Speech of Prof. Dr. Ali M. Abbasov, Minister of Communications and High Technologies in the 20th GCC eGovernment and eServices Conference Dubai, UAE

Dr. Al Kamali,
Excellencies, distinguished participants,

First of all I would like to express my appreciation to Mr. Ali Al Kamali for his warm words about Azerbaijan and in return I want also to convey the same kind words about the Emirates and particularly the city of Dubai that host this very important event. And I thank you for the invitation.

It is great to be among the participants of the 20th conference organized by the Gulf Cooperation Council and the supporting companies and agencies, and I'm very happy that the Eurasian Connectivity Alliance initiated and hosted by Azerbaijan - is also one of the strategic partners of the event.

The GCC plays an important role internationally, in regional cooperation, in problem solving, and so often brings together business and governments for discussion and dialogue in many fields, including in digital challenges and opportunities. And this conference dedicated to the electronic public services and it is much more important for our region since we are located between the two highly developed parts of the world - North America and Eastern Europe considered as the West, and the Asia Pacific region. And Azerbaijan is located between Europe and Asia, and is geographically classified as part of extended Europe; but from the deep history Azerbaijan has been on the crossroad between the West and East, North and South. Thus, we attach a significant importance to this conference and we hope the conference will bring new opportunities for development of not only the Gulf region but also non-Gulf and particularly neighbouring regions.

The e-government and e-services are not only the tools for communications between the governments and citizens as well as the SMEs but they are also real platforms, for reduction of poverty and unemployment.

The point which I would like to focus on is related mostly with developing countries. It is a case. The e-government platform is basically for the poor people, for the people with low income. They need the e-government services more than the people with high income. In my country one of the target of e-government is to fight against corruption, to fight against bureaucracy to ensure that all the level of people to benefit from the services. And it is about how the e-government and public services create value. But you never reach the expected results if all these services are not reaching out to all the citizens and mostly the people with low income. And Azerbaijan recently has adopted the second strategy on building the information society. The two programs, the two points are very important for this conference. By the target set by 2020 all services should be provided online and must be affordable and accessible for all. The governmental program in Azerbaijan is being realized in two levels. First - service provided by public institutions via e-government portal which is running under the Ministry of Communications and High Technologies. Now, the Cabinet of Ministers of Azerbaijan has confirmed 417 public services. Now, around 300 of them are online and by end of 2020 we shall have them all accessible online.

Second issue is that how to ensure the accessibility particularly in the rural areas. It is a question of infrastructure. Now we have another state program on building fibre-optic network which is funding by the Oil Fund of the Azerbaijan. This program will be ended in 2017 and cost of the overall project is about half a billion US dollars. And by the end of 2017, 85 percent of the Azerbaijani people and all the households will have an access to high speed internet and the speed in the rural areas will be more than 30 megabit and in urban areas more than 100 megabit.

And the other aspect of Azerbaijani policy, it is most the important issue how to cooperate with the regional and neighbouring countries. From our point of view, most important aspect for cooperation in the region is to assist countries that need funding for updating their ICT infrastructure and service capacity. Azerbaijani Government has initiated in 2009 the project so called Trans-Eurasian Information Super Highway which was supported by the UN General Assembly in 2009 and 2012. In September of last year, 67th Session of the General Assembly issued a special, resolution supporting the initiative of Azerbaijan on creation of Eurasian Connectivity Alliance and I have to thank all the Gulf countries, Arabian countries that fully supported this initiative of Azerbaijan.

You will hear a detailed presentation tomorrow about the Eurasian Connectivity Alliance. The target is to bring the connectivity to the region. To improve the countries’ infrastructure, digital infrastructure and to help to increase development of national and inter-regional content which is much more important for all of us.

At the first stage, there are two projects, the one that I mentioned, Trans-Eurasian Information Super Highway and the second is the EPEG. EPEG is European Persian Express Gateway. This optical highway begins from Frankfurt and going through Russia, Azerbaijan, Iran, Gulf and ends in Oman and it has already been launched. These two projects are our contributions to newly created Eurasian Connectivity Alliance. And by recommendation of the UN General Assembly Azerbaijan and the ITU will implement the first stage for the process of establishment and then we are expecting this Alliance to be a regional cooperation platform. Now the Secretariat is funded by the Government of Azerbaijan, and we are about to host the special conference on establishment of the Steering Committee. And after, we hope this Alliance will take off and will involve a lot of governments also.

Another approach for empowering the Alliance is to create the Trust Fund under the joint efforts of the UNDP and Azerbaijani Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In upcoming September we are going to sign an official agreement even we have started with the work with Afghanistan. With support of my Ministry and the International Development Agency of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs we assist Afghanistan to build e-government there.

The activity of the Alliance is not limited with bringing the connectivity to the region by the terrestrial channels only, but to use the space infrastructure also. Now there are Arabian satellite, Turkish, Malaysian, Chinese, Russian and recently Azerbaijan has launched its first commercial satellite and we hope to bring connectivity to the different areas with different and difficult relief by using the satellite communications. And as I'm here I want to take this opportunity to call all participant countries to join this initiative and to cooperate on inter-regional issues. And I believe that the Emirates and Datamatix as a company providing this type of conferences will respond.

Once again, I want to thank personally Dr. Al Kamali, and the people of the Emirates who warmly hosted us here in Dubai.

Thanks you for your attention.