New investment projects worth $46bn identified
Industry and government leaders attending the International Telecommunications Unions (ITU) Connect Arab Summit, which closed yesterday, have identified market opportunities worth over $46bn for new projects designed to enhance ICT access, applications and services throughout the region. The investment opportunities focus around key priorities for the region, including building a regional Arab ICT highway, developing e-services, empowering local people through training and human capacity building, leveraging ICTs for youth job creation, strengthening cyber security, and protecting Arab heritage and culture. The Summit was convened to forge regional consensus on new strategies to boost infrastructure deployment, extend access to marginalised populations, and stimulate innovation and employment across the region. The Summit closed with a communique endorsed by all participating governments from across the region, which set out four key development goals around access and infrastructure; digital content; cyber security; and innovation. Connectivity commitments and partnerships announced during the event included a project between ITU and the League of Arab States to establish a dot Arab domain name (UAE announced that it would host this important new domain); a womens literacy project involving ITU, ALESCO and UAE, designed to empower women in the region with ICT skills in Arabic; a project between ITU and the Linux Professional Institute to promote open source software training and certification; a broadband toolkit to be developed by the World Bank, along with a regional broadband connectivity study to support additional infrastructure investment and an employment study focusing on the West Bank/Gaza. At the national level, Egypt proposed a raft of projects for investment, and made three announcements with ITU: a project to enhance access to Arab digital content through the Memory of the Arab World project; a project to strengthen Arab statistical indicators to better inform policy-making in the region; a project to leverage the power of ICTs to help persons with disabilities. The Arab Information and Communication Technologies Organisation (AICTO) proposed several projects, including a regional cyber security initiative to promote safe and secure e-transactions; a digital broadcasting project; a new project to establish e-accessibility centres to provide education, training and retrofitting of Arab websites in partnership with W3C; and a common legal framework on e-accessibility in Arab region. In addition, a number of counties, including Djibouti, Mauritania and Sudan, put forward exciting ICT investment opportunities for which they are seeking partners. In his closing remarks, Brahima Sanou, director, ITUs telecommunication development bureau, hailed the Summit as an outstanding success in bringing countries from right across the region and the world to share ideas and identify opportunities for business partnership.