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Cameroon: Can ITU Help Bridge the Digital Divide?
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Cameroon Tribune (Yaoundé)
8 April 2008
Posted to the web 8 April 2008
Lukong Pius Nyuylime
The organisation's Secretary General streamlines a workable strategy.
It will be hard to achieve the Millennium Development Goals without fully integrating the Information and Communication Technology component. This is the key idea that came out from the visit to Cameroon of Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
"We are reviewing all the projects and plans underway in order to meet the Millennium Development Goals in the Information and Communication technology", he told pressmen in Yaounde during his stay in the capital from April 03 to 05. According to the ITU official, the ICTs will be the key to meeting all the other MDGs. "We cannot talk about agriculture without E-agriculture, health without E-health, education without E-education, government without E-government, business without E-business", Toure underscored.
From every indication, the ITU is working out a strategy not only to help push the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals but to quicken the bridging of the digital divide. The time when electronic mails or telephone calls initiated from Africa and destined for Africa have to leave the African continent before coming back may soon be over. Meeting in Yaounde recently, precisely on February 18, internet service providers and economic actors from the Central and West African sub-regions, received on how to set up Internet Exchange Points in their various countries. An Internet Exchange Point (IXP) is a physical infrastructure that allows different internet service providers to exchange internet traffic between their networks by means of mutual agreements, which allow traffic to be exchanged without cost.
The main task of the ITU includes "Radio" radio spectrum, and organizing interconnection arrangements between different countries to allow international phone calls. It is one of the United Nations.
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On the basis of its objective, the International Telecommunication Union knows the whole challenge of bridging the digital divide. "Since my election, I have been able to convince our leaders to move forward with the MGDs in the ICTs from 2015 to 2012", Toure said. According to him, the key element is to have the right partnership, the right policy and conceive the right project. "I am convinced that in this field which is a profitable one, there are always partners and there will always be financing", he assured, stating that if good projects are conceived from the grassroots, they can be easily be implemented. "I have always advocated the fact that we will not, at the ITU conceive any development programme from Geneva. We will let the countries come up with their own development plans.", he concluded. In Cameroon, the UTU is working with the Telecommunication Regulatory Agency, telecommunication companies and the rest of the ICT industry.
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