More than 550 delegates from 116 countries are meeting in Nairobi today and tomorrow to ponder the postal sector’s present and future.
Kenya’s vice-president, Kalonzo Musyoka, officially opened the Universal Postal Union’s 2010 Strategy Conference this morning to the rythm of African drums and Masai dances. It is the first time the UPU holds its Strategy Conference on African soil.
“The Strategy Conference is an opportunity to look at the current trends impacting our sector, including those in the areas of technology, customer behaviour, services diversification and postal financial services. The agents of change are numerous in this period of radical transformation for the postal sector,” said the UPU's Edouard Dayan, who heads the United Nations specialized agency for postal services.
The two-day conference is an important forum for delegates to take stock of progress made in achieving the objectives of the current world postal strategy. The strategy, adopted in 2008, focuses on improving the quality and efficiency of the worldwide postal network, stimulating a universal postal service adapted to the social, economic and technological environment, promoting the sector’s sustainable development and fostering the growth of the postal markets and services.
Adapting to change
“With the rapid growth of electronic communication, consumers’ communication needs are expected to change significantly in the coming years,” said Samuel Poghisio, Kenya's minister of information and communication. “It is essential to establish a modern and dynamic concept of the universal postal service, which better corresponds to the demands of today’s consumers. Postal operators should be stimulated to improve and innovate upon the existing universal postal service.”
Innovation and service diversification are important themes of the Strategy Conference, as one aim is to start defining the contours of the next world postal strategy UPU members will be expected to adopt at the next Universal Postal Congress in Doha, Qatar, in 2012.
The postal sector is lifting itself out of an economic crisis that has accentuated a trend of declining letter-post volumes, but also provided new opportunities for national Posts in business segments such as parcels and financial services. Well before the economic crisis occurred, many Posts around the world had started to diversify their services, expanding into new areas such as logistics management, e-commerce and e-government. During the crisis, several Posts, especially those managing postal financial institutions, witnessed exponential growth in the number of customers and accounts as a result of consumers’ loss of trust in traditional banking institutions. E-commerce, often responsible for the growth of parcel volumes in many Posts, also continued to thrive despite the crisis.