Bamako 2002 ConferenceUNESCO prepares for the Consultations with non-governmental organizations African regional
meeting/ WSIS official regional preparatory meeting A. Introduction 1. The International Telecommunication Union Council (ITU), in close cooperation with other interested United Nations Agencies, will organize the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in December 2003 in Geneva, Switzerland, and in 2005 in Tunis, Tunisia. 2. UNESCO wishes to contribute to the WSIS preparation process a common and consensual vision of the ultimate goals of the information society by encouraging the broadest possible participation by decision-makers, professional communities, representatives of civil society, bilateral and multilateral partners and the private sector in a debate on the conditions for the development of an information society open to the greatest number. 3. In a first round of consultations, UNESCO has invited non-governmental international and regional organizations and professional associations to contribute to the WSIS preparation process focusing on the challenges of providing for all an affordable and equitable access to information. These four consultative meetings took place in February 2002, in Paris, and gathered around fifty participants from worldwide-represented NGOs and networks of NGOs.
4. After this first round of consultations, UNESCO plans to enlarge its consultative process to embrace the largest number of NGOs and representatives of civil society. Regional consultative meetings are an essential part of this process, because it is the best way to involve organizations from developing countries and to take into account specific regional problems and issues. 5. To prepare WSIS and, more precisely, its first preparatory conference ("PrepCom I") that will take place from the 1 to 5 July 2002 in Geneva, the WSIS Executive Secretariat is organizing its first regional meeting in Bamako, Mali, from 28 to 30 May 2002. This meeting will gather a number of heads of states and heads of agencies. In fact, Prepcom I is intended to make a final statement on the issues that will be discussed during the Summit. 6. As an introduction to this
meeting, UNESCO has been invited by the Executive Secretariat to organize an NGO meeting
to meet the concerns of African civil society regarding the introduction and use of ICTs
in its continent and its inclusion in the emerging Information Society. This meeting will
take place just before the opening of the Conference on 26 and 27 February, and will last
one day and half. C. Aim of the meeting 7. As part of the consultative process that UNESCO has launched with NGOs to prepare the World Summit on the Information Society, the Bamako meeting will take, as a basis, the final report of the consultative meetings that were held in February 2002. This document deals with a great number of issues centred around four main themes: · Infostructures in developing
countries 8. This report is the synthesis of the proposals made by the NGOs during the four meetings in February. This document is destined to evolve during the whole consultative process until December 2003. The Bamako meeting will be a milestone in the involvement of developing countries' NGOs. 9. The participants in Bamako's consultative meeting will be requested to formulate, on behalf of the professional communities they represent, a set of proposals to be included in the Declaration of Principles and Plan of Action that the WSIS is expected to adopt. These proposals will be consolidated by UNESCO into statements that will be forwarded to the WSIS Executive Secretariat.
10. This NGO consultation will gather about twenty NGOs and will last one and a half days. It will open with a plenary session aimed at presenting the WSIS and the preparatory process launched by UNESCO. This inaugural plenary session will also allow for the examination of the basic principles identified during the first four meetings. 11. The second part of the meeting will comprise a session of thematic workshops on the issues raised during the first four meetings. It will be the occasion to discuss more specifically the principles and actions that must be undertaken in the above four domains. 12. The last part of the meeting will be a plenary session aimed at endorsing the final documents (Principles and Plan of action) that will have been discussed during the meeting. The consolidated document will be transmitted to the WSIS Executive Secretariat and to the participants of the Bamako meeting as civil society's views on the WSIS issues.
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