U.S.-India Business Council West Coast Digital Summit
Keynote
Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Director, ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau
6 December 2021
Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening everyone, and thank you for inviting me to be a part of this first U.S.-India West Coast Digital Summit.
What a great initiative aimed at fostering closer collaboration and cooperation between two of the world's great tech powerhouses!
International dialogues like this one are vital to unleashing the true power of partnership. And partnership will be increasingly key in finding solutions to the many challenges we face today.
The first digital entrepreneurs who set up their businesses in the area we now know as Silicon Valley created a unique hub for research and innovation.
Now, a select handful of other countries – India among them – have leveraged and grown that model to create their own thriving tech communities, where cutting edge research is driving digital development and pushing the envelope on the power and potential of emerging technologies.
The growth of India's tech sector is a truly remarkable success story. From its earliest days as an outsourcing hub, India has been racing up the Global Innovation Index produced by our sister agency, WIPO, and, in 2019, was ranked third in the world for attracting investment for tech transactions.
That innovation culture has created fertile ground for start-ups. India is now estimated to have the third-largest start-up ecosystem in the world, with 26 young companies valued at more than $1 billion.
And India has another not-so-secret-weapon in its armory: the energy and talent of its youth. More than 50% of India's 1.3 billion people are under the age of 25, and the country already ranks eighth in the world for the number of students graduating in science and engineering.
While all this has been happening, across the ocean, through talent, enthusiasm and sheer hard work, the Indian diaspora has earned itself a place at the very heart of Silicon Valley's tech community, with leaders like Microsoft's Satya Nadella, Alphabet's Sundar Pichai, IBM's Arvind Krishna, and recently announced Twitter's Parag Agrawal inspiring other young Indians to reach for the stars.
Despite the impressive achievements, I believe there is still tremendous potential to further accelerate India's digital innovation growth. That is why ITU is just about to open a brand-new Area Office in New Delhi – the first new addition to our regional presence in 15 years.
Our New Delhi office will bring us closer to our Indian partners in government, the private sector, and civil society, and help us strengthen our work to promote digital inclusion throughout the subregion.
One important element of that work is our new ITU International Centre of Digital Innovation, known as I-CoDI, which we are developing with the support of the UAE. I-CoDI will provide a safe co-design space for ITU Members and other stakeholders to co-create, co-innovate and collaborate on strategies to accelerate digital transformation and drive progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals.
We're also co-hosting a webinar series around Digital Technology Innovations, together with the Telecommunications Standards Development Society of India, with support from the Department of Telecommunications, select Ministries of the Government of India, and other partners from the Asia-Pacific region. These webinars highlight India's many digital innovations, such as the national digital ID system, Aadhaar, and new digital financial services.
Ladies and gentlemen,
The COVID crisis has turbo-charged digital transformation. Where connectivity permitted, anything that could go digital, did go digital. We now have an opportunity to make a virtue of that necessity.
Innovation is the critical element we need to drive adoption and value creation in under-served markets.
Old-fashioned business-as-usual approaches won't cut it: we urgently need new thinking to bridge the digital divide, so that people everywhere are empowered to participate in our digital world.
ITU's belief in the untapped, catalytic power of digital to re-energize the SDG process and get us back on track to meet our global goals by 2030 is the driving force behind our decision to launch the Partner2Connect Digital Coalition.
This bold new global platform aims to mobilize multistakeholder partnerships and concrete commitments to bring meaningful connectivity to the world's hardest-to-connect communities.
The Partner2Connect pledging mechanism, due for launch early next year, will serve as an important driver of innovation in its own right, stimulating commitments to support start-ups and entrepreneurs in the digital sphere. I warmly encourage everyone to join us, so that we can showcase the first results of this effort at ITU's upcoming World Telecommunication Development Conference in June 2022.
Let me close by expressing my gratitude to the U.S. India Business Council and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for convening this important event, and for inviting me to be a part of it.
I look forward to hearing the outcome of your sessions, and to working ever more closely with partners in India, through our new Area Office, to achieve our vision of a better, shared digital future for all.
