H.E. Mr Haruna IDDRISU (MP) Minister of Communications the fastest growing sector, benefiting from increased investment, enhanced competition, improved regu-latory The Chairman of the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference Your Excellencies, Heads of Delegations The Secretary General of the ITU, and The Directors of the ITU Distinguished Delegates Ladies and Gentlemen I thank you for the honour of allowing me to greet the distinguished delegates and participants at this eighteenth Plenipotentiary Conference of the ITU in the beautiful city of Guadalajara, in the State of Jalisco. May I, on behalf of my delegation, express our pro-found oversight, determined policy application and above all, involved participation of the citizenry and stakeholders in implementation. It is therefore not surprising that my predecessor Minister of Communications who is now a leading member of the Opposition in Ghana’s Parliament is present with me to reinforce Ghana’s consensus on the pursuit of ICT for Development. It has just been captured in Ghana’s third quarter report on economic indicators that the Services sector, led by ICT, has overtaken the Agriculture Sector in growth. There has been substantial investment in broadband in-frastructure to deliver e-Government services and other ICT applications in education, health, commerce etc. It is in this regard, Mr. Chairman that Ghana com-mends gratitude to the Government and people of the the ITU for collaborating with UNESCO to set United Mexican States for the warm welcome and hospitality extended to us since our arrival. Permit me, Mr. Chairman to use the opportunity to salute the he-roic up the Broadband Commission to promote access and connectivity to all irrespective of geographic location. As a result of the investment in broadband, telephone service has reached 16.9 million subscriptions, which is nearly 74 percent tele-density and definitely very well ahead in meeting the targets of WSIS. There has also been a proliferation of other value add-ed people of this great country on the occasion of the bicentennial celebration of the independence of the United Mexican States. In the same context, the delegation of Ghana also extends warm felicitations to the twenty-seven coun-tries of Africa celebrating 50 years of independence services such as those supporting financial trans-actions in 2010. Ghana however, extends her condolences to Nigeria for the unfortunate bomb blasts that claimed innocent lives. We are confident that the Information Age will provide a more catalytic proposition for rapid economic push in the years ahead. Mr. Chairman, it is clear that ICT holds the key to the world’s development and the promotion of peace and therefore we should constantly remind ourselves of the consensus of the World Summit on the Information Society and also, the Action Plan adopted to build a truly inclusive global Information Community. I am delighted to report that the communications sec-tor and mobile Internet services. Today, Number Portability infrastructure has been installed and the facility is to being introduced to provide greater choic-es to consumers while allowing competition to deliver improved quality of service and affordable pricing. Ghana is presently rolling out a national fibre optic pro-gramme to cover all the Local Government District areas to support the deployment of high-speed Internet con-nectivity to all Public Offices, Schools and Teacher Training colleges, Hospitals, Libraries and lately, the Prisons. To be able to undertake these programmes during this period of global financial challenges, Ghana has ben-efited in Ghana has witnessed dramatic improvements from prudent management of its International since the last Plenipotentiary Conference. Indeed, it is 26