Barcelona continues to demonstrate its international leadership. The Catalan capital has been chosen to host the Giga technology center, a United Nations initiative that works to guarantee the educational and digital inclusion of children, clearly affected by the pandemic, especially in developing countries. Unicef, the UN agency for children, and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) promote the program, which has a budget of almost five billion euros to connect all schools in the world to the Internet by 2030.
In just three years since its creation, the Giga program has already served to detect more than 1.1 million schools where action is needed and to connect some 3,700 schools in countries such as Kenya, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Botswana, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan. As a result, 1.35 million students and teachers have been able to leave behind the digital divide.
From the end of the year, the old Ca l'Alier textile factory will be the headquarters of the program, which will share space with the municipal BIT-Habitat foundation and the Cisco Co-innovation Center for digital transformation and the Internet of Things. Precisely, the Giga center will draw on the rich ICT ecosystem in the city, seeking solutions to the challenges it wants to face through its collaboration with local companies, universities, research centers, and institutions.
"The engineering work that began with the support of the Musk Foundation, Ericsson, and Dell, among others, will be developed and expanded in the city that hosts the Mobile World Congress and the main global technology firms. This will change the rules of the game for millions of students around the world," Giga states. "Barcelona is a city recognized for its technological innovation and its digital policies in favor of digital inclusion and open-source solutions. The city will give Giga access to its vibrant ecosystem of technology companies and will serve to bring together technologists from emerging markets in a physical space to build, collaborate, and scale connectivity solutions for children," they add.
One of the duties assigned to the UN program is the development of new technological solutions that ensure connectivity in any country, through the use of blockchain, satellite image analysis, and artificial intelligence, always open source. It also has to finish completing the world map of schools, an essential step to be able to reach them and connect them.
"Barcelona is a city recognized for its technological innovation and its digital policies in favor of digital inclusion and open-source solutions. The city will give Giga access to its vibrant ecosystem of technology companies"The choice of Barcelona by the United Nations has had the backing of the Government, the Generalitat, and the City Council.This Monday, representatives of the three administrations met in the city with the project promoters to evaluate the progress of the agreement. "The Giga technology center consolidates a first-class technological ecosystem in Barcelona with a just digital transition. The City Council works to close the digital divide in the city; with Giga, we will contribute to doing so in the rest of the world as well," values the deputy mayor for Agenda 2030, Digital Transition and International Relations, Laia Bonet.
According to La Vanguardia, the three administrations are about to close the agreement that defines the establishment of the UN program in the city. A scientific team of about fifteen people is expected to initially settle in Ca l'Alier, including engineers and specialists in blockchain, artificial intelligence and robotics. The staff will be expanded according to the needs of the project. The administrations will have to contribute 17 million euros jointly in the first three years.