Policy Statement
The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia

Mr. Chairman
Mr. Secretary General of ITU, Dr. Hammadun Tuore
Excellencies,
Distinguished Delegates,
Ladies and Gentlemen

It is my great pleasure to join other speakers in congratulating you, Mr. Chairman, on your election to the chair. On behalf of people of Ethiopia and government, I would like to thank the Government and people of the United States of Mexico, and in Particular the people of Guadalajara, for hosting this ITU Plenipotentiary Conference and for the warm welcome and hospitality extended to us. In addition, I wish to express my delegation’s deep appreciations for the excellent work done by the secretariat of ITU in making the necessary preparations for the conference.

Mr. Chairman,
My Country Ethiopia will support and cooperate with ITU in order to transform our society in to information and knowledge based society. It is also our sincere desire to see and strive for a strong, and technologically vibrant and economically integrated World, which can effectively take part in the transformational process our country Ethiopia is carrying out. Ethiopia, as a seat of African Union, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), and the host of the ITU Regional Office for Africa, has to play active role and participate in the effective implementation of such global initiatives of World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) commitments and action plans. It is our sincere hope to see ICTs tangibly play pivotal role in achieving MDGs in Ethiopia as our country Ethiopia recognized the need in making efforts towards ICTs applications at grass root levels.

Mr. Chairman,
In the perspective of my Country, Telecommunications/ICT Infrastructure and services are regarded to be strategically important:

• To enhance the expansion and penetration of quality education, health services, market access for small and medium scale enterprises, good governance and efficiency of the civil services.

To this effect, since 2007 Ethiopia has been engaged in huge investment of telecommunication Infrastructure Development .The infrastructure development among others consists of deployment of new all-IP based network, upgrade and optimization of existing networks.

These networks are now supported by 14, 000 kms fiber optics backbone while some more fiber optics is on the way to be laid. The fiber optics network is connected to our neighboring countries such as Sudan and Djibouti and we have also laid a fiber optics backbone network to Kenyan’s boarder. We believe these interconnections will create additional high speed international gateway.

To address issues of universal access more than 14,000 rural localities got access to basic telecommunication services. In the next five years, my government planned to scale up this figure to 18,000 rural villages and achieve 100% coverage to rural and remote areas to make them able to benefit from internet connectivity.

Regarding the e-governance services, my government has been working on the following projects:

• A government network (known as ‘WoredaNet’) which linked nearly 700 local (‘woreda’) and 11 regional government States across the country with each other and with the federal government headquarters in Addis Ababa.

• An education network (‘Schoolnet’) which connected more than 700 secondary school institutions.

• An agriculture network (‘Agrinet’), which linked more than 46 research and operational agricultural centers.

• A healthcare network ‘Healthnet’ which will connect to all major referral hospitals for a nationwide telemedicine infrastructure.

In general, my government is putting a great effort towards realization and deployment of an all-IP backbone infrastructure construction which enables utilization of all types of services over the packet-based transport network, including everything from basic voice telephony services to data, video, multimedia, and advanced broadband applications.

With the completion of the NGN, rural connectivity (universal access) and e-government projects, Ethiopia will contribute to the universal access and ICT development in Africa and the world.

Besides, users will benefit from improved telecommunication and ICT service levels in such a way that affordability, service quality, and utilization of diversified services is guaranteed.

To scale up this ongoing effort of telecommunication services development, in the next 5 years of Growth and Transformation Plan, my government has put stretched goals that is in the year 2014 , mobile tele-density will reach 64% and that of landline will be 8.5%, from 8.5% and 1.5%, respectively.

We are determined to exploit the opportunities made available by ICT both as an enabler and as an economic sector. We have also been aggressively working on the fundamental institutional reforms of regulatory and operation activities.

Mr. Chairman,
Finally, I would like to assure you that my country will continue its commitment to work with ITU in its efforts of coordinating global ICT development, standards, scarce resources such as numbering and spectrum, combating cyber threats, and the full development of world information society.

I thank you!