Published on Digital Transformation

Celebrating 10 years of Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development

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Over the last several years, information and communication technologies (ICTs) have been a critical component of human and social development around the world. ICTs have helped drive economies, revolutionize education, and improve government’s service delivery and citizens’ engagement. But who collects and measures the data to show the crucial impact of the expanding information society?

For the past decade, the Partnership on Measuring ICT for Development has worked toward putting together a framework to improve the availability and quality of official ICT statistics, including use of computers, the Internet and mobile phones by people around the world. The World Bank and 12 partner organizations have led this effort, and will celebrate 10 years of achievement on June 12, 2014.

The milestone will be commemorated and discussed during the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS+10) in Geneva, Switzerland. This event will include ICT ministers, government officials, civil society, private sector staff, and experts from across the globe.

Some of the Partnership’s achievements include:
  • Developing international standards
  • Collecting and disseminating ICT statistics
  • Defining a core list of ICT indicators endorsed by the United Nations Statistical Commission The core list has served as the basis for the collection of internationally comparable ICT statistics worldwide
  • Publishing a midterm review of WSIS and a statistical framework for measuring the WSIS targets in order to monitor outcomes
  • Enhancing ICT statistics worldwide through the provision of training and technical workshops at regional and national levels
  • Coordinating the production of ICT statistics and establishing task groups to work on new dimensions and aspects of the information society, such as gender, e-government, ICT-related employment, ICT services/ICT-enabled services and e-waste
The World Bank is proud to be part of this Partnership*, and looks forward to many more years of collaboration, innovation and positive change through better understanding of ICTs. If you’re interested in cross-country comparable ICT data, please take a look at the Little Data Book on Information and Communication Technology 2014 at http://data.worldbank.org/products/data-books/little-data-book-on-info-communication-tech.

*The current Partnership members are: International Telecommunication Union (ITU), Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Statistical Office of the European Communities (Eurostat), United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs (UNDESA), United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP), United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), UNESCO Institute for Statistics (UIS), United Nations Environment Programme/Secretariat of the Basel Convention (UNEP/SBC), The United Nations University Institute for the Advanced Studies of Sustainability (UNU-IAS SCYCLE), and the World Bank.

Authors

Roger Burks

Online Communications Officer

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