State Minister Palak will receive the UN WSIS Prizes on May 28
Bangladesh Minister of State for Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak will receive the World Summit on Information Society (WSIS) Prizes-2024 at the forum held in Geneva, Switzerland on May 28, 2024, in recognition of his special contribution to the information and technology sector in the international arena. He will receive this award as the winner in the category of Building confidence and security in use of ICTs for the safe video conferencing system ' Boithok' made by the developers of the country under the initiative of the ICT department.
In an e-mail message from WSIS, it has been conveyed that, this honor is being awarded to the Bangladesh Computer Council-BCC for Boithok.
To address the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic, BCC developed a video conferencing platform called Boithok . So far 2,500+ meetings, conferences, seminars, workshops, online classes, webinars, policy discussions, trainings, job interviews, etc. have been successfully conducted using this platform.
State Minister for Posts, Telecommunications and Information Technology Zunaid Ahmed Palak congratulated Bangladesh Computer Council on this achievement. Under the visionary leadership of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina and overall supervision of Prime Minister's Information and Communication Technology Advisor Sajeeb Wazed, the Information and Communication Technology Division has been working tirelessly to build 'Smart Bangladesh'. He expressed hope that this award of the United Nations' World Summit on Information Society Prizes-2024 will inspire everyone to take various successful initiatives in the future.
Apart from this, a2i's 'Shikkhak Batayan' won the World WSIS Summit on Information Society (WSIS) Award-2024 in the capacity building category and UNICEF Bangladesh's ‘Okay, the period tracker app for girls by girls’ in the e-Health category.
Out of 1049 projects/initiatives submitted from different countries around the world, 360 projects were selected and opened for voting. A total of three projects/initiatives from Bangladesh were selected for the award this year, out of which the meeting video conferencing system developed by BCC's BNDA team Boithok was selected as the 'winner'.
It may by noted that, multiple initiatives or projects in each category were selected as champions through voting to determine the WSIS Awards. One of them was declared as the winner. This year 18 projects will be awarded as winners and 72 projects will be awarded as champions.
