Q1/2020 - Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development

On the sidelines of the Davos World Economic Forum, the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development launched a new campaign titled “Broadband Transforming Lives”. The campaign is intended to help improve access to broadband, especially in developing countries^[1]. At the meeting, Carlos M. Jarque, who represented the co-chair of the Commission, Carlos Slim Helú from Mexico, complained that 3.6 billion people were still offline. He said that the Commission wanted to help ensure that broadband was not considered a luxury good, but a basic infrastructure for everyone. Access to broadband was a human right. ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao called for new innovative financing models in the remaining decade to achieve the UN's sustainable development goals (SDG) by 2030. ITU and UNESCO, along with Carlos Slim Helú and Paul Kagame, President of Rwanda, are co-chairs of the Broadband Commission for Sustainable Development, which was founded in 2010. One of the Commission's main projects is the “ITU-UNICEF School Connectivity Project” (GIGA Project), which aims to provide access to broadband, especially for young people in the global South^[2].