WSIS+20 Side Event: Linguistic and cultural diversity: for an inclusive digital environment.

This activity will be organized in close collaboration not only with member countries of La Francophonie that actively support this fight for diversity, but also with other interested institutional and non-institutional partners, as well as other language groups (in particular Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking groups).

The Francophonie seeks to make the voices of French speakers heard and to put the priorities of its member countries at the forefront of discussions. In particular, we want to emphasize the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity in digital content as a tool for digital inclusion.
The digital environment must reflect the reality and diversity of the world so that the benefits of digital technologies are not reserved for a small minority of individuals and countries that are mainly monocultural and monolingual. This challenge is even more pressing at a time of exponential growth in AI tools that are built on the corpus of data from the internet.
The objectives of this high-level event are therefore to:

1) Raise awareness of the crucial role of cultural and linguistic diversity;
2) Conceptualize and describe in concrete terms the link between diversity and digital inclusion;
3) Bring together a large coalition of stakeholders around this issue, including Member States involved in negotiations on the architecture of global digital and AI governance;
4) Define how this objective could be translated into concrete actions that could be taken by these same member countries in the context of international negotiations.

Watch the WSIS+20 Side Event: Linguistic and cultural diversity: for an inclusive digital environment!

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