17 May each year is an occasion to celebrate World Telecommunication Day. There is no need to recall that this date commemorates the signing of the first International Telegraph Convention and the birth of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU).
The theme chosen for World Telecommunication Day 2020 is particularly noteworthy in the current context, marked by the many consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in numerous countries around the world. Indeed, “Connect 2030: ICTs for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)” represents an exceptional opportunity for the whole of humanity, and for our country Benin in particular, to draw our attention to the importance and relevance of policies and strategies in the Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) sector.
These undeniably constitute the milestones to be laid, which everyone recognises as the foundation of current and future policies for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. We recognise, indeed, that they will make possible, among other things, improved healthcare, access to education, the development of infrastructure and innovation, the establishment of smart systems for managing access to water and sanitation, and the use of better-adapted agricultural methods to reduce hunger and build our resilience to climate change, etc.
In the fervour of these convictions, which underpin the development of global and regional policies aimed at achieving the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030, Benin has not lagged behind. The Government of President Patrice TALON has drawn up a vast action programme aimed at “relaunching the economic and social development of our country in a sustainable way”. In the ICT sector in particular, the Ministry of Digital Affairs and Digitalisation is leading the implementation of flagship projects aimed at “transforming Benin into the digital services platform of West Africa for accelerated growth and social inclusion”.
These flagship projects and the related reforms, together with the regulatory decisions taken, have generated public and private investment that has increased the internet penetration rate, in particular mobile internet, which doubled from 24.97% in 2016 to 52.80% in 2019, at a time when, according to the latest ITU data published in 2019, nearly 3.6 billion people are still not connected to the internet, most of them living in the least developed countries where, on average, barely two people in ten are connected.
The rise in the internet penetration rate between 2016 and 2019 has created favourable connectivity conditions for the use of the digital solutions and platforms set up by the digital agencies and sectoral ministries. These include the Beninese administration’s platform, service-public.bj, set up by the Government to give citizens and businesses access to public services 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Likewise, in higher education, the Government has just provided our public universities with an e-learning platform that allows students to study online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, attend remote classes via videoconference and access the teaching resources posted online by their lecturers. In addition, better management of public finances has been made possible by an in-depth digitalisation of public finance administration, marked among other things by the introduction of electronic VAT invoicing machines and the establishment of online filing and payment of taxes and duties.
ITU’s Connect 2030 vision is also about reducing inequalities, and in Benin, the results achieved in 2G coverage, combined with access to USSD codes, have greatly helped to accelerate financial inclusion through the development of money transfer services. Indeed, the growing mobile money market, estimated at nearly one million transactions a day covering financial flows of around eight billion CFA francs, is reducing the volume of cash in circulation and points to a substantial contribution to economic growth and, even more, to the eradication of poverty.
Similarly, the deployment of fibre optics in our municipalities and the Community Digital Points initiative have brought broadband closer to more than one million of our fellow citizens throughout the national territory through the establishment of internet access points open to the public.
Challenges remain, however, and they must be met by the public authorities and the regulatory and supervisory bodies. These challenges include securing transactions and guaranteeing digital trust, which is why our country has taken cybersecurity initiatives that have raised it to 8th place in Africa in the Global Cybersecurity Index; and far from resting on these laudable results, the Government is strengthening this position by adopting a three-year digital security strategy, the implementation of which has already begun.
Helping to reduce inequalities also means taking gender into account in the digital sector, by setting up digital rooms in girls’ secondary schools, encouraging girls to take up digital entrepreneurship and celebrating International Girls in ICT Day through useful activities such as the webinar on digital careers and the introduction to coding
Ultimately, it is through this determination to harness ICTs, reflected in the above-mentioned actions of the Government and the private sector, that our country is today among the countries that count in the digital sector, countries that leverage ICTs to achieve the SDGs, for the benefit of the people, for economic growth and for social inclusion.
Measuring our country’s progress in the digital sector against the Sustainable Development Goals gives meaning and direction to digital development policy and inevitably shapes thinking on the issues and challenges our country must address by 2030. I would therefore like to take the opportunity of celebrating this Day to invite the stakeholders of the digital ecosystem to step up their commitment to developing a benchmark digital economy in Benin.
Thank you.