UN High-Level Political Forum on Sustainable Development
ITU Special Side Event on Digital Partnerships for a Sustainable and Resilient Recovery from COVID-19
Opening Remarks
Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Director, ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau
6 July 2021
Excellencies, distinguished speakers,
Dear colleagues and participants,
Good morning, good afternoon, good evening, and welcome to ITU's HLPF side event on Digital Partnerships for a Sustainable and Resilient Recovery from COVID-19.
This year's HLPF is focused on policies and international cooperation frameworks that will help mitigate the devastating social and economic impact of the pandemic and recoup much of the ground that has been lost in our efforts to achieve the SDGs by 2030.
As the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies, ITU is central to these discussions.
Alongside our sister agencies, we are playing a leading role in the roll-out of the Secretary General's Roadmap for Digital Cooperation, and of course we are also a lead facilitator of the continued ongoing WSIS process to implement the Tunis Plan of Action that emerged from the UN World Summit on the Information Society back in 2005.
ITU data show that 3.7 billion people remain unconnected to the transformational power of the internet.
At the same time as COVID has dramatically accentuated our dependence on technology. It has underlined the fact that a gap between digital ''haves'' and ''have-nots'' is something the world can simply no longer tolerate.
In his recent vision statement for his second term, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres lamented the ''colossal digital divide that reinforces social and economic divisions.''
We simply cannot wait and watch as this digital divide becomes the new face of global inequality.
ITU estimates that around 430 billion US dollars will be needed to connect the world's unconnected over the next 10 years.
And this huge investment in network deployment will need to be matched by a similarly huge investment in developing human capacity, so that people are empowered to take advantage of connectivity as and when it becomes available.
It's clear that a challenge of this scale is not something that any single entity – be it a government, or a company – is going to be able to achieve alone.
Strong commitments by national leaders and the private sector, efficient public interventions, and effective partnerships will be key to meeting our goal.
Last year, I noted that every single participating country included ICTs in its Voluntary National Review – a dramatic change from the situation just 5 years back, when the potential of technology was too often overlooked.
So I think it is safe to say that there is no longer any doubt that digital technologies are our only hope of getting on track to achieve the SDGs by 2030.
Innovative multi-stakeholder digital partnerships are the vital enabler we need for an ICT-driven sustainable and resilient economic recovery.
ITU's Connect 2 Recover initiative aims exactly to do this.
With the support of the governments of Japan and Saudi Arabia, we are working to strengthen countries' digital resilience, and help countries ''build back better with broadband.''
Other ITU work to harness the power of digital to advance the SDG process includes:
- Our Giga initiative with UNICEF and others to connect every school on the planet to the internet, and every child to information, opportunity and choice.
- Our PRIDA initiative with the African Union and the European Commission to strengthen ICT policy and regulatory frameworks in Africa.
- Our Financial Inclusion Global Initiative with the World Bank to develop and promote digital financial services.
- Our new International Centre of Digital Innovation – called i-CoDI – which will focus on innovative digital solutions for the SDGs.
- Our GovStack initiative with Estonia, Germany and the Digital Impact Alliance to promote scalable e-government solutions in developing countries.
- The EQUALS Global Partnership, highlighted at last week's Generation Equality Forum, which brings together over 100 partners from around the world in efforts to bridge the gender digital divide, and
- Our new Generation Connect youth initiative which is bringing the vital voices of young people into our digital development work.
In addition to these and other projects, last week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona I was proud to announce the Partner 2 Connect Digital Coalition, a multi-stakeholder alliance to accelerate digital transformation in the hardest-to-connect communities, including LDCs, LLDCs, and SIDS.
I hope many of you connected today will join us on this new journey, so that Partner2Connect can take advantage of the rising tide of political will around connectivity, and the transformational technologies already ready for deployment, which together could make such a difference to the people most in need.
Dear colleagues,
The outcomes of today's discussions will serve as important input to ITU's forthcoming World Telecommunication Development Conference, which will be held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in June 2022.
COVID has emphasized the urgency of our task.
WTDC gives us the chance to come together to collaborate, innovate and invigorate our efforts to bridge the digital divide.
I hope all of you will all join us there, so that we can leverage the untapped power of digital partnership to deliver on our sustainable development pledges.
Thank you.
