IDB to sponsor IT Seminar in Uruguay

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) will sponsor a two-day regional conference on Mercosur – southern South America's Common Market - in the 21st Century: Information Technology for Development and Integration, to be held July 21-22 in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The forum, organized in conjunction with the Uruguayan Government, will address the impact of information technology as a tool for boosting economic growth and social development. Leaders and experts from the public and private sectors, the academic field, and civil society will discuss how information technology may help to double the growth rate of Latin America and the Caribbean.

IDB President Enrique V. Iglesias has recently stated that in order to significantly reduce poverty, the region must double its growth rate from around 3.5 percent to 7 percent.

"Information technologies offer the region a unique opportunity to overcome obstacles for rapid progress, particularly for lower income groups, giving them ready access to education and allowing them to contribute to productive and profitable activities," said Iglesias. "The great challenge for regional integration efforts like the Mercosur is how to use this opportunity creatively to promote synergies through public policies that foster growth in a knowledge-based global economy."

The Uruguay President Jorge Battle and Iglesias will inaugurate the meeting at the Mercosur Building, where the Administrative Secretariat of the Accord has its offices. The seminar is expected to strengthen the flow of information and improve shared policy setting and initiatives among Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay, the countries of the expanded Mercosur group.

Four plenary sessions will analyze ways to expand the group's integration efforts and its participation in the global knowledge-based economy; opportunities to overcome the so-called digital divide in the new information economy; innovative permanent learning and training initiatives; and digital democracy and e-government.

Seminar participants also will discuss the role of a fair, open and competitive information sector to facilitate access to information; information technology and the skills to use them; and investments in small and medium information enterprises and their role. The sessions will feature cabinet ministers and senior government and business decision-makers from the Mercosur countries and also representatives from the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and the International Telecommunications Union.

For more information about the seminar, visit the conference web site at http://www.integracionXXI.net.uy or the IDB web site at: http://www.iadb.org.