Panellists from the World Bank, Columbia University, Microsoft, Artificial Intelligence in Medical Epidemiology (AIME) and Socrata came together for a Second Committee side event on 13 October organized by UN DESA's Division for Public Administration and Development Management, to discuss the role ICTs can play for achieving the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.
Speakers underlined that ICT have a huge potential to help accelerate progress towards the SDGs, even though they are not a short cut to development. They shared examples showing that technology can save lives and protect people, countries and their economies. One such example relates to predicting future disease outbreaks by compiling multiple variable through ICT. This can allow more proactive health measures.
SDGs also require sustainable public services delivery. ICTs can allow reliable service delivery as well as lower transaction costs. Measures can be implemented in this area without waiting for everyone to have access to smart phones for example.
At the same time, while digital technologies have spread rapidly globally, the broader development benefits from using these technologies have lagged behind. To get the most out of the digital revolution, countries need to work not only through ICT policies, but also by targeting ¡°analog complements¡±, as highlighted by a recent World Bank report.
Those include strengthening regulations that ensure competition among businesses, adapting workers¡¯ and other people¡¯s skills to the demands of the new economy, and ensuring that institutions are accountable. Other factors include investment friendly environment for public private partnerships and entrepreneurship, effective regulation policies, overcoming social challenges such as fear of technology. Of key concern is to bridge the gender digital divide, although there are areas where women are very actively using ICT (eg peer to peer lending).
Target 9.c of the SDGs (which calls for significantly increasing access to ICT and providing universal and affordable access to the Internet in least developed countries by 2020) will only be realized if we do things very differently. To achieve this target, it is was suggested that countries adopt enabling legal and regulatory environments that support competition, ease market entry, promote business confidence, lower transactional costs and ensure inter-operability.
Intellectual property and consumer rights are also critical. To address connectivity challenges, as well as more generally, collaboration among all stakeholders including public sector, private companies, and civil society, is needed.
Challenges in developing countries are different than those in developed countries and solutions must thus be tailored to the context of each country. For example, online payment solutions such as Apple Pay or Google Pay may not be suitable for developing countries. However, customized local scalable payment solutions, including mobile payments, can still decrease the transaction costs in developing countries.
Overall, the discussions highlighted action points and policy actions that may inform the Second Committee as it develops its resolution on ICT for development.