World Telecommunication and Information Society Day

The first WSIS+20 preparatory meeting with Member States and observers will be held on 30 May 2025 at 3:00 p.m. in Conference Room 1 to discuss expectations and inform the intergovernmental process. In December 2003, the global community gathered in Geneva at the first phase of the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) , declaring a shared commitment to “build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented Information Society.” This milestone launched a sustained effort to harness information and communication technologies (ICTs) for sustainable development , initially contributing to the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). The resulting Geneva Plan of Action established 11 Action Lines to guide progress in key areas. The United Nations General Assembly recognized the outcomes of the Geneva phase in its resolution 59/2202 . The second phase of WSIS, held in Tunis in 2005, built upon the Geneva outcomes and adopted the Tunis Agenda, which addressed additional dimensions...

AI is reshaping the way the  United Nations  serves people and planet. The projects highlighted in this annual report reflect our shared conviction that #AIforGood is no longer a distant aspiration; it is a present-day imperative within and beyond the United Nations. Explore how to leverage the potential of AI to advance #GlobalGoals in this new compendium of #AIforGood use cases, projects and initiatives

  Efforts to strengthen information integrity are crucial to preserve and further advance the Sustainable Development Goals . Erosion of the integrity of the information ecosystem can worsen existing vulnerabilities in achieving the Goals, in particular for countries in the global South. Groups in situations of vulnerability and marginalization are disproportionately affected. The participation of greater numbers of women in the global workforce, for instance, is vital to achieve the Goals . However, in addition to discriminatory laws and policies that exist in many countries, gender-based hate speech, disinformation and violence are used to systematically subjugate women by silencing and pushing them out of the public sphere. This can have devastating and long-lasting consequences for women’s participation, suppressing women’s voices and fuelling self-censorship, causing professional and reputational damage and jeopardizing hard-won progress in gender equality. Efforts to expl...

    The Global Initiative on AI and DataCommons is a program and collaborative platform to  Support the implementation of beneficial AI-based solutions to accelerate progress towards the 2030 Agenda for  Sustainable Development Goals . It is now initiating a public collaborative effort named “ Project Resilience ”. The vision, in  The continuity of efforts towards AI for the common good , is to create a public AI service where a global community of innovators and thought leaders can enhance and utilize a collection of data and AI approaches both in the context of the current pandemic and for similar future challenges. The goal is to collaboratively Design and build an open AI system that could inform and help tackle globaldecision-augmentation problems .