Summary

  • African administrations propose turning the ITU’s Global Symposium for Regulators into a more accountable cycle of guidelines, practical tools and measured follow-up.
  • Their draft asks for qualitative and quantitative indicators and regular reports to the ITU Council and Plenipotentiary Conference on how the outcomes are used.

Conference tote bags are excellent at carrying papers home. They are less good at showing what became of the papers. In Addendum 20 to their PP-26 contribution, African Telecommunication Union administrations propose a sterner afterlife for the annual Global Symposium for Regulators, or GSR.

The symposium already produces best-practice guidelines: the 2026 edition was endorsed in May. The adopted 2022 Resolution 138 puts GSR in the ITU development work programme, calls for an annual meeting and tells the Telecommunication Development Bureau director to consult on topics and draw regional regulators into the guidelines. The new draft pushes past publication. It would require concise guidance and practical toolkits after each symposium, distributed in accessible digital formats and all six official ITU languages.

Then comes the harder assignment. The director would identify qualitative and quantitative indicators for implementation and impact, and report regularly to the Council and the next conferences. The text also seeks frameworks for staff attachments between regulators, peer reviews and coordinated studies. Those could give a regulator with limited staff more than another slide deck. The draft supplies no indicator list, budget or measured result; those choices would decide whether the proposed scorecard is worth reading.

The ITU register records the addendum as posted on 24 October. PP-26 will decide whether the extra duties enter Resolution 138. Even if they do, the useful test sits after the applause: can the ITU trace a piece of guidance into a regulator’s actual work, and explain which results belong to the guidance rather than to an attractive conference photograph?

Official sources