Information and communications technologies (ICTs) have emerged as powerful and important tools for communities and countries in their pursuit of sustainable human development. In the broad definition adopted by the UNDP, ICTs are basically information handling tools — a varied set of goods, applications and services that are used to produce, store, process, distribute and exchange information. They include traditional ICTs such as telephone, radio and television and new ICTs such as personal computers (PCs), mobile phones, satellite and wireless technologies, internet and the World Wide Web. With appropriate content and applications, these tools are now able to work together, and combine to form a networked world. While ICTs are not a panacea for all development problems, they offer enormous potential to narrow social and economic inequalities and thus help achieve broader development goals such as those set by the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) — global targets adopted by the UN Millennium Summit in September 2000.