World Summit on the Information Society Forum 2022: Inaugural Session
15 March 2022
Excellencies,
Ladies and gentlemen,
I am pleased to welcome you to the WSIS Forum, along with our co-organizers, ITU, UNESCO and UNDP.
This forum takes place precisely two years after the world went into lockdown. The COVID-19 pandemic has been hugely disruptive. While digital solutions have provided means to mitigate the economic downturn and strengthen resilience, we have also seen widening digital gaps. To ensure that ICTs promote well-being, inclusion and resilience, we need more cooperation, and the WSIS Forum with its multistakeholder approach offers an excellent avenue.
UNCTAD is firmly committed to enable development gains from digitalization.
In our recently adopted mandate - the Bridgetown Covenant – the digital economy has a central role. Our Member States request UNCTAD to “move to a more resilient, digital, and inclusive world of shared prosperity [by] transforming economies through diversification; fostering a more sustainable and more resilient economy; improving the way development is financed; and revitalizing multilateralism.”
In this spirit, we are hosting intergovernmental discussions on e-commerce and digital economy policy. We are supporting capacity building for e-trade, digital value creation, and data governance. And we are producing research that guides developing countries in benefiting from a rapidly evolving digital economy.
We are collaborating with various international partners, donors, and communities to ensure development gains from digitalization. For example, our eTrade for all initiative offers relevant services and resources from many partner agencies. Our eTrade for Women programme boosts female digital entrepreneurship in developing countries.
We strongly advocate for the need to go beyond connectivity issues. Developing countries need to build ICT skills and an enabling environment for e-commerce and the digital economy, invest to participate in a global digital market, and ensure that they have a say in digital governance.
I want to draw your attention to one specific aspect of the digital world that is increasingly important: digital data. Digital data play an ever more critical role as an economic and strategic resource. The problem is that many developing countries are mere providers of raw data to global digital platforms and pay for the digital intelligence generated from their data. The United States and China dominate the harnessing and processing of such data and the market capitalization of the world’s largest digital platforms.
Developing countries need to have a say in how their data are used, and they should be able to also benefit from the global data value chain. A new global framework for data governance could be the answer to help avoid further fragmentation of the internet, and narrow existing inequalities.
Finally, I also want to take this opportunity to invite you to our upcoming eCommerce Week. It will take place online from 25 to 29 April 2022, and will focus on data and cross-border data flows and their role for economic and social development. Our ambition is that the debates and discussions can contribute to building more resilient and inclusive societies and economies.
I look forward to also engaging with you then, and thank for your attention.
