XX Infopoverty World Conference

Infopoverty

Rome [ENA] The COVID-19 pandemic is not only the greatest global health crisis since the creation of the United Nations 75 years ago, it is also a humanitarian crisis, a socio-economic crisis, a security crisis, and a human rights crisis. The United Nations system-wide response to COVID-192 is based on three pillars: a large-scale, coordinated, comprehensive health response; a wide-ranging effort to safeguard lives

and livelihoods; and a transformative recovery process. On 4th and 5th December 2020 the Infopoverty World Conference, has been held at the United Nations Headquarters in NewYork, and has been organized by the Observatory on Digital Communication and the Permanent Mission of Italy. The Conference aimed at pointing out the most innovative solutions and the best practices developed with the United Nations system, governments and the civil society, to encourage the fight to poverty.

The Objective of the Infopoverty Programme and Infopoverty World Conference is to help the poorest and disadvantaged populations in the developing world through the use of Information Telecommunication Technologies (ICTs). The conference, since its foundation, pursued the mission of fighting poverty, providing innovative technological applications that can help a large mass of poor people who are far from the attention of the multinationals and risk being even more exploited in the years to come.

The first step is to solve their primary need in terms of eservices:education, medical assistance, ability to produce food, and finally e-governance. Providing basic welfare for all and transferring knowledge is the key to development, as it is in the spirit of the Infopoverty Program and the partnership with important Institutions that launch projects through the Global Platform for eservices. The real task is to show how it is essential and feasible to involve all those people left behind so that they can benefit from the digital revolution and can move towards a digital society that is democratic and physically and mentally healthy.

The digital society is emerging now without boundaries, horizontally, totally connected, and with a continuous transition between the virtual and the real world. This edition moved from the results of the previous one with a general discussion on the theme "Toward the Digital Society Inspired by SDGs: e-welfare for all, clean energy, circular economy", to the discussion on the nature of the digital society that will be constituted if all the SDGs will be achieved. The Conference investigated the different aspects of how the ICTs and the new technologies will work in terms of overcoming the gap between developed countries and the emerging ones, introducing sustainable solutions to fight poverty and climate change, promoting the economy,

ensuring a basic welfare to all through e-services and in the meanwhile preserving the cultural identities of each country and respecting the human rights . The Infopoverty Program experiments the guidelines issued by the Conference, applying the best practices that emerged in the field of new technologies for the development of disadvantaged communities, through the creation of ICT Villages. The ICT Villages model follows a process of intervention flexible and easily replicable in many areas of the globe, providing various services designed to promote endogenous and sustainable development process.