Prime Minister Khaleda Zia yesterday made a proposal to the world community for creating a special fund to promote and disseminate information technology globally.

"I would like to strongly recommend that we create a digital solidarity fund," she said addressing the three-day World Summit on Information Society (WS1S) at Palexpo Conference Centre in Geneva in the morning.

The prime minister said the fund will facilitate technical and financial assistance towaids national capacity building for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and its use and transfer from the from international financial institutions."

Prime Minister Begum Zia called for resolute commitment to build the information society and implement the plan of action to be adopted in the WSIS.

"We live in an asymmetric world marked by wealth and poverty. The digital divide has widened the development gap. However, I believe that we have now devised a technology that can overcome these differences and lead to a global society with minimum poverty and maximum equity," she said.

"Information technologies have generated profound changes in human society. These are quite different from social transformation caused by earlier scientific advances," Khaleda said, adding that it is for the developing countries, particularly the least developed ones, to seize the opportunity and adopt ICT as a priority tool to fight hunger, malnutrition, illiteracy, discrimination against women, the aged and disabled.

She said Bangladesh has placed poverty alleviation on the top of its development agenda where ICT has a crucial role to play.

"I am happy that our national policy on ICT conforms closely with the outcomes of the documents we intend to endorse in Geneva," Khaleda said.

She said Bangladesh hopes to establish countrywide ICT infrastructure to ensure access to information by all its citizens.

"This will both empower people and enhance democratic values. It will also facilitate sustainable economic development, governance, e-commerce, banking, public utility services and a variety of on-line ICT enabled services," she said.

The Geneva summit is the first phase of the WSIS while the second phase will take place in Tunisia in 2005.