The Giga Knowledge Spark kicks off!
Starting in Switzerland, the programme, seeks to leverage the research capacity of academia in the policy, business, ICT, and technical fields, tackling one of today’s most pressing global challenges: ensuring that every student, everywhere can access and benefit from meaningful connectivity.
26 students from six university cities in Switzerland: Zurich (ETHZ and UZH), Geneva, Fribourg, Bern, Lucerne and Lausanne joined the two-day foresight workshop on 16 and 17 October at the Giga Connectivity Centre.
The workshop set out the scope of the challenge, drawing on ITU’s technical, policy and regulatory expertise, with first-hand insights from ITU’s Telecommunication Development Bureau (BDT). This was complemented by experience of practitioners from the Permanent Mission of Switzerland to the UN and Giga.
Students engaged the experts on different aspects of the challenge of delivering meaningful connectivity, then broke off for deep dive of one of the four challenge areas defined of this edition of the programme:
- Multi-sectoral collaborative or whole-of government regulatory approach
- Taxation policies
- Economies of scale
- Innovative finance to address inadequate infrastructure
As the ITU Giga Programme Manager Irene Kaggwa put it “Your freshness helps us rethink, looking in from the outside through a different lens to identify why the existing intervention/practice isn’t working, and what can be changed to make it better.”
Over the next two months, students will continue to collaborative, transforming their ideas from the foresight the workshop into powerful recommendations – to be presented to in a co-authored policy brief on December 11 2025.
This edition of the Giga knowledge spark is being piloted with the support of Foraus.
For more information on the pilot, visit: https://www.foraus.ch/en/projects/giga-knowledge-spark/