The fourth meeting of the ITU Council Working Group (CWG) on Strategic and Financial Plan of the Union (SFP) was held from January 12 to 14, 2026. The meeting was chaired by Mr. Mansour AlQurashi of Saudi Arabia.
The group's objective is to develop a draft of the Union's Strategic and Financial Plan (SFP) for 2028–2031 for submission to the ITU Council for approval and subsequent endorsement by the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2026 (PP-26).
The discussion during the meeting centered on the following documents and inputs:
• The draft ITU Strategic Plan and accompanying documents prepared by the ITU Secretariat.
• Proposals and comments from the group's members. These included, in particular, two substantive contributions from the communications administration of the Russian Federation focusing on strategic targets.
As a result of the discussions, the group was unable to agree on a draft document due to diverging positions, particularly on:
• Narrowing the strategy exclusively to the ITU's technical mandate — avoiding the dispersion of efforts and resources on socio-humanitarian issues — especially in formulating the Union's mission and vision.
• Expanding the Union's priorities to include the integration of new and emerging digital technologies in a broader sense, rather than focusing solely on telecommunications and ICT.
• Formulating overall strategic implementation targets and the substance of several proposed targets, in light of existing ITU statistical frameworks and related considerations.
• Accurately incorporating proposals from the ITU's sectoral bureaus, particularly those from the Telecommunication Standardization Bureau (TSB), into the draft strategy.
Given the need to complete preparatory work at the group level—including harmonizing the draft Financial Plan—the discussions will continue. A one-day joint meeting of the CWG-SFP and the CWG on Financial and Human Resources has been scheduled for the eve of the ITU Council session in April.
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