The 15th meeting of the Telecommunications Development Advisory Group (TDAG) of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) was held last 24-26 February in Geneva, chaired by Vladimir Minkin of Russia.
This meeting was the last before the World Telecommunications Development Conference (WTDC), the top body in the ITU Telecommunications Development Sector (ITU-D), due to be held from this 24 May to 4 June. For this reason, the work basically focused on Conference preparations, specifically on:
- consolidation of results from the various WTDC-10 Regional Preparatory Conferences;
- consideration of reports from the working groups (WGs) on private sector issues and human resources development, as well as from the ITU-D study groups, which also report directly to WTDC;
- discussion of various member state proposals for WTDC, some of which have already garnered some consensus in the group, while others will be reviewed by their authors in light of comments made at the meeting, which in both cases should facilitate their approval at the Conference.
The gathering also revised the section referring to ITU-D in the Union’s proposed 2012-2015 Strategy Plan currently being drawn up by an ITU Council WG. The version now prepared by TDAG will be submitted to WTDC-10 for validation and subsequent approval at the Plenipotentiary Conference (Guadalajara, 4-24 October 2010), which should adopt the said strategy plan for the next four-year period.
As usual, this TDAG meeting also proceeded to review application of the ITU-D operational plan for the previous year (2009), as well as the main activities and initiatives of the Telecommunications Development Bureau (BDT) since the last meeting, which in this case was extended to an overall assessment of the cycle that will end at the next WTDC.
The participants paid special attention to the recent tragedy in Haiti and congratulated the ITU secretariat and BDT in particular for the rapid reaction and inestimable support for establishing emergency communications and rebuilding communications infrastructures in general in that country.
Plans call for the next TDAG meeting to be held in June 2011.
