ICTP and ITU have forged a partnership to advance the frontiers of the telecommunication revolution in developing countries.

Dot Dash Digital

Fatima, a 30-year-old Nigerian woman, sits beneath a cloth canopy that screens both her and her merchandise from the blistering sun. The stand has been her place of business for more than a decade.
Sales have been good for the past several days and her stock of brightly coloured napkins, scarves and table cloths is running low. So she takes her cell phone from her handbag and places a call to her supplier. Within an hour, he delivers her order. Customers, meanwhile, have continued to come and go.
Just last year, if Fatima needed to restock her merchandise, she would have been forced to close her stall and walk to her supplier, placing her order in person. Two hours of work would be lost. That would mean fewer sales and less money to take home.
When you're living on US$3 a day, every sale counts and, with her cell phone in hand, Fatima has now been able to make more sales and earn more money, more often.
Hamadoun I. Toure, director of the International Telecommunication Union's (ITU) Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT), likes to tell this story when describing how new information technologies have transformed the lives of everyday people in the world's poorest nations.
And he has the numbers to back him up. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, mobile phone use has increased 300 percent a year for the past five years--a reflection of the broad appeal of this technology. ITU has sought to advance the use of cell phones and other new information technologies by seeking regulatory reform and encouraging investment from the private sector.
This isn't the first time that Toure's organisation has offered to steer new information technologies in the right direction. Indeed the venerable 140-year-old institution was created just 20 years after the discovery of the telegraph. At the dawn of the first telecommunications revolution, ITU's goals were twofold: to develop universal standards that would facilitate the use of the new technology and to promote widespread global access to a breakthrough communication tool.
ITU has continued to pursue these goals throughout its history and never more so than in the past two decades. Indeed bridging 'communication divides' has been at the heart of ITU's mandate ever since its inception. In effect, efforts to narrow the 'dot and dash divide' symptomatic of the telegraph era have been replaced by strategies to reduce the 'digital divide' characteristic of our computer age.
With the help of ICTP, Toure now hopes to lend a helping hand to universities in the developing world in their efforts to become full and equal partners in the use of email and the internet. This February, he visited ICTP to sign a 'cooperation agreement' with ICTP's director K.R. Sreenivasan. The agreement calls for the institutions to "collaborate for the advancement of resources and research and develop capabilities in the field of telecommunication science and technology in developing countries."

Sandro M. Radicella, Katepalli R. Sreenivasan, Hamadoun I. Touré and Ryszard Struzak

Toure hopes that "this new partnership will help meld ITU's 'connectivity' capabilities--through its strong ties to governments, private sector telecommunication companies and financial institutions--to ICTP's 'training and research' capabilities."
"ICTP," notes Sandro Radicella, head of the Centre's Aeronomy and Radiopropagation Laboratory (ARPL), "has been conducting extensive training activities for communication researchers and technicians from the developing world for more than a decade." The Centre has also taken a lead role in the transfer of knowledge and open-source technology to universities and research institutions throughout the South. And, through its eJournals Delivery Service, launched in 2001, it has sought to bring up-to-date scientific publications to scientists in more than 100 countries, including some of the world's least developed countries (see "Ready Access," News from ICTP, Spring 2003, p. 2, and "ICTP's eJournals Delivery Service," News from ICTP, Autumn 2001, p. 2).
"Our partnership with ICTP," says Toure, "is designed to help ITU achieve one of its major objectives: to cyber-connect all universities by 2015 and, equally important, to use this university-wide web to provide valuable information for improving university curricula and research, especially in the developing world."
In big ways and small, new communication technologies are radically transforming our world. Now ITU and ICTP are joining forces to help universities in the developing world build the infrastructure and skills that they need to reap the benefits that are inherent in these breakthrough technologies.

For additional information about ITU, see www.itu.int/home/index.html. For additional information about ICTP's Aeronomy and Radiopropagation Laboratory, see arpl.ictp.trieste.it.

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