The Baku Declaration and Action Plan: ITU's 2026-2029 Roadmap for the Last 2.2 Billion Unconnected

The World Telecommunication Development Conference closed in Baku, Azerbaijan on 28 November 2025, after a two-week session that ran from 17 to 28 November, with a high-level segment on the first two days. Roughly 2,000 participants representing 153 ITU member states attended. The conference’s output was the Baku Declaration and the accompanying Baku Action Plan, which together set the International Telecommunication Union’s development-sector priorities for 2026 through 2029.

The headline figure cited throughout the conference was 2.2 billion people still offline worldwide — the same population the ITU’s Facts and Figures 2025 report had put a number on the week before WTDC-25 opened. The plan that emerged is explicitly framed as the mechanism for closing that gap. What it does not contain is a date by which the gap is meant to close.

What the plan actually is

The Baku Action Plan is not a single document with a single set of targets. It is a package: new and revised ITU-D resolutions, recommendations to the Telecommunication Development Bureau, a set of regional initiatives tailored to each of the ITU’s operating regions, and a list of technical questions assigned to ITU-D study groups for the coming study period. The Declaration is the shorter political statement that frames the package; the Action Plan is the operational detail.

This structure is a direct continuation of the ITU’s four-year conference cycle. The Baku plan succeeds the Kigali Action Plan, adopted at WTDC-22 in Rwanda and covering 2023 through 2025 (later years of that plan’s regional initiatives ran through 2025 on a rolling basis). Reviewing the Kigali plan’s implementation was itself part of the WTDC-25 preparatory process, which means the Baku plan is best read as an iteration on a standing institutional programme rather than a fresh start.

No fixed date for universal connectivity

The most consequential feature of the Baku Action Plan, for research purposes, is what it omits. Despite the conference’s stated aim of advancing “universal, meaningful and affordable connectivity for an inclusive and sustainable digital future,” neither the Declaration nor the Action Plan sets a target date by which that connectivity is to be achieved. The plan commits to a four-year work programme — 2026 to 2029 — for the ITU’s own development activities, but the connectivity goal itself is stated as a direction, not a deadline.

This is worth noting because earlier global connectivity commitments, including elements of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals framework, have used specific target years (2030 for most SDGs) even when the underlying indicators made those targets look implausible in advance. The Baku plan’s choice to state an open-ended goal alongside a bounded institutional work programme is a different approach, and it has a practical consequence for researchers: there is no single year against which “success” or “failure” of the plan can be scored. Evaluation will have to track intermediate indicators — coverage, usage, affordability, the specific resolutions’ implementation — rather than a pass/fail outcome at a stated horizon.

Regional initiatives and the LDC/LLDC/SIDS focus

The Action Plan gives particular weight to least developed countries, landlocked developing countries, and small island developing states, a grouping the ITU treats as facing compounding structural disadvantages — LDCs on income and institutional capacity, LLDCs on transit dependency for international connectivity, and SIDS on the small-market economics of undersea cable and satellite provisioning. Each ITU region submitted proposed regional initiatives during the preparatory meetings, covering areas that recur across recent cycles: cybersecurity capacity building, gender-inclusive connectivity, youth digital skills, emergency telecommunications, and digital innovation ecosystems.

The regional-initiative mechanism is where the plan’s substance is most likely to be tested. Regional initiatives are resourced through a mix of ITU-D budget, member-state contributions, and partnerships, and their delivery has historically been uneven across regions and across the life of a plan. A comparison of what the Kigali plan’s regional initiatives actually delivered against what was proposed in 2022 would be a useful, currently unwritten piece of evaluative research, and the same comparison exercise applied prospectively to the Baku initiatives is the kind of tracking this plan invites.

Reading the plan against the Facts and Figures data

The Baku Action Plan was adopted into a data environment the ITU had itself just described in detail. The Facts and Figures 2025 report, published on 17 November 2025 — the day WTDC-25’s high-level segment opened — documented that the remaining 2.2 billion unconnected people are disproportionately concentrated in low-income countries, and that the gap between high- and low-income countries has shifted from a binary connected/unconnected divide toward a divide in the quality of connection: 5G coverage reaches 84% of people in high-income countries against 4% in low-income countries.

That framing shift matters for how the Baku plan should be read. A plan that measures progress mainly by counting new mobile broadband subscribers will look more successful than a plan that also has to account for the widening gap in 5G access, data usage volume, and service quality between the same two country groups. The Action Plan’s resolutions on emerging technologies and its regional initiatives on digital innovation ecosystems gesture toward the quality dimension, but the plan does not commit to a metric that would make the two kinds of progress — access and quality — separately trackable against its own text.

For researchers using WTDC-25 as a reference point, the practical approach is to treat the Baku Declaration as a statement of institutional intent and the Action Plan’s resolutions and regional initiatives as the actual object of study, tracking their funding, implementation, and outcomes against the Kigali cycle’s record rather than against the unconnected-population figure alone — since that figure, on the ITU’s own open-ended framing, is not the metric the plan has bound itself to.

The ITU’s own WTDC-25 conference documentation and the Facts and Figures 2025 statistical release are the primary records for anyone tracking implementation against the Baku Action Plan’s text over the next four years.