Countries must seek ways to complement each other rather than compete, stressed President Tabaré Vázquez at the opening of the forum “South-South Cooperation in the Digital Age”, organized this Tuesday (19.3.2019) in Buenos Aires by the UN. The Uruguayan president added that 80% of households in the country have an Internet connection and that the number of active mobile phones exceeds the number of inhabitants by 54%.
“Uruguay is willing to share its experience with you. We do not believe it is the best or the only one, but it has given us great satisfaction and very positive results and we are eager to learn from other countries, and this is where we recognize the opportunities that cooperation offers us for the development of our peoples,” said Vázquez in part of his speech at the conference “South-South Cooperation in the Digital Age.”
“We must seek paths of complementarity rather than of competences"because if the region does well, our country will do well", the president said in his dpresentation at the forum held in the Ternium Siderar pavilion of the Museum of Architecture and Design in Buenos Aires, within the framework of the Second High-Level Conference of the United Nations (UN) on South-South Cooperation, which will bring together heads of state from around the world on Wednesday 20th.
Vázquez held meetings with the president of the Financial Centre for South-South Cooperation, Cai E'Sheng, and the director of the UN Office for South-South Cooperation and special envoy of the Secretary General of the World Forum for South-South Cooperation, who then accompanied him on stage at the conference.
The President continued his speech by pointing out that the technological changes affecting our societies have generated, in recent years, among other things, a new discipline, namely the digital economy. In this regard, he added that between 2011 and 2017 the global big data market (big data) has increased fivefold and is expected to triple over the next 10 years.
Vázquez then mentioned the rapid multiplication of the amount of data stored in data centers (data center) in the world. Between 2015 and 2017, they grew more than two and a half times and it is estimated that by 2021 they will exceed 1.300 exabytes.
For the president, “knowing these data is essential to set and meet the objectives we set ourselves as countries, but above all, as humanity, because we will not be able to develop good policies if we do not understand the new development parameters of this new digital world.”
The challenge is for these changes to benefit the greatest number of inhabitants on the planet. and mainly serve those most in need. “In Uruguay we have made progress in providing our people with the tools to face this new digital world,” he said.
In this regard, and as a reference, Vázquez pointed out that today 80% of Uruguayan households are connected to the Internet, 75% of which do so through direct fiber optics, while the number of active mobile phones exceeds 54% of the 3,4 million inhabitants; more than 80% of them are LTE technology (high-speed data transmission).
He also said that all educational centers in the country are connected to the Internet and 80% have fiber optics.
Uruguay also has a submarine Internet cable of more than 12.000 kilometers, which links it directly to the United States and has connections to Brazil. Added to this is a public data center and a private ecosystem.
The Uruguayan education system has the Ceibal Plan, which provides a laptop with free Internet to each primary and secondary school student, as well as to each low-income retiree or pensioner through the Ibirapitá Plan, which provides them with a digital tablet also connected free of charge and various information services.
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