 Mr. Soon-hong Choi, the newly appointed Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, responsible for Information Technology will attend the fourth Web4Dev conference in Nairobi, to take place from 28-30 November, 2007. The conference, which is being hosted by UN-HABITAT, will bring together some 500 participants to discuss how the Internet can help accelerate achievement of the Millennium Development Goals. The conference promises to be a remarkable event with high level presentations, panel discussions and a wide menu of parallel workshop to respond to all participants’ interests. It has an outstanding list of presenters representing organizations from all over world, ranging from TATA Interactive-India, Gedaref Digital City-Sudan to GTZ-Germany, Internet Speech-USA, the Institute of Development Studies-UK among others. Several UN agencies have also lined up an impressive array of interesting sessions. The tour to the CISCO regional academy, which helps to educate the community in Kibera, should inspire participants to come up with new Internet solutions to help improve the conditions of the poorest of the poor. Kibera is one of the largest slums in Africa housing almost 1 million people crammed into 220 hectares of muddy, unpaved land with shacks as far as the eye can see. The presence of Mr. Choi will give participants from governments, civil society, the private sector and United Nations staff a chance to learn his vision for exploiting information and communication technologies for development and humanitarian work. Mr. Choi has 30 years of technical and management experience in the public and private sectors. He served as Head of Information Technology Services at the International Monetary Fund (IMF) from 2004 to February 2007. |
