Summary

  • Europe proposes a public ITU portal naming cyber capacity-building activities, donors, beneficiaries, topics and activity types, including work under Cyber for Good.
  • The same Resolution 130 draft calls for impact evaluations to shape future projects and draws a boundary around the ITU’s technical and development cybersecurity work.

“We trained people” is an easy sentence to put in an annual report. Who paid for the training, where it landed and what it covered are harder questions. European CEPT members have submitted a proposed revision of ITU Resolution 130 for the 2026 Plenipotentiary Conference. One instruction would have the Telecommunication Development Bureau build a public-facing portal for the Union’s cyber capacity-building work, including Cyber for Good. It would identify activities, donors, beneficiaries, topics and types of activity. The proposal also asks that a portal under the UN Global Mechanism be able to identify relevant ITU work.

The existing Cyber for Good programme already describes its focus on eligible least developed countries and small island developing States, its backing from the Republic of Korea’s Ministry of Science and ICT, and its work on incident-response teams, national strategies and skills. It matches country needs with donors and ITU members. A systematic activity register would let a reader trace that matching across projects, rather than piece it together from programme pages.

The European addendum, filed in the ITU register, couples disclosure with feedback. It asks the Union to measure the impact of capacity-building and feed the findings into the selection and design of later measures. It also calls for further development of the Global Cybersecurity Index so that it assesses middle-income countries’ gaps more accurately and supports targeted assistance. The 2022 Resolution 130 already gave the ITU a standards and development role. The 2026 proposal would make project choice and evidence of effect more visible.

It also places a fence around the mandate. Under the draft, ITU resources would concentrate on technical and development cybersecurity; member states retain decisions on the application of legal or policy principles concerning defence, national security, content and cybercrime. ITU standards work to reduce infrastructure vulnerabilities and development assistance remain in scope. The conference will decide the proposed language. If it passes, the portal’s first real challenge will be mundane: listing an activity is easy; showing that the next one was chosen because the last one worked is governance.

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