Saudi Gazette report

PARIS — Saudi Arabia has joined the Information For All Program (IFAP), 24 hours after Minister of Culture and Chairman of the National Commission for Education, Sciences and Culture Prince Badr Bin Abdullah Bin Farhan announced that the Kingdom had won a seat on the Executive Board of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

IFAP is a program of UNESCO that provides a platform for international policy discussions and guidelines for action on preservation of information and universal access to it; ethical, legal and societal consequences of Information and Communications Technology (ICT) developments, Saudi Press Agency (SPA) said.

The IFAP was established in 2001 to provide a platform for all the stakeholders in the knowledge societies to participate in international discussions on policy and guidelines for action in the area of access to information and knowledge. The program is guided in its planning and implementation by an Intergovernmental Council, comprising 26 UNESCO member states that are elected by UNESCO general conference.

The council guides the planning and implementation of the program by considering relevant proposals, recommending broad lines of action, assessing achievements, encouraging the participation of member states, and supporting fundraising efforts.

The council’s main functions include considering proposals on the development and adaptation of the IFAP; recommending the broad lines of action that IFAP could take; reviewing and assessing achievements and defining the basic areas requiring increased international co-operation; promoting participation of member states in the program; and supporting all fund raising efforts for its implementation.

The priorities of IFAP focus on the use of information for development, the promotion of information literacy, the preservation of information, ethics in information, access to information and the promotion of multilingualism.

The program aims to strengthen the international thinking process on the ethical, legal and social challenges faced by knowledge societies, promote and expand access to information through digitization and preservation, and support lifelong training and learning in communication and information, and on the production of local content and indigenous knowledge through information literacy, besides promoting the application of international standards and best practices in the field of communication and information, and promoting the establishment of information and knowledge networks at the national, regional and international levels.