Excellencies, Distinguished Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am honoured to welcome you to this landmark event, the First Joint Workshop on Strengthening Broadband Infrastructure and Services across the Europe Region and beyond.
This workshop is a direct outcome of a joint declaration between ITU, the European Mediterranean Regulators Group and the Eastern Partnership Electronic Communications Regulators Network at this year's Global Symposium for Regulators - GSR - held in June.
It represents a significant step forward to make digital policy fit the goal of digital transformation in this region.
I am therefore very pleased that it has been actualized.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
Recalling the aspiration of our joint declaration, apart from strengthening our collaboration in mapping broadband infrastructure mapping, and facilitating knowledge exchange on good practices, we also committed to enabling twinning programmes between countries and regions.
In this context, I would like to introduce the innovative Digital Regulation Network which I also launched at the GSR in June. It is one of the immediate benefits that we can reap from the joint cooperation.
Digital Regulation Network is powered by Regulatory Associations at the regional and global level to accelerate sustainable digital transformation, through common digital policy approaches across economic sectors and across borders.
The network focuses on three main building blocks:
- Thought leadership
- Capacity development
- Regulatory innovation.
The Network is meant to help evaluate emerging issues and needs in digital transformation, and pilot good practices for harmonized approaches.
Through it, we hope that European Mediterranean Regulators Group (EMERG) and the Eastern Partnership Electronic Communications Regulators (EaPeReg) Network, can exploit the platform for knowledge transfer, twinning programmes and capacity development for your members.
In regulatory experimentation and innovation, we want to see the network support policy experimentation—especially for emerging technologies—as well as promoting cross-sectoral approaches in digital transformation.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
The DRN initiative fills a long-standing gap in providing a formal global network of regulatory associations.
As agreed by Member States during the 2022 World Telecommunication Development Conference, affordable connectivity is one of the five priorities of ITU Development Sector. In line with this, the ITU Telecommunication Bureau - BDT- has dedicated resources to help members foster the development of infrastructure and services using existing, and also new and emerging telecommunication/ICT services and technologies, and new business models.
Aligned to this is one of Europe's Regional Initiative - Digital Infrastructure Development.
BDT supports countries in development of broadband infrastructure maps that display geospatial infrastructure connectivity layers, transmission networks, and other relevant information from our research on: Infrastructure data, National mapping systems survey and others similar areas.
It is joint effort, and I would encourage pooling resources, learning from each other, building capacity so that together, we can formulate credible, coherent, evidence-based tools for decision making.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is a step that presents a compelling digital future for our society.
Accelerating this kind of digital policy collaboration and harmonization is key to the development innovative solutions for meaningful connectivity and ultimately, getting digital governance to the next level.
In this workshop, I ask you to engage with similar aspirations.
It is a journey fundamentally enabled by the collaboration.
Thank you!
