within the region, demonstrates that is not only a sustainable project, but one that is delivering real value to the organisations receiving the training. Moreover, the partnerships with regulatory agencies in different countries across Latin America provide additional funding to carry out capacity building activities in the region.

Through this capacity building programme, CE-Digital is helping to strengthen regulatory institutions that oversee the telecommunications sector in the Latin American region, promoting regulatory frameworks that favour access, security, user rights and free competition in the provision of ICT services, while also highlighting the need for adequate guarantees of regulatory stability in order to encourage investment in telecommunications infrastructure and services. Moreover, it is building confidence and security in the use of ICTs and providing an excellent and stable example of international and regional cooperation.