Cross-Cutting Session on Digitalization: Digital Transformation in the Wake of Covid-19

Focus areas: 

• Bridging digital divides in the time of COVID-19, ensuring universal meaningful connectivity across Europe and Central Europe.
• Developing digital skills and building human capacities to match the needs of gigabit society, thus empowering different groups of society, strengthening employability, and creating new job opportunities. 
• Ensuring the participation of girls and women in ICT and its dynamics, and women's participation in the digital world; with a special focus on the repercussions of COVID-19 for women and girls in ICTs. 
• Creating a safe and empowering cyberspace for children and youth through capacity building, skills development and the adoption of a multi-stakeholder approach to address the new challenges related to the current global pandemic. 
• Highlighting the emerging role of ICTs as an engine for agriculture development in Europe and Central Asia, as well as pathways to ensure coordination amongst stakeholders and best practices to be scaled-up across the regions. 
• Spotlighting the importance of new technologies to support trade and trade facilitation for more resilient and responsive economies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. 
• Strengthening sustainable trade through ICTs to promote inclusive, transparent, and traceable value chains that foster responsible consumer choice, eco-design, planning, recycling processes, and effective waste prevention and management. 
• Underscoring the importance of ICTs in pursuing trade-related environmental objectives, including fighting illegal, underreported, and unregulated fishing and the illegal trade of CITES-protected species, promoting the sound management of hazardous waste, and reducing food waste. 
• Strengthening national capacities in implementing mobile health in the European region, with a special focus on the development of solutions to manage the COVID-19 outbreak. 
• Strengthening the ICT´s contribution in making cities smarter, more sustainable, and more resilient in time of the pandemic.