World Telecommunication Development Conference
Opening Ceremony Address
Doreen Bogdan-Martin
Director, ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau
6 June, 2022
His Excellency, Paul Kagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda,
The Honorable Minister Paula Ingabire, Minister for ICT and Innovation, Republic of Rwanda
Mr Houlin Zhao, ITU Secretary-General, and fellow elected officials
Ambassadors and dignitaries, esteemed colleagues,
Good morning, and welcome to ITU's 8th World Telecommunication Development Conference.
I thank H.E. President Kagame and his team for their extraordinary efforts to ensure that this event delivers the powerful outcomes we are all working towards.
In some sense, this event will feel familiar to many.
We understand the structure, and how things will play out over the next two weeks.
We've all been here before, right?
Wrong.
This event may have the same name as previous ITU development conferences, but in all important respects, this is a very different ballgame.
In the five years since we last came together for a WTDC, our world has changed unrecognisably.
We faced a global pandemic that devastated our communities.
Inequalities have grown. Energy and food security concerns are growing.
The climate crisis is accelerating.
And our SDG targets are at real risk of falling by the wayside.
Digital technologies can help in all of these areas – and yet their promise is still not being fully realized.
All of us have worked so hard, and with enormous dedication over the years, to make universal affordable connectivity a reality.
Our efforts have borne fruit. In the last five years since our WTDC in Buenos Aires, the number offline has fallen by more than 1.5 billion.
But yet, the reality is that we are still not shifting the dial fast enough in the world's hardest-to-connect communities and people living in LDCs, LLDCs, and SIDs.
That's why this conference has to be different.
Ladies and gentlemen,
UN Secretary-General Guterres has said that the only way to confront the critical issues facing our planet and its people will be through collaboration and cooperation on a truly unprecedented scale.
Digital inclusion will be the bedrock of that global collaboration.
Not as an end in itself, but a means to empower people to improve their own lives.
That's why a more people-centric approach needs to be at the heart of our work.
And it's why this conference features new elements designed to shift our thinking and mobilize our collective energies in new ways.
One of these was the Generation Connect Global Youth Summit which took place last week.
That ground-breaking event brought together young people from the world over to debate the issues that most concern the next generation.
Their 'Call to Action' will serve as an important input to our work at this WTDC.
Another innovation is our ITU-D Network of Women that so many of you are generously supporting.
But most important of all the innovations we have brought to this event is our Partner2Connect Digital Coalition.
This 'coalition to connect the world' has already mobilized huge support from more than 150 entities.
The pledges made by P2C partners will be showcased throughout this first week through our Partner2Connect Digital Development Roundtable programme.
Partnership is not new, of course.
And it's not a silver bullet.
But I think, as a community, we have too often failed to take a holistic, whole-of-society approach that really pulls parties together, galvanizes all resources, most importantly, monitors our progress in a collective manner.
It's time for us to do that, so that our next WTDC can report on truly transformational change, especially in the communities where it is needed most.
Ladies and gentlemen,
Let me close with some inspiration from one of my favourite holiday films, 'It's a wonderful life'.
The film is about a man named George, who did lots of good in his life but mid-way through he loses faith… faith in his ability to make a difference to his community.
Because this film is a fairytale, George is briefly magically transported to an alternative future – a future in which he did not exist.
He gets to look back at what the world would have looked like without him (and the goodness he brought).
This film is so adored because it illustrates the immense power that each and every one of us has to influence the lives of others.
It shows that our smallest decisions can have a truly profound effect on the shape of the future.
That our actions ripple outwards, assuming a significance and impact we could never have imagined.
That each and every one of us has the power to change the world.
And that, by working together, we really can achieve the impossible.
Let's remember this, over the coming two weeks, and let's allow it to: guide our decision making, to inspire us to be bold, to go the extra mile, to try something new, and most importantly, to put the interests of people and planet first, and work together as collaboratively as we can towards our common goal.
We, the digital community, hold in our hands the solution to so many of today's challenges.
We truly can change the world.
So let's use this conference to do just that.
Thank you.
