The event was held at the serene Sea Cliff Resort & Spa, Kama Village, Mangapwani, Zanzibar.

This year, the Green Standards Week was dedicated to the theme “Linking circular economy and industry 4.0”, and was be kindly hosted by the Universal Communications Service Access Fund (UCSAF) and Tanzania Communications Regulatory Authority (TCRA), Zanzibar, Tanzania.

The Green Standards Week brought together leading specialists in the field, from top policy-makers to engineers, designers, smart city planners, government officials, regulators, standards experts, academia and others. This year, the programme had a strong slant towards e-waste management issues. It was attended by about 150 participants from about 30 different countries.

The two morning sessions of Day 1 (9 April, 2018) were devoted to the holding of the Symposium on “ITU's Activities on ICT, Environment and Climate Change to Attain the Sustainable Development Goals”.

Session 2 of the day was dedicated to: “Tackling E-Waste and Achieving a Circular Economy”. The Executive Director of the BCCC-Africa (Professor Percy Onianwa), during the session, made a presentation on "Tackling The Global E-Waste Problem: Contributions of the African Basel Convention Regional and Coordinating Centres"

Other presentations during this session were:

• Helen Nakiguli, Uganda Communications Commission, Uganda: "Leveraging on International and Regional Cooperation for Sustainable E-Waste Management in the African Region" 
• Olivier Mbera, Country General Manager for Enviroserve Rwanda Green Park: "Opportunities in the Circular Economy of E-waste management - Case of Rwanda
• Kees Baldé, United Nations University: "Statistics on E-waste for the Circular Economy"
• Virginia Onyara​, Multimedia University of Kenya: "Challenges & Opportunities for Developing Countries: A Case of East Africa E-Waste Management Projects" ​
• Joost de Kluijver, Director, Closing the Loop: "Business (models) for circular telecom" 

 The fourth day (12 April, 2018) was solely dedicated to “Training on E-waste Statistics” which was conducted mostly by two experts from the United Nations University (Kees Balde and Elise Vermeersch) and a few other persons. The training activities involved eight sessions with the following themes:

Session 1: Addressing the e-waste challenge: Better data - Better policies

Session 2: Country presentations 

Session 3: General Principles of E-waste Statistics

Session 4: How to track “sales of electronic equipment”, and how to measure “e-waste generated”

Session 5: How to measure e-waste collected and recycled

Session 6: How to measure imports and exports of e-waste

Session 7: How to use the e-waste toolkit

Session 8: Group discussion on Workplan on e-waste statistics

 Among several other activities held during the Standards Week were the meetings of:

• ITU-T Study Group 5 Regional Group for Africa (SG5RG-AFR)
• ITU-T Study Group 20 Regional Group for Africa (SG20RG-AFR)

For further details:

https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/gsw/201804/Pages/default.aspx

https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-T/Workshops-and-Seminars/gsw/201804/Documents/Percy_O.pdf