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| HE the Minister for Culture, Art and Heritage Hamad bin Abdulaziz al-Kuwari flanked by Q-Post Acting Chairman Abdul Rahman Ali al-Aqaily and UPU Director General Edouard Dayan at a meeting at the Ministry of Culture headquarters yesterday. PICTURE: Jayan Orma |
The existing ‘digital divide’ in the postal sector at the global level is expected to be reduced from the current levels to the bare minimum and the less developed countries stand to gain significantly from the projects to be implemented in the next four years by the Universal Postal Union (UPU), said the organisation’s Director General Edouard Dayan.
Informing this yesterday, the top UPU official, whose tenure ends in a fortnight from now, said the deliberations to be held at the forum’s Congress in Doha starting today would possibly see a number of reforms that would accelerate the activities in the postal sector in several countries, mainly in underdeveloped regions across the world.
The UPU has 192 member-countries and most of them are expected to attend the three-week long Congress.
Dayan, who took over as Director General in 2004 has completed two terms in the office during which the postal sector witnessed a series of challenges on account of the technological advancements in the communication world.
“Every development in communication technologies has contributed to the emergence of a large number of new opportunities and postal activity, as in any other field, is poised to gain remarkably from their introduction,” he said.
The UPU director general was all praise for the activities that Qatar initiated since the beginning of the millennium and he felt the initiatives that the country’s postal corporation (Q-Post) made in the last one decade gave a lot of visibility both to the country and to the postal sector throughout the Arab region. The activities in the postal sector, he felt, had done a remarkable job in recent years in boosting the image of Qatar at the international level.
“At the Congress starting today in Doha, it would be known well where we stood at present and what each of us needed to do in the coming years to keep pace with the developments in other areas of communication,” said Dayan.
“Ours is an organisation which has all along been committed to providing services to a world without borders and the introduction of the new technologies is hence seen by every UPU member as a road to further development rather than as a hindrance to the postal sector’s progress henceforth,” he added.
The official also felt that the despite cultural differences, the relations between the Arab world, in particular Qatar, and France, from where he has come, have all along been good and the postal activities in recent years have contributed a lot to bringing the two nations closer than ever before.
Dayan hoped the introduction of more electronic and financial services, and e-commerce activities in coming years would give a big push to the postal sector all over the world and along with the introduction of new services a lot of quality improvement is also expected to be in place.
It was also informed at the meeting by a UPU official that the latest figures put the number of mails handled by the member-countries at 380bn, and parcels at 6bn. There are more than 670,000 post office outlets and 5.4mn people are rendering their services in the postal industry across the world.