Sub-theme II: Building productive capacity
and international competitiveness
 
Presentations
 
16. Mr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Chairman and CEO, Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization
(TAGO), and Vice-Chair of the UN ICT Task Force, emphasized the crucial importance of education in capacity building and called on UNCTAD to consider giving education greater emphasis in the pre-Conference negotiating text or making it a separate theme. UNCTAD should play a leading role in the preparations for the second phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), to be held in Tunis in 2005, including monitoring the implementation of the Plan of Action adopted during the first phase of WSIS. UNCTAD should participate actively in the current discussion on Internet governance and ICT for security, in close collaboration with the UN ICT Task Force and the ICC, and it should assist developing countries in the design of ICT policies and in the development of e-business capacities.  It should devise a proposal for a Special Drawing Right (SDR) system in support of the global solidarity fund to help bridge the "Digital Divide", and it should carry out policy research into other new and emerging technologies, such as bioinformatics, nanotechnology, and biotechnology, with a view to helping developing countries formulate relevant policies in these areas.
 
17. On the issue of investment, greater attention should be given to measures that help localize national capital.  On the issue of regional approaches, he called on UNCTAD to re-establish its activities focusing specifically on the Arab region.  The Arab Regional Network (ARN) of the UN ICT Task Force would be ready to work with UNCTAD on paragraphs 77-80 of the pre-Conference negotiating text, and TAGO was ready to participate as a private sector partner.  Lastly, wealth creation did not automatically translate into social benefits, and he called on UNCTAD to address the social dimension in its work on globalization.  He was making available to the Preparatory Committee a background document on how ICT could contribute to enhancing productivity and business competitiveness in developing countries, from the business perspective.
Subtheme IV: Partnership for development
 
Presentations
44. Mr. Talal Abu-Ghazaleh, Chairman and CEO, Talal Abu-Ghazaleh Organization
(TAGO), and Vice Chair of the UN ICT Task Force, said that the ICT for Development (ICT4D) partnerships that would be launched at UNCTAD XI would involve practical examples of business applications of ICT.  The applications included activities to enable developing countries to take full advantage of free and open-source software; an e-tourism initiative to give countries the technical means to promote, market, and sell their tourism services online; activities to improve the access of SMEs to finance and e-finance, mainly for short-term working capital and trade requirements; a program to identify a set of core (and comparable) e-measurement and ICT indicators that could be collected by all countries; and UNCTAD's participation in the Global ePolicy Resource Network (ePol-NET).  The UN ICT Task Force itself was an excellent example of a partnership approach to the spread of ICT in developing countries.

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