International
Telecommunication Union's World
Telecommunication/ICT Development Report 2010, focusing on
monitoring the targets of the World Summit on the Information Society
(WSIS), was presented on 25 May 2010 at the 5th World Telecommunication
Development Conference (WTDC-10), in Hyderabad (South-Central India).
The
report provides a mid-term review of the progress made in creating a
global Information Society by 2015, a commitment that governments agreed
upon at the WSIS, which took place in Geneva in 2003 and in Tunis in
2005.
The report points out that the booming area of mobile cellular
technology has led to connecting many previously unconnected areas.
"Today, nearly 90 % of the world's population is covered by a mobile
cellular network," says the ITU Secretary-General, Dr. Hamadoun Touré,
"and even people in rural and remote areas now have the means to access
the global information society". In India and China, the world's two
most populous countries in the world, the mobile technology has provided
basic telephone services to over 90 % of villages. In many developing
countries, fixed telephone lines are largely limited to urban areas. But
today, more than half of the rural households have a mobile telephone.
Overall, the report stresses that while major achievements have been
made over the past five years, substantial efforts are required in
developing countries to achieve the goals and targets by 2015. The
report makes three main recommendations on the policies and measures
needed to help achieve the targets:
- Ensure that half the world population has
access to broadband by 2015;
- Build an ICT-literate society
globally;
- Develop online content and applications.
To this end, governments can take a number of concrete steps, such as
licensing mobile broadband operators and ensuring that broadband
infrastructure is accessible to all citizens. Policy-makers in
developing countries, in partnership with the international community,
should continue to commit resources to connecting educational
institutions to Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and to
adapt the curriculum. According to the report, the development of
online content and applications in local languages should be promoted,
for example, through the digitisation of books and documents to create
an e-culture. With more than half of the Internet users speaking
languages with non-Latin scripts, the recent opening up of Internet
domain names to non-Latin script characters is an important development.
Furthermore, the report emphasises the lack of local content, in
local languages on the Internet. The web is still largely dominated by
the English language, even though only around 15 % of the world's
population understands it.
Finally, the report highlights the importance for setting clear
policy targets and monitoring progress and for this purpose, it proposes
a list of 50 concrete indicators to monitor the targets over the next
five years, until 2015.
Several international organisations, led by ITU, including
contributions from United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural
Organisation (UNESCO), World Health Organisation (WHO) and United
Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), as well as
from representatives of civil society joined their efforts to conduct
this report. It reviews each of the ten targets agreed upon at the World
Summit on the Information Society, ranging from connecting villages,
schools, health centres, libraries and government agencies to
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and to developing
online content.
The present report constitutes the first global effort to identify
quantitative measures to show how far the world has come in building an
Information Society, and what remains to be done.
Further information:
