Three initiatives from Bangladesh have been placed in the list of championship in the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS-2024) award, compared to the Oscar of the IT sector. The summit is organized by the International Telecommunication Union of the United Nations in three categories. As the world’s only lifestyle gateway to education financial and health services in the Capacity building Category, the initiatives include Aspire to Innovate a2i’s ‘Shikkhak Batayan’; UNICEF Bangladesh’s menstrual cycle tracking app ‘OK’ for adolescent girls; and national video conferencing platform Boithok created by Bangladesh Computer Council’s BNDA team as a confident and secure IT initiative.
Among these initiatives, this year, the only winner medal achieved for the country is the national video conferencing platform Boithok, which has held more than 25,000 meetings for more than 5,000 hours since the pandemic caused by Corona. This victory came from more than a thousand projects submitted from 104 countries around the world. Based on 1.5 million votes received from different parts of the world and other factors, Bangladesh achieved the victory in the IT sector.
Zunaid Ahmed Palak, Minister of State for Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology of Bangladesh received this award from the hands of ITU Secretary General Doreen Bogdan-Martin on Tuesday at night (Bangladesh time) held in Geneva, Switzerland.
Accepting the award, he expressed his gratitude to Prime Minister’s ICT Advisor Sajeeb Wajed Joy for this honour. Palak said, he is the chief engineer of our digital Bangladesh. This innovative solution was created by our country’s programmers working at the Bangladesh Computer Council during the pandemic as part of the implementation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s Digital Bangladesh vision. Now this video conferencing platform is going to be a part of our daily life. I hope the young and smart programmers of our country will be able to provide more opportunities and solutions for the world besides meeting the national needs.
State Minister Palak attended the high-level event of the WSIS+20 Forum and the ministerial round table meeting before receiving the award. The meeting discussed global digital governance processes, ongoing trends and emerging technologies, WSIS activities for 2024 and post-2025 WSIS Shaping the Future of an Information Society. In the meeting, the Minister of State highlighted how the visionary leadership of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has improved innovation, economic growth, e-governance, service delivery and digital inclusion and literacy. Palak called on the WSIS and ITU societies to consider Internet connectivity as a fundamental right of citizens and to adopt a ‘global government’ and ‘indivisible world’ approach to establish policies, laws, guidelines and international governance on emerging technologies.
ITU awarded 72 champions in 18 categories this year. For this reason, 360 projects are selected in the initial stage out of 1049 projects.
