Kingdom Participates in the WSIS Forum 2013 in Geneva

The World Summit on the Information Society Forum (WSIS Forum 2013) opened today in Geneva, organized by the International Telecommunication Union, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). Among the more than 1,000 participants were ministers and high-level representatives from more than forty United Nations member states.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is participating with a specialized delegation from a number of government entities as one of the strategic partners in this event. The delegation is headed by His Excellency the Governor of the Communications and Information Technology Commission and Chairman of the National Information Society Committee, Eng. Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al-Darrab. This forum is considered a global forum bringing together countries from all over the world, centered mainly on evaluating the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society and exchanging experiences and information on a broad range of key topics such as telecommunications and information technology infrastructure, capacity building, building trust and security in the use of information and communications technology, and linguistic diversity and local content.

During the opening session, the WSIS Project Prizes were awarded, and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia won two global United Nations awards in the field of telecommunications, information technology and e-government services. The Ministry of Higher Education won an award for the Safeer Program, an electronic system serving our students studying abroad on scholarships, and the Ministry of Education won an award for the electronic school-linking system.

In the high-level opening session dialogue, His Excellency the Governor answered a question on how the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia achieves the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society related to delivering telecommunications and information technology services despite its vast geographic area and the distances between cities and remote regions. In response, His Excellency the Governor of the Communications and Information Technology Commission explained that the state has, from an early stage, been keen to deliver telecommunications and information technology services to all residents of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and established, before the World Summit on the Information Society was held, the Communications and Information Technology Commission in 2001, which liberalized the telecommunications sector and stimulated competition to accelerate the deployment of telecommunications services, improve their quality and reduce their prices, and began establishing procedures and regulations, and adopted an approach of transparency and public consultation to attract investment and stimulate competition and growth in the telecommunications and information technology sector. As a result, the Kingdom achieved a success story in the mobile phone market, with its penetration rate exceeding 182% of the population, one of the highest rates globally, covering 99% of populated areas in the Kingdom. A number of service providers were also licensed in fixed and mobile telephony, data transmission, satellites, value-added services, Internet provision, and others. The rate of fiber-optic deployment has increased, exceeding 120,000 km so far. His Excellency indicated that the penetration rate of broadband availability and Internet use reached approximately 54% of the population, with annual growth reaching 16%.

As part of the Forum's activities, the Kingdom will, over the next two days, organize two workshops on its achievements in implementing the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society, with the participation of a number of entities represented on the National Information Society Committee, namely the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Higher Education, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, presenting and showcasing their electronic programs and services in line with the outcomes of the World Summit on the Information Society.