Africa wants ITU continuity drills across suppliers and offices

The ITU has an emergency plan. Africa wants a fire drill for the whole chain.

Why it matters

The old plan followed a headquarters move. An African proposal puts regional offices, outside suppliers and recovery tests on the same continuity map.

Daniel Kade25 October 2026 at 22:09 UTCReading Time 2 minLast update: 25 October 2026

Africa’s proposal would test ITU recovery across offices and critical external providers.

Summary

African administrations propose turning ITU Resolution 217’s 2023–2026 continuity programme into a standing, organization-wide management system integrated with its existing resilience framework.
The draft names regional offices, ICT and data, critical third parties and supply chains; it calls for recovery exercises, Council oversight and planned independent audits.

The spare key is not much use if the door belongs to a supplier. That is the practical reach of Africa’s proposed revision of ITU Resolution 217. Instead of a continuity strategy tied to 2023–2026 and the Geneva headquarters transition, the draft calls for a permanent Business Continuity Management System, or BCMS, across the Union. It would sit inside the Organizational Resilience Management System that the ITU Council approved in 2016.

The 2022 resolution already ordered a strategy, risk assessment, Council dashboard and priority for cybersecurity and remote-meeting platforms. The African text changes the operating perimeter. Its list includes critical activities, staff and premises, ICT and data, regional and area offices, all three Sectors, and critical third-party and supply-chain dependencies. A headquarters recovery plan cannot restore a service if its outside link is the part that failed.

It also wants rehearsal. The Secretary-General would maintain impact and risk analyses, continuity and recovery arrangements, exercises, tests and lessons learned. The Council would receive information on preparedness, significant disruptions, gaps and improvement actions, then oversee whether the system gets better. The Independent Management Advisory Committee, Oversight Unit and external auditors would examine it at planned intervals within their respective mandates. A handsome binder could finally face an audience that asks whether the switch actually works.

The ITU register lists Addendum 43 among African submissions for the November conference. Delegates will decide its fate. The proposal gives no test results or supplier names; the first real receipt would be the system’s defined scope, recorded exercises and Council reporting on gaps and fixes.