IGF 2020 NRIs Collaborative Session: Data utilization for sustainability

NRIs Collaborative Session: Data utilization for sustainability

Theme: Data

Policy Questions: 

• How does data help the economic development of people on local levels?
• How does data affect our environment?
• What concretely Spain, Lebanon and Benin multistakeholder communities’ have done on utilizing data for improving lives of people? 
• Are there examples where data negatively impacted people in these countries?

Relevance to Theme and Internet Governance: 

Data, gathered through the ICTs, is proven to be a major contributor to an  inclusive economic development. However, on local levels, the ways the data is gathered and utilized are different. This session will aim to look at those specificities, drawing upon the experiences from the national IGFs in Benin, Lebanon and Spain.

Description: 

[Benin IGF input] Digital technologies are making a significant contribution to the implementation of the 17 sustainable development objectives, notably objective 9 relating to health. Benin became aware of this and adopted a national cyber health strategy in 2017. The vision of eHealth states that by 2021, the Beninese health system will offer better health care to all its users by removing each of the barriers linked to quality, equity, equality, accessibility, availability and speed thanks to the contribution of eHealth. The implementation of this strategy made it possible to debate the security of information, responsibility, offence, management of medical confidentiality, the legal and regulatory aspects to be put in place. It was suggested to insist on the confidentiality of information, the protection of personal data, the preservation of the integrity of users, the sensitization of health workers on the risks they run, their training and implementation. place of a regulation to limit the excesses. This strategy promotes mobile health solutions (Mhealth). By way of illustration, the “mobile” solution of the NGO-ANCRE makes it possible to improve the health of Beninese families by strengthening the implementation and scaling up of the High Impact Intervention Package (PIHI) . We also have initiatives led by startups. These include: Kea Medicals, Go Medical, Pass santé musso, Dit moi doc,  It is important to question the processing of the data collected by these applications and how it improves the lives of local people.

[Spain IGF input] The Polytechnical University of Madrid (UPM), is studying with the support of Facebook, the impact of the introduction of Information and Communication Technologies on the United Nation Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the 2030 year. It has been seen that the adoption of these technologies is associated with important progress toward the achievement of these goals in several aspects like poverty reduction, good health, quality of education or economic growth. However statistical studies also show a negative association between the progress in digitalization and the goals associated to climate action and natural environment protection. While geographic areas with low levels of Internet penetration show good progress toward the achievement in these goals, the performance of areas with high digitalization levels is still poor. It is necessary to study what should be the best digitalization paths to ensure that the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies help to maximize the progress in the achievements of the Sustainable Development Goals. Collecting anonymized data from the use of digital services, like social networks, can provide very valuable information to understand the user behaviours and the impact of the digital technologies adoption on SDG achievements.

The stakeholders that are sponsoring the activities of the Spanish IGF are contributing to these studies and the results will be shared at the IGF annual meeting.

[Lebanon IGF]  How does Lebanon respond to the COVID-19 through ICTs?

To cope with the spread of the Coronavirus, The Lebanese Government and the National incumbent operator OGERO took a set of measures to ensure the continuity of service provision and the equitable responsible use of the Internet. These measures  include:

1- doubling, free of charge,  the ceiling of Internet consumption and speed for the unlimited packages, for its users encouraging citizens to stay confined at home and to conduct their work at a distance. This also aimed at enabling students to continue their studies online. A list of white pages, the educational pages, was defined to be used free of charge by students.

2- OGERO has launched an awareness campaign calling for reasonable use of the Internet, in particular by the number of computers connected simultaneously or by reducing the quality of videos on YouTube. Noting that OGERO is maintaining local caches for the major OTT content (YouTube,  Netflix, Facebook..) so its National Broadband network carried easily the surge in traffic. Some extra capacity was added where needed mainly between the major regions and Beirut to handle the additional demand.

3- OGERO is continuously upgrading its capacity on its submarine cables and increasing the size of its international peering links in order to meet the increasing demand of the Lebanese market but in the COVID -19 situation preparations are currently undergoing to increase the international capacity to respond to the additional Internet demand without straining the links.



 Format of the Session: Interactive roundtable discussion

Expected Outcomes:  

Understanding specific challenges and examples of good practices on local levels.

Discussion Facilitation: 

The moderator will follow the agreed set of policy and will allow for introductory, case study remarks by the NRIs speakers. This will be followed by engaging other present participants into developing an interactive discussion.

Online participation: 

A dedicated online moderator will be placed next to the onsite moderator. All participants will be using the online speaking queue to be treated equally in their requests for interventions. All input presentations will be made available at the IGF website and links will be shared via the online tool.

Co-Organizers and delegates speakers:

1. Argentina IGF - Dr. Olga Cavalli
2. Benin IGF - Dr. Amessinou Kossi
3. Lebanon IGF - Ms. Zeina Bou Harb
4. Spain IGF - Dr. Felix Hernandez-Gil

Moderator: Mr. Giacomo Mazzone

Online/chat moderator: Ms. Harimino Rakotondrainibe, Madagascar IGF

Rapporteur: Ms. Muriel Alapini

Connection to SDGs:

• GOAL 1: No Poverty

• GOAL 2: Zero Hunger

• GOAL 3: Good Health and Well-being

• GOAL 4: Quality Education

• GOAL 5: Gender Equality

• GOAL 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

• GOAL 7: Affordable and Clean Energy

• GOAL 8: Decent Work and Economic Growth

• GOAL 9: Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

• GOAL 10: Reduced Inequality

• GOAL 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities

• GOAL 12: Responsible Consumption and Production

• GOAL 13: Climate Action

• GOAL 14: Life Below Water

• GOAL 15: Life on Land

• GOAL 16: Peace and Justice Strong Institutions

• GOAL 17: Partnerships to achieve the Goal