Good morning honorable Ministers, State Ministers, Vice Ministers, Excellencies, distinguished speakers, participants, ladies and gentlemen.

On behalf of ETC, as one of the main sponsors and organizers of this symposium, I have the pleasure of extending a cordial welcome to all participants of this International Symposium ... I have to express my sincere appreciation especially to all speakers who have come a long distance to participate and present papers. We appreciate your visit/gathering.

Here in Ethiopia, with the new millennium and all-round government development initiative that identified ICT to be the critical success factor, we are now poised to make a giant step forward in our history - all-round transformation through ICT. In this connection, there is recognition, clear direction, encouraging expressed commitment from the top. In short, there is an enabling, stimulating and exciting environment.

The developments on the infrastructure front are encouraging: AAUNet,
EthERNet, SchoolNet, WoredaNet, Broadband Multimedia, Broadband
Internet, RuralNet, Fiber-highway, are all examples of such developments.
Some of these networks are big and able to support bandwidth hungry applications. But sitting idle - used for running email applications and web browsing. This is discouraging. That is, content and applications are lagging behind.

The challenge now is to change the pace and direction of content and application development. We have this challenge in front of us, in addition to the further development of the infrastructure. To meet this challenge, more than anything else we need acknowledge, research and development capability. We need a local capacity. To successfully meet these needs, we need to network; foster relationships with our development partners; bring together the Government, the industry and higher learning institutions to spearhead the support and the development. This is one of the purposes of this symposium. Such forums are the prime catalysts that should continually and proactively play a leading role in ensuring the mainstreaming the advancement of conceptualized ICT education, research and development.
Such forums bring together actors and shareholders to deliberate on issues, share experiences, cope up with the dynamism of the field, learn from past successes and failures.

To succeed and leapfrog (which is a must), we have to be focused. We have to be able to set our direction before we leave the dock. W8 have to have a vision for our destination and understand what it will take to get there. We have to adjust our priorities. In general, we have to try to control our direction better than being controlled by it. Such forums will help us get ideas and issues for this purpose.

During these three days, we will have an opportunity to listen to speakers and paper presenters from all over the world to discuss and share the use and application of ICT as well as the current trends and implications of the IT revolution from a variety of viewpoints - infrastructure, human resource, services and applications. From your deliberations over the next three days, I believe several coherent these will emerge, we will-find insights and inspirations to make a difference in our society.

1 hope in your stay you will have thought-provoking presentations and invigorating exchange of opinions that incorporate trends and developments with down-to-earth strategies that help countries such as Ethiopia benefit from this revolution; valuable acknowledge and experience sharing on how such technologies and solutions are being best deployed and exploited to enhance connectivity and service delivery; and more

To close my words of opening, I would like to emphasize that malting this Symposium a success depends on the active involvement of each participant. I am strongly hoping that this symposium will take many opportunities to speak out actively on the issues tabled for discussion.

With these few comments, on behalf of the Ethiopian Telecom Corporation, before giving the floor to the official opening address, I thank all participants and observers for coming here today and I want to wish you a successful meeting. I wish you that the conference will be very informative and fruitful for you all. I look forward to the results and I hope to gain some new insights myself by talking to many of you personally during the course of the symposium.

I want to thank GSTIT for spearheading the organization of this conference.

I wish you all the best in your three day deliberations and a nice stay in Addis Ababa.
I now have the honor to call upon the Minister to declare this conference officially open.

Thank you!

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