PRESS CONFERENCE BY UNITED NATIONS GLOBAL ALLIANCE FOR INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

At a Headquarters press conference today, Craig Barrett, Intel chief and Chairman of the United Nations Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID), said the new initiative would perform a central facilitating role for accelerating the digital revolution in developing countries.

The inaugural meeting of the Alliance had been held in Kuala Lumpur 19-20 June, and the Steering Committee was scheduled to meet this afternoon, he added.  More than 500 participants had come together from throughout the world, representing Governments, business, civil society and the media, to help launch the Alliance, which aims to harness the potential of the information revolution to advance development and promote the achievement of world anti-poverty goals.

Calling the Global Alliance’s challenge “straightforward but not simple”, Mr. Barrett said the four general priorities were education; health care (bringing health care expertise to remote areas); governance (the use of information technology for increased citizen participation); and economic development.

The Global Alliance had already facilitated a successful transformation in a remote region of the Amazon in Brazil, where, with the help of computer and communication companies, and in cooperation with the Government, a community centre, two local public schools and a health clinic now received broadband connectivity to the rest of Brazil and the world.  “If you could do this in the middle of the Amazon, you could do it anywhere essentially on the face of the Earth,” he said.

Responding to a question on whether GAID would have contact with International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and what role the ITU would be playing, Mr. Barrett noted that there was indeed “some degree of overlapping interest”.  The Alliance was, after all, not a funding agency, but a facilitator and, as such, would work with ITU and many other organizations to achieve its objectives.

José Antonio Ocampo, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, added that the Global Alliance had been, in a sense, a creation of the World Summit on the Information Society, and it was clear that the major mechanism would have to be multi-stakeholder partnerships among Governments, the private sector and civil society.

In response to a question regarding which countries the Global Alliance would target, Mr. Barrett said the obvious targets were least developed countries, which were characterized by few internet users, low connectivity and a lack of hardware and software.  Latin America, much of the Asian and African continents, Eastern Europe and the Middle East were all possible targets.

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For information media • not an official record