WSIS Forum 2026

6–10 July 2026 · Geneva
Dates
6–10 July 2026 (ITU HQ 6–7; Palexpo 8–10)
Location
Geneva, Switzerland
Host
Co-organized by ITU, UNESCO, UNDP and UNCTAD; co-hosted with Switzerland
Theme
The WSIS Action Lines and their alignment with the SDGs

About

The World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) Forum is the largest annual gathering on information-and-communication technologies for development, organised around the WSIS Action Lines. 2026 is the first Forum held after the WSIS+20 review (the twenty-year review of the WSIS process, whose outcome document was adopted in December 2025), so it carries added weight in setting the next phase of global digital cooperation.

It runs in parallel with the AI for Good Global Summit and the UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance as part of Geneva's July digital week.

What we're watching

What to expect

How to follow it

Note on watching remotely: the Forum supports registered remote participation, but it does not stream to the general public and publishes no official transcripts. Only the high-level track is recorded and posted on demand. The most complete public record of what was actually said is the independent, session-by-session reporting of the Digital Watch Observatory.

The forum in brief

This is the first WSIS Forum convened since the WSIS+20 review concluded, and its organising task is to turn that review’s recommendations into implementation out to 2035. Egypt took the chair from South Africa at the opening session, with Minister of Communications and Information Technology Raafat Hendy presiding over the high-level and ministerial track and due to deliver the Chair’s Summary at the close.

The Forum’s most concrete output landed on 9 July, when ITU Secretary-General Doreen Bogdan-Martin presented the WSIS Prizes 2026 at Palexpo. The fifteenth edition drew a record 1,595 submissions from 122 countries and more than 2.2 million votes, producing 18 winners, one for each WSIS Action Line, drawn from 15 countries and 3 international organizations, alongside 90 Champion projects. The Prizes are the closest thing the WSIS process has to a measured, public-facing scoreboard of digital-development projects, and their Action Line structure is what ties them back to the SDGs.

The Forum closed on 10 July. On scale, the Digital Watch Observatory’s reports cover 74 sessions, 516 speakers and some 2,445 interventions, with reports for the final day still being written. Across that corpus the two most-used words were “digital” and “AI,” which is a fair summary of where the Forum’s attention now sits. The recurring themes were AI governance, connectivity and digital inclusion, cybersecurity and trust, e-waste and the circular economy, and digital public infrastructure, with sessions on rethinking education for the AI era and on connecting landlocked developing countries.

This section draws on press coverage, ITU announcements and third-party session reporting rather than our own transcripts, because the Forum produces none. Primary sources are linked under Key links below.

The language question

The thread worth pulling out of UNESCO’s contribution is multilingualism, because it is the same divide the AI summit next door was describing in a different vocabulary. UNESCO convened a session on multilingualism in the digital age and published a joint policy brief with ICANN on universal acceptance, the unglamorous technical work of making domain names and email addresses function in every script rather than only in Latin characters.

Guilherme Canela, UNESCO Director for Digital Policies and Digital Transformation: “An inclusive digital future cannot be built on a monolingual foundation.”

Read alongside the AI for Good keynote, which described an AI giving a worse answer about a pregnancy symptom in Kiswahili than in English, the point sharpens. A language that is thin on the internet is thin in the training data, and a language thin in the training data produces a model that serves its speakers badly. Connectivity statistics count whether someone is online. They do not count whether the internet, or the model, works in the language they actually speak. UNESCO also used the Forum to press public access institutions, libraries and post offices, as digital-equity infrastructure, and to publish a brief on human-rights-centred governance of quantum technologies.

Session coverage

WSIS publishes no official transcripts and streams only its high-level track, so this section carries fewer summaries than our coverage of the webcast UN events. Where a WSIS session matters for SDG measurement, we cover it from the recorded high-level video, the Digital Watch Observatory’s reports, and ITU’s own outputs.

8 July · Opening remarks

The opening: a mandate to 2035

ITU’s Bogdan-Martin on the post-WSIS+20 mandate, the 2.2 billion still offline, and the risk of an AI divide stacking on the old one.

Read summary →

The WSIS Forum Outcomes and the Chair’s Summary are expected in the weeks after the Forum, on the official site. We will summarise them here once published.

Key links