Philippines

Excellencies, Heads of Delegations, Distinguished guests, Please accept our warmest greetings from the Philippines!   

The Republic of Philippines is deeply honored to join the best and the brightest innovators of the world who are assembled today in this marvelous city of Bucharest. Thank you, Romania for a splendid hosting of this year’s Plenipotentiary.   

Today, the Philippines express our continued full commitment to the goals of the ITU in connecting the world. Our membership in the ITU since 1912 has continuously challenged and inspired our nation to dream and to work towards our dream of becoming a digital nation.    

Six years ago, through a dedicated department for information and communications technology with attached agencies for cybersecurity, telecommunications, and data privacy – the Philippines has fully embraced digitalization as both a clear policy direction and a strategic goal to move the country forward.     

Our investments in digital infrastructure, and connectivity compose of 90 percent of our total department budget to ensure that every island of our 7,641 islands are all connected to the world. Already close to 4 million Filipinos, including our school children, enjoy free wifi in more than 4,000 schools and public places across the country, including geographically isolated and disadvantaged communities. Our target in the next fifteen months is to activate close to 10,000 sites to serve more than 10 Million Filipinos.   

With the timely assistance of ITU, we have revived competition with the introduction of a third major telecommunication company to provide internet connectivity to our citizens. From 2020 to 2021, the number of fixed broadband subscribers increased by 22%.   

The Philippine National Broadband Program, which is now at 73.56% completion of its fiber backbone and targeted to be completed by May 2023, connecting 981 National Government Agencies, nationwide.  We steadily improved our ranking from 63 to 57 for fixed broadband, and 73 to 62 for mobile internet speed.      

Our country’s digital future is now anchored on an “agile bureaucracy” aligned with the marching orders of our new President – for laws and programs for e-government systems and overall digital governance to benefit a young nation of an average of 24 years old tech-savvy citizens.   

Through our i-Governance project, we target to digitize and improve the interoperability, security, and data-driven capacity of all our 81 provinces, 147 cities, and 1,488 municipalities – to ensure that government services are citizen-centric or designed from the lenses of every citizen.    

The Philippines also recognizes the value of digital data and has worked relentlessly with the ITU and other member states in laying the foundations for ICT statistics in the country. This led to the successful conduct of the first-ever National ICT Household Survey in 2019 and this year to ensure data-driven policy.    

Clear programs and national policies for massive digital upskilling are now in place to future-proof our workforce, our greatest resource, to ably serve the world’s complex digital services requirements and needs.    

Our target is to train 5 Million Filipinos through massive open online courses in basic and advanced digital skills, including emerging technologies – to complement the target of 3 Million digital jobs by 2026, doubling our current numbers for business and knowledge process management, and increasing the current 4 Million number of Filipinos in the gig economy.    

Our digital cities program has become an excellent template for developing tier 2 and 3 cities into mature locations for digital services. We wish to share our matrices and experts with ITU member states aiming to generate digital jobs especially for your countryside population.   

In closing, I respectfully present the Philippines’ candidature for the ITU Council for 2023-2026. The Philippines is willing to share our success stories and best practices and deploy our citizen experts to member states. These citizen experts are our frontliners and ground workers who not only speak, but live and embody the human face of the technology and connectivity. And in support of the Bucharest Declaration – the Philippines is excited to work with ITU and all its member states to achieve a better digital future for the world. Mabuhay!