APT asks ITU to assign cross-sector roles at the planning stage

Summary

Asia-Pacific proposes that the ITU Secretary-General and three Bureau Directors clarify roles during the planning of priority work shared across sectors.
The 2022 Resolution 191 already recognized overlapping functions and required coordination reports. The proposed change puts a more explicit decision point before a project starts.

The ITU has three sector desks: radio, standards and development. When a project lands across all of them, a fourth desk is sometimes needed just to decide who owns the pen. Asia-Pacific's addendum 17 to contribution 79 proposes a practical amendment to Resolution 191. It asks the Secretary-General and the three Bureau Directors, where appropriate, to coordinate and allocate roles more clearly at the planning phase of priority intersectoral activities. The ITU register lists the proposal for Doha's plenipotentiary conference.

The adopted 2022 resolution already gives the three advisory groups and the Inter-Sector Coordination Group, or ISCG, a role in identifying shared work and its distribution. It asks the Secretariat to identify overlapping functions and report results to Council. APT's addition sharpens the timing: settle who does what while the activity is being designed. The draft preserves each sector's mandate and limits the added instruction to appropriate priority work.

There is real machinery behind the acronym. ITU's 2026 Council report describes a task force led by the Deputy Secretary-General and a cross-sector working group preparing the Union's 2028–2031 strategic and financial plans. It also records ISCG's interest in accessibility during a new ITU website review. These are existing coordination efforts. They show why a role assigned before a plan hardens can matter more than an overlap discovered in a year-end report.

The proposal is a small amendment with a familiar office problem inside it. In Doha, delegates will decide whether to make the planning-stage instruction part of Resolution 191. The next useful evidence will be workplans that name a lead, supporting sectors and decision path early enough for everyone to act on them. Three signatures at the end are easy; one owner at the start takes a choice.