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 ran 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 happened

This was the first WSIS Forum convened since the WSIS+20 review concluded, and its organising task was 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. The week ran to more than 250 sessions, including the Action Line facilitation meetings that tie specific ICT work to specific SDG targets, workshops and country insights, and a High-Level Track that convened ministers, regulators, chief executives, civil-society heads, mayors, ambassadors and heads of UN agencies.

The Forum’s most concrete output was the WSIS Prizes 2026, presented at Palexpo in the second half of the week. On ITU’s account the contest drew a record 1,595 submissions from 122 countries and more than 2.2 million votes, producing 18 winners, one in each of the 18 prize categories that the eleven WSIS Action Lines are broken into for the award. The Prizes are the closest thing the WSIS process has to a measured, public-facing scoreboard of digital-development projects, and it is that Action Line structure that ties them back to the SDGs.

The Forum closed on 10 July. On scale, the Digital Watch Observatory’s reports covered 120 sessions, 516 speakers and some 2,445 interventions as of 16 July, a corpus that was still growing for a week after the Forum ended as outstanding reports landed. Across it 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.

What the Forum has not yet produced is its own written record. Hendy delivered the Chair’s Summary orally at the closing; as of 16 July, six days after the Forum ended, no Outcomes document had been posted, and ITU says the high-level track will be consolidated later as “WSIS Forum 2026: Outcomes and Executive Brief.” For a process whose whole argument is that digital cooperation should be measurable against the Action Lines, the gap is worth noting: the fullest public account of what was said this week is currently an independent third party’s.

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 Watch & read 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’s Director for Digital Policies and Digital Transformation, put the argument, in UNESCO’s summary of it, as this: 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.

What we were watching, and how it landed

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 →

Why it matters for the SDGs

The Action Lines are the WSIS process’s answer to the question of how digital cooperation gets counted, and the WSIS Prizes are the closest thing it has to a public scoreboard. Their structure is what ties a digital-development project back to a goal rather than leaving it as a good story. It is also a scoreboard of self-nominated projects settled partly by public vote, which measures visibility as much as impact.

The multilingualism thread is where SDG 10 hides inside SDG 9: reach is counted, usability is not, and universal acceptance work on domain names and email addresses is one of the few places the difference is being addressed at the level of the plumbing. The unresolved part is SDG 17. A Forum whose task is implementation to 2035 closed without a written outcome, and a mandate no one has yet published is hard to hold anyone to.

Watch & read

On the record of what was said: 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 the sessions is the independent, session-by-session reporting of the Digital Watch Observatory. The Chair’s Summary was delivered orally and, as of 16 July, has not been published.