His Excellency, the Prime Minister, Dr. Mohamed Kamal El Ganzouri met today with ITU Secretary-General, Dr. Hamadoun I. Touré, coming to Egypt in an official visit for a couple of days.
Dr.Touré discussed with Egyptian officials the current preparations to participate at the World Summit that is scheduled to be held from 5-7 March 2012 in Doha, Qatar, under the slogan “Connect the Arab World”.
Also, ITU Secretary-General, Dr. Touré is to coordinate with the Egyptian officials concerning the recent updates related to this summit. This meeting was attended by the minister of Communications and Information Technology, Dr. Mohamed Salem.
Connect Arab Summit is part of Connect the World intiative series by 2015, which has been launched many years ago by the ITU. This Summit brings together all countries in the Arab region..A number of world leaders, top government leaders, concerned ministers, telecommunications regulatory authorities’ leaders, top officials of the communications industry and international and regional organizations are the main attendees of the summit.
This summit is assigned to study the means to provide necessary human, financial and technical resources to boost the development of ICT sector, considered as the engine of the world economy prosperity and the sustainable development in the Arab region, especially the Arab Spring countries.
During Kamel and Touré meeting, Egypt’s official request to the ITU to host the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the World Telecommunication Development Conference (WTDC) respectively in 2014.
The WSIS is an international summit during which the world leaders adopts necessary mechanisms to make use of the potential of the digital rev to serve humanity.
Furthermore, the WTDC aims at setting the ICT development priorities, in addition to reviewing the relevant policies and specifying the ITU development strategies along the coming four years.
Egypt is highly interested in hosting such these international major events, due to the huge political and economic gains that will be in favor of the national interest in this sector.
This also aims at emphasizing Egypt’s potential to host and organize such international conferences and world key events in addition to stressing on Egypt’s distinguished participation.
This also takes part in restoring Egypt’s international status as a key player for the international ICT community. Participating at formulating the agenda of these international events enables Egypt to make its mark and affect the events’ outputs and recommendations. This could help serving Egypt’s national interests and support its approaches on the regional and international levels.