The United Nations Secretary-General recently approved the launch of the Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technologies and Development (GAID). The Alliance has been formed on the basis of extensive consultations within and outside the United Nations system over the past year.

The Global Alliance offers a platform to engage the private sector and civil society in the effort to integrate the outcomes of the WSIS and the 2005 World Summit. Its mission will be to contribute to advancing the broader United Nations development agenda, including the Millennium Development Goals, by providing a multi-stakeholder forum for an open, inclusive, and cross-sectoral policy dialogue on the role of ICT in development.

The Global Alliance will function primarily as a decentralized network, open to the participation of all stakeholders, including Governments, business, civil society and international organizations. The policy dialogue it will engage in will be geared to supporting exchanges of experiences, knowledge-sharing and best practices. The Alliance will build on and seek to link up existing initiatives and networks and promote synergies among them, so as to avoid duplication and foster mutual reinforcement of on-going efforts. It will make extensive use of the latest web-based collaborative technologies thus, minimizing the need for physical meetings. 

The Alliance will address core issues related to the role of ICT in economic development and eradication of poverty, employment and enterprise in pro-poor growth scenarios, with particular focus on health, education, gender, youth, disabled and disadvantaged segments of society. We envision that groups of participants will coalesce around specific topics of mutual interest in collaborative networks.

The inaugural meeting of the Alliance was held in Kuala Lumpur 19-20 June 2006, generously hosted by the Government of Malaysia. The outcome statement of this meeting is available at http://www.un-gaid.org/kl06/kl_outcome.html

Tatiana Ershova, IIS General Director, was invited to join the GAID Panel of Advisors. José Antonio Ocampo, UN Under-Secretary-General, wrote in his letter to Ms. Ershova: "You have played a critical role in advancing the objectives of the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) and in helping to promote a transforming vision for a universal and inclusive Information Society. Your contribution to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals with the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) has been widely recognized. In view of your leadership and vast experience, it gives me great pleasure to invite you to be a member of the GAID Panel of Advisors."