 Welcome to the ITU 2022 Plenipotentiary Conference here in Bucharest, Romania, where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Dr Amr Talat, who is the Minister of Communications and Information Technology for Egypt. Welcome to the studio. Thank you very much for inviting me. Great to be with you. Now, Excellency, I wanted to ask you to begin with the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference, which is obviously happening here in Romania, is working hard together with member states to serve two main goals, namely universal connectivity and sustainable digital transformation. I know that Egypt is developing its national initiatives in line with the international collective moves. I wanted to ask you if you could possibly tell us a little bit about digital Egypt and how it serves on the sustainable digital transformation front. Indeed, digital Egypt is a great aspiration that everybody in Egypt is currently working on and aspiring for. We've set a strategy for digital Egypt four years back that stands over several pillars. One of the most important pillars in building digital Egypt is digitalizing the government services that we render to our citizens. We started by forming a data repository for all the databases the government is in possession of to give us a better digital framework and a digital characteristics of our citizens that would help us serve them better. And then, of course, we digitalized the processes itself of different government serving agencies. And finally, we built the clouds and infrastructure together with the platform that renders those services. Currently, we have around 150 fully digitalized services on the platform that we avail to our citizens and we're working to finalize the rest of the services by end of this year. This has been coupled with enhancing our digital infrastructure. We started back in 2018. We invested around $2 billion in the fixed broadband network replacing copper with fiber and extending the mesh across the country. Since the beginning of 2020, Egypt is number one in Africa in the average high-speed internet for the continent. It's a position that we're happy with and we plan to keep on. Now it's very interesting to hear all about digital Egypt and the comprehensive plans that it's serving. I wanted to ask you perhaps you could speak to us a bit more about how the Ministry of Communication and Information Technology in Egypt is serving universal connectivity fronts, especially because, of course, as we know, 2.7 billion people are still unconnected. Egypt enjoys a unique geographical position in the world. Hence, over 90 percent of the data flow flowing between the east and west passes through Egyptian soil and Egyptian seas. This is a characteristic that obliges Egypt to better serve and maintain the connectivity of the friendly countries around us. Around 16 cables, international submarine cables, passes through Egypt. Hence, we have doubled the infrastructure of the domestic network that transfers this data between the Red Sea and the Mediterranean to pass from east to west. We've invested $1.5 billion in enhancing and robusting this domestic network to be able to better serve our neighbors. Also, we started a project for an international submarine cable that would pass all around Africa and then on to the countries on both shores of Africa, onwards to the inland countries, to better avail cyber access to our friends in Africa. I know that Egypt, amongst other countries, is privileged with a young population and I wanted to ask you, perhaps you could talk to us a little bit about the national plans to build on the strength of the human factor. Actually, this is the core of the strategy of building digital Egypt, to expand the scale pool of Egyptians across the disciplines and specializations of the ICT industries. In four years, we have multiplied the budget for training of the Ministry of ICT in Egypt by 26 and we have increased the number of trainees from 4,000 back in 2018 to 250,000 this year. So quarter of a million trainees this year in order to expand our pool of resources. We've also built the first university in Africa specialized in ICT with four different faculties and we've built incubators and training centers all across the country. We have around 30 government rates administrative constituencies in Egypt and the plan is to have an incubator and training center in each and every one of them. We've finished around 12 so far, by the end of this year we'll release eight more and onwards next year to complete. So the human factor and the human development is the cornerstone of the strategy of digital Egypt. There's certainly an enormous amount of enthusiasm and it's great to find out that you can build on that capacity as well. I'm sure we've witnessed that ourselves and hackathons at ITU events in Egypt and as I say they've all been extremely successful. I wanted to also ask you about the future of electronic design and manufacturing in Egypt. How do you see that evolving? This is one very important pillar in our strategy. Maybe the past few years between the pandemic and the current socio-political crisis has proven that there is no stable region in the world where all development should flow to. So the strategy of most of the parties involved in this industry now is to distribute their resources across the world and definitely Egypt stands out as a country that can attract the resources and attract investments in this very important specialization. We have around 50 to 60 companies specialized in electronic design. We plan to invest one billion dollars in training in electronic design in the next three years in order again to have enough resources to attract non-Egyptian companies to come to Egypt and set centers of excellence there. We also plan to help Egyptian startups specialized in electronic design by giving financial resources and human resources necessary for that. We also started several very promising agreements with leading electronic manufacturing companies to set up manufacturing plants in Egypt for mobiles and tablets and laptops. We plan to continue on this route in the coming few years. Now just finally you've given up I'm sure what is a chunk of your busy schedule to be here at the ICU Planet Potentiary Conference. Why is it important for you to be here physically here in Bucharest? Egypt has always been an active team player in the ITU since we joined back in 1876 and we joined the council in 1973. So we're an old and active member. We're proud of the role that Egyptian experts play in the ITU. We want to continue serving in the ITU and cooperating with the rest of the countries in availing access to more and more people. These 2.7 million citizens that we talked about, better connectivity, better service for people around the world through the ITU. Well we're very glad to have you here and we look forward to catching up with you again in the very near future I'm sure. Dr. Mahmoud, Minister of Communications and Information Technology for Egypt. Thank you very much indeed for being with us in the studio today. Thank you very much for having me.