ITU and UN-Habitat collaborate in support of SDGs

Cities are home to 3.5 billion people, half of humanity, and this figure is projected to rise to 5 billion by 2030. Government, industry, academia, and civil society are working together to accelerate the digital transformation of cities and communities to meet today’s challenges and challenges to come.

A new Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) between the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) highlights their mutual commitment to collaborate in support of the innovation required to achieve the New Urban Agenda and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

ITU is the United Nations specialized agency for information and communication technologies (ICTs). UN-Habitat is the United Nations programme for human settlements and sustainable urban development.

The MoU supports the collaboration of ITU and UN-Habitat to advance human rights, promote social inclusion, and achieve sustainable urban development.

It supports the organizations in encouraging responsible investment and financing for smart city projects as well as inclusive dialogue around the support offered by digital technologies and related standards and guidelines.

The leadership of ITU and UN-Habitat welcomed the new MoU at a Virtual Forum on the Digital Transformation of Cities and Communities, co-organized by ITU and UN-Habitat on 7 December 2020.

“From climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, ICTs offer new solutions to the challenges facing cities and communities across the world,” said ITU Secretary-General Houlin Zhao.

“With this new collaboration agreement, ITU and UN-Habitat are committed to reducing spatial inequality and poverty in communities ? as well as strengthening climate action in urban environments ? to promote social inclusion and achieve sustainable urban development.”

UN-Habitat Executive Director Maimunah Mohd Sharif observed that: “Digital technologies and data offer new ways for urban managers to make informed decisions and strategic choices.

We need to build digital capacity and digital public infrastructure to ensure that the benefits of the digital revolution leave no one behind. By bringing together UN-Habitat and ITU, we have the potential to build the real people-centred smart cities of the future.”

The MoU is a new step in the collaboration of ITU and UN-Habitat, building on initiatives such as United for Smart Sustainable Cities (U4SSC), an initiative supported by 17 United Nations partners with the aim of achieving SDG11: ‘Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’.

This shared experience is now supporting a UN system-wide effort led by UN-Habitat to develop an Urban Monitoring Framework to strengthen the links between the national and local monitoring and reporting processes supporting sustainable urban development.

The effort benefits from cities’ experience with U4SSC Key Performance Indicators for Smart Sustainable Cities based on ITU standards, indicators that have been adopted by more than 100 cities to evaluate their progress towards smart city objectives and the SDGs.

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.
FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles.

Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully, we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking

More about Irish Tech News and Business Showcase here.
FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 50,000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully, we can share your story too and reach our global audience. We are agile, responsive, quick and talented, we look forward to working with you!

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at [email protected] or on Twitter: @SimonCocking