 Hello and welcome to the WISIS Forum 2019. We are celebrating our 10-year anniversary this year and as you all are aware the WISIS process is built around the framework of WISIS Action Lines and there are several components that make the WISIS process effective and inclusive. We are going to be talking to some representatives of the WISIS process today and the theme for today's talk is aligned to the theme of the high-level political forum 2019 which is empowering people through inclusiveness and equality. Good morning Sophie. You are the Action Line facilitator for Action Line C6 enabling environment. What role does collaboration in this area play to ensure equality and inclusiveness? Good morning Kitangeli and thank you for inviting me for the interview. Indeed equality and inclusiveness. We are in the age of digital transformation. If we want to bring in the bottom of the pyramid everybody have everybody connected. We also need to see how that connectivity can benefit them so they can be included in the digital economy. For that ICTs are really the oil of the motor. It's the oil that makes society and the economies transform. And for that we need collaboration, collaboration across the partners, collaboration across the sectors and collaborative regulatory measures because that collaboration, the discussion and the talking to each other and ensuring that together we find the innovative solutions to really include everybody in an equal way in the digital economy. It's a foundational element. Thank you very much Sophie. Of course collaborations, partnerships, networking for win-win situations is the key for this forum. Now we are moving to our Action Line facilitator for Action Line C2. It's ICT infrastructure. Good morning Desiree. My question to you would be what are the new technologies that are emerging to ensure equality and inclusiveness in this area? Good morning Kisanjari. The technologies are improving as you have noted. After 10 years anniversary of the WISIS we are doing some improvement in terms of broadband. Broadband, if we go to rural areas that's where we make an impact and the inclusiveness can be a reality. So new technologies, we have broadband technologies. This includes many standards developed by our department in ITUT on optical cables, low cost optical cables and also other broadband technologies which are standardized, other not standardized like DOCSIS but also 5G coming in operation these days and this really will make a difference. But the key issue here we need to have clear policies on broadband also business model. The business model which can be sustainable even in rural areas. Thank you. Thank you very much Desiree. Connecting the world especially the rural areas is crucial for the Action Line C2 in ICT infrastructure. We have here with us today also our regional representative to give us a regional perspective of why it is important to implement WISIS Action Lines at the regional and national levels. Good morning Yaroslav. My question to you would be how can we strengthen regional cooperation for equality and empowerment of people? When the global leaders agreed on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development all countries committed to achieve SDGs by 2030 and also in line with this change the UN system is adapting to make sure that the real impact is happening at the national level and that the real action is happening at the country level to address the challenges of the countries. This is the reason why the WISIS framework is so important for assisting the countries in strengthening and amplifying the impact of the ICTs on SDGs. A lot of discussions at the national level are happening in field of health, education, governance but more and more we are hearing that the ICT is this central point of all those projects and therefore here we're coming to the need and necessity of alignment of the WISIS process with the SDGs and more importantly on strengthening the regional implementations. This is the reason why the all action line facilitators are so eager to work together with the Economic Commissions of the United Nations and to make sure that the ICT component is very strong in the original development for us and that the ICT component is essentially the most important component in the all UN development assistance frameworks which now are rebranded but still are focusing on the addressing the national challenges. Of course there is plenty of different national initiatives, projects and supporting the countries but we are working with the all UN systems and sister agencies to support all countries at the regional level. Thank you very much Yaroslav. Regional, national and international collaboration in fact is very important for the success of the WISIS process and here at the WISIS forum we have more than 3000 stakeholders who represent the WISIS stakeholder communities from all these different stakeholder types. A very important part of the WISIS process is also the partnership on measuring ICT for development and this is facilitated by a group of UN agencies. We have a representative from the partnership Miss Esperanza. Esperanza what role does the ICT for the measuring partnership for ICT play in ensuring equality and empowering people? Thank you Gitanjali so the partnership was formed 15 years ago with its original objective of improving quality and quantity of ICT statistics in countries. So we have been very involved in ensuring that this goal is achieved first by assessing the monitoring of the WISIS targets where we look at the WISIS target indicators that were defined few years back when WISIS just started but most recently we had embarked on a work through our task group on ICTs for SDGs where we are defining indicators that could be used to monitor the implementation of the SDGs so what will be the role of ICTs in achieving the SDGs and through this work we have come up with a number of indicators which we presented actually in the session that we organized on Monday which is open to all WISIS stakeholders they can provide comments to this list of indicators with an objective that the implementation of the SDGs could be speeded up by the use of ICT so we want to measure how ICTs could be instrumental in achieving the SDGs so that is the current work that the partnership is focusing on and we are counting at the different WISIS stakeholders to provide comments to those indicators and to use them when those indicators are available so that they will be able to assess the implementation of the SDGs Thank you Thank you very much We heard from all our representatives that ICTs are crucial to achieve the sustainable development goals and different processes within the World Summit on the Information Society are working to ensure that the implementation activities are impactful Thank you and wish you a great day