H.E. Mr Peter Gatkuoth GEY State Minister, Ministry of Transport and Communications 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 de-sire 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 initia-tives 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; Mr. Secretary General of ITU, Dr. Hammadun Tuore; Excellencies, Distinguished Delegates; Ladies and Gentlemen; It is my great pleasure to join other speakers in con-gratulating Mr. Chairman, In the perspective of my Country, Telecommunications/ ICT Infrastructure and services are regarded to be stra-tegically important: To enhance the expansion and penetration of quality education, health services, market access for small and medium scale enterprises, good governance and effi-ciency you, Mr. Chairman, on your election to the of the civil services. 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 peo-ple 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 net-work, of Guadalajara, for hosting this ITU Plenipotentiary Conference and for the warm welcome and hospital-ity upgrade and optimization of existing networks. 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. 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 con- 160