Dominica hosts Inter-American Telecommunications Commission’s 47th annual meeting

For the very first time, Dominica is host to the 47th Meeting of the Inter-American Telecommunications Commission.

The gathering, ongoing at the Intercontinental Hotel in Portsmouth from April 6-10, consisting of representatives from 32 countries.

Reportedly on the docket for Dominica are macro and micro technological objectives.

“Dominica shares in these goals, disaster preparedness and resilience in keeping with the prime minister’s vision of being the first private resilient country in the world, ensuring in our disaster responsiveness that we embrace technologies…recognizing that all technologies are important to build a scalable and responsive disaster communication strategy,” Minister of State with Responsibility for Telecommunications and Broadcasting, Chekira Lockhart-Hypolite said while addressing the meeting.

She continued, “We, of course, also have goals that are more specific to our small island country. Creating the enabling environment to encourage growth, development, and digital transformation by participating in the Caribbean digital transformation project.”

According to Lockhart-Hypolite,  security and protection of citizenry, ensuring that “we can detect and respond to threats  to all forms,  including weather-related,  ensuring that the necessary legal framework is enacted to protect the citizens in the digital space and that international cooperation coordination is readily available, allowing us to engage in information sharing and security enhancement practices with our partner nations.”

She added that this is why Dominica is actively exploring the implementation of a Cybersecurity Incident Response Team.

Furthermore, the minister noted that the government wants to ensure that it creates the environment to allow for these pioneering technologies.

“5G deployment, NEOS, D2D [Device-to-Device], Wi-Fi 8, we want to ensure that we create the environment to be early adopters and the test bed for new and innovative technologies,” she stated. “These are ambitious goals that  require our steadfast continued engagement with other regulators to both learn and influence, to ensure that our needs are met and our views considered.”

Lockhart-Hypolite encouraged all participants to engage in open, constructive and forward-looking discussions that will strengthen their collective capacity and advance common goals.