UN ICT Task Force - Global

The mandate of the Task Force includes:

• Raising policy-maker awareness and understanding on ICT development potential
• Promoting universal and affordable access to ICT
• Assisting Member States in creating national ICT strategies, policy frameworks, and regulatory environment
• Building human resources and institutional capacity, including e-government and education and community-based technology training
• Developing a cooperative research and communications agenda in areas such as how to seed a market for small vendors and consumers or to teach digital literacy
• Building partnerships, networks, and consortia for actions among relevant stakeholders, including the private sector, at global, regional, and national levels
• Mobilising new and additional resources - financial, technical, and human - for promoting and funding ICT-for-development programmes and projects
• Advocating for priority action within the UN system and facilitating cooperation and coordination among the various programmes underway in UN agencies
• Opening and broadening the international approach to setting standards, regulatory frameworks, and governance mechanisms for ICT-related activities, including areas such as Internet name assignments, privacy, cyber-crime, and commercial and financial transactions
• Assuring a better balance between women and men in the ICT-for-development programmes and activities.

The Task Force is organised around several convictions about ICT-for-development programmes: they need to be local; cooperation should be promoted at the sub-regional and regional levels; and the broad agenda should be set globally. Further, the Task Force is not envisaged as an operational or executing agency. For the execution of programmes and projects that it would wish to promote and support, it will identify appropriate entities and facilitate connections among interested parties. The Task Force represents in its composition the public and private sectors, civil society and the scientific community, and leaders of the developing and transition economies as well as the most technologically advanced.

Technolology, Economic Development.

Information and communication technologies are creating a new global information society - from which four billion of the world's people currently are excluded. The new global economy elevates the value of sophisticated information and information technology, while depreciating the return on raw commodities. In the process, many poor countries have become less competitive and more marginalised, and their struggle against poverty even more challenging.

However, the electronic revolution may yet prove to be a springboard to development. Some developing countries have become global leaders in production of hardware and software. Even in the poorest countries, access to computers and the Internet is growing. The rapid development of wireless access is a promising avenue for countries in which telephone lines are unreliable and limited in reach. ICT capability can catapult small and medium-sized firms in emerging economies, and even local artisan guilds in the poorest and most isolated regions directly into regional, national, and global markets.

The impetus for the Task Force derives from an April 2000 meeting of independent experts from industry, academia, civil society, and government, convened by the UN.