The ITU's recurring dream: connect the world

Stuart Corner
Friday, 27 June 2008 05:08

Opinion and Analysis

Co-incidentally this week, market research firm Strategy Analytics issued a forecast: "More than half of the world’s population will be using mobile phones by early 2010, up from 40 percent at the start of this year." It said that worldwide mobile subscriptions  would rise from 3.9 billion in 2008 to 5.6 billion in 2013.

So, we've gone in a quarter of a century from half the world never having made a phone call to half the world owning their own phone, and with this achievement so too have the ITU's goals changed: from simply ubiquitous availability of communications to making effective use of this underlying capability. "Connectivity must be our focus for the coming years to empower people everywhere with access to information on healthcare, agriculture and the environment," Touré said.

The uptake of cellphones opens up huge possibilities for providing such information to developing nations, but whether the ITU will this time be able to successfully channel the resources of member nations and multinational corporations into achieving anything meaningful remains to be seen.

The ITU said Touré had "discussed ways to cooperate with technology companies like Microsoft to explore the options for shared access and inexpensive ICT devices, including mobile smartphones and low-cost notebooks and it added that "The ITU delegation also visited the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to discuss future collaboration." That philanthropic organisation is now the world's largest and, we are told, to be the main focus of Gates' energies. Maybe Gates will be able to help Touré to make more progress towards the ITU's development goals than any of his predecessors.