 Good morning, good evening, good afternoon to all stakeholders who are joining us from all over the world to the WSIS Forum 2022. We are live from Geneva and we are celebrating the final week of the WSIS Forum 2022. We have here with us WSIS Action Line facilitators. UN is an integral part of the entire WSIS process and we work with our United Nations sister agencies to implement the different action lines that form the framework of the WSIS process. I'll move on to my first invited guest. It's Mr. Timbani from FAO who implements the WSIS Action Line C7 e-agriculture. Good morning Mr. Timbani. Good morning, how are you? Fine, thank you. How are you? I am very well. So thank you for being here, you know, e-agriculture is such an important topic, you know. We have been hearing the ministers, head of regulatory bodies, other stakeholders talking about our great collaboration in e-agriculture. So what were the challenges that you faced during COVID and how did you overcome them because we had to adapt so quickly, you know, and what are some of your plans for the future? The greatest challenge that COVID brought to us was to break the food systems. Food could stay on the farm and not go to the market. So that was also an opportunity because that's when we apply digital technologies to ensure that we resuscitate agri-food system and get the food to the farmers. So we quickly jumped in and helped with a lot of technologies that we can offer and data to was one of the most pillars of digital agriculture and e-agriculture. In the future, we are thinking of how to implement various robust digital agriculture systems to help our small-holder farmers participate in the agri-food systems so that they absorb the shocks of a similar nature when it happens. So we are in the process of rolling out a number of solutions, a number of projects that we will allow to do that. For example, FAO is implementing the hand-in-hand platform that collects data from all the countries that are participating in the program to ensure the visibility of content of data, of production, of consumption, so that at least the marketing or the agri-food systems remain stable. Thank you so much and we look forward to implementing the proposed ICT and agriculture track in the WSIS Forum 2023 in collaboration with FAO. Thank you. I would now like to move on to Ms. Tiziana from UNS CAP. So UNS CAP, as you all know, is a regional commission and the WSIS process is implemented at the regional level through the regional commissions. We have a great collaboration with UNS CAP. We do a regional review every year with them. Even during COVID, we had virtual WSIS reviews and UNS CAP has actually a resolution on WSIS. So can you please tell us a bit more about that? Okay, thank you, Gitanjali, and good morning. So as you said, we have had the pleasure of a very productive partnership with ITU on the WSIS review. Our next one will be 29 to 30 August, so we're looking forward to that. And then, you know, in terms of the concerns that ESCAP has, I think the key one is the digital divide. It has widened during the pandemic, and as digital became default, so it also widened other socioeconomic inequalities and development gaps. But the good news is that last week in ESCAP, we celebrated our 75th anniversary. So we are rather old, but still useful, and a resolution was adopted. And this resolution has, I think, a very strong commitment by governments to increase collaboration in digital connectivity and in digital transformation. And the resolution recognises that the Asia Pacific Information Superhighway Initiative could be a very useful platform for bridging the digital divide in partnership with ITU and our UN family. So we really look forward to continuing to work with ITU and our UN family and really bridging the digital divide by 2030. Thank you. Thank you, Tiziana. The ministerial roundtable that was held yesterday actually echoed the similar words where they said that ICTs are no longer a luxury but a necessity. So we need a serious call to action through the WISIS process to ensure that the WISIS action lines are aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals. Thank you so much. So I have next with us Mr. Denis Sousar. He facilitates the action lines on C1, C7 e-governance, and C11 on international collaboration. Welcome Denis from UN DESA. So Denis, what are some of the observations you had within the framework of e-governance and what are some of your plans for international collaboration this year? Thank you Gitanjali. We've organised a session on e-government this year. And of course as you know COVID-19 tremendously changed how governments worked. We've seen many, many innovations in the area of e-government. But of course digital divides that Mr. Ziyane Bonapas mentioned also exist in the area of e-government. There are online services but not everyone can access them. So that's one challenge. We've also started looking at how cities are doing in addition to national e-government portals. So what we are observing is cities are far behind even though we see that hype about smart city, many cities are lacking basic online services and there's lots of room for improvement there. And the last thing I want to mention is about the Internet Governance Forum. This is related to C11. IGF is communed by the Secretary General. We are taking it back to Africa more than 10 years now in Ethiopia. It will take place end of November. And we will be talking about the SD's global digital compact and other issues that are high in the UN agenda. So thank you. Thank you so much, Denise. You mentioned smart cities and this year at the WSIS Forum we initiated the first ever discussion with mayors which was really successful and we hope to build on it for the next year ensuring that smart cities are well integrated and they are providing a digital inclusion, a healthy smart city for all their citizens. I would now like to move on to Smirna from UNSQA. Smirna has also won a WSIS prizes 2022 champion for her project that she pioneered. So Smirna tell us a bit more about this project and congratulations. It was wonderful. It's a very, very difficult contest and you won it. You had so many votes. So thank you for being here. Over to you, Smirna. Thank you. Thank you. Actually the Arab Digital Inclusion Platform is an initiative launched by ESQUA in 2020 and was focused on e-accessibility and digital accessibility, particularly for people with disability. Within this project we aim actually to provide support to policymakers at national level by providing them templates, adaptable templates on building and improving their national policy on accessibility. In addition to that, we developed interactive tools in order to actually facilitate the usage of these templates and the application of these templates at national level. We also built an online platform which is actually, and we are proud of that, 100 percent near 100 percent, 96 percent accessible by people with disability. This online platform provides people with disabilities with all necessary resources, accessible resources in addition to a private section dedicated to intergovernmental experts for people with disabilities in the region to discuss and share common understanding and documents and so on. So by this actually we launched the initiatives and we are currently conducting the national rollouts and we started with selected member countries who are currently using the templates that ESQUA developed in order to develop their national e-accessibility. And the moment to launch this initiative is very critical and sensitive. It was during COVID-19 because as you know people with disabilities in the Arab region are among the most marginalized groups and with the pandemic they become even more marginalized. So this would help actually to bridge the digital divide, not only the digital divide but the social and economic divide with specific focus on people with disability. Thank you. Thank you, Marina. Congratulations once again for your great work. We'll continue to work with you for digital inclusion of people with special needs, older persons, gender, children, youth. So thank you so much and we continue this great collaboration. Thank you. I would now like to move on to Claire from UNESCO. Welcome Claire. Claire is the facilitator for the WISIS Action Line C10 on ethics, ethical dimension of information society, extremely crucial. We heard so many discussions and dialogues during the WISIS forum highlighting the ethical dimensions of information society. So Claire, what were the key trends you noticed during this COVID phase and what are your plans for the future? Over to you Claire. Well, thanks very much, Katanjali. Yes, in terms of ethics, I'd just like to mention one of the major milestones of UNESCO was the recent adoption last November of the ethics of AI recommendation, which was adopted by 193 member states. And the recommendation lays out principles and policy actions looking at how we can develop an ethical AI which is human-centric and looks at issues around sustainability. As we know, for example, AI, the data centers used to create AI are increasing, and this is increasing CO2 emissions. We've seen a lot of gender discrimination and racial discrimination coming out of some algorithms based on faulty data sets. So we're trying to really make this well-known, but also to provide guidance to member states about how they can develop ethical AI. And as part of this recommendation, we have two main tools that we will be developing. One is an ethical impact assessment, and a second one is on an AI readiness, because as we know, there are a number of countries that are at very different stages of being able to access AI. As you mentioned, one of the issues is around connectivity. So we've been looking with other partners through the AI interagency group that we'd share with ITU on what are the different baselines for different countries. And we've also established a group of early adopters who are interested in taking forward the recommendation. As you know, there's about 60 countries that already have national AI strategies, but they don't all include an ethical dimension, which we find very important. So this is some of the work that we're doing, and we will be having a session on this dimension actually later this afternoon. Thank you, Claire. I'm sure this crucial discussion will continue. And UNESCO is an excellent partner of the WISIS process contributing to ensure that we're not only forming information societies, but information and knowledge societies. So thank you so much, Claire, for being with us here today. I'd move on to the last WISIS Action Line facilitator, Mr. Preeti Maloor. He facilitates the WISIS Action Line C5 on building confidence in the use of ICTs, cybersecurity. You must have heard cybersecurity pop up in most of the workshops, the ministerial roundtable, the mayor's sessions, everywhere. The parliamentarians are requesting capacity building in cybersecurity. So what are your plans for ensuring that our WISIS stakeholder community is aware of the cyber threats? What is the WISIS Action Line C5 doing? And what are your plans for the future? Thank you, Gitanjali. So there's obviously a clear trend that not only are the number of cyber attacks increasing, but the range and the nature of the attacks are also getting increasingly diverse. For example, as you all must have noticed, there's a lot of buzz around AR, VR, the Metaverse here, there's an exhibition space here. But it was also addressed in most of the sessions, the issues such as the need for a proper technical framework for the Metaverse came up several times, the need for guardrails, especially for children who are already exposed to video games, which is the first initiation into the Metaverse. That was brought up many times, various kinds of abuses were highlighted. So that is something that as the Action Line C5 facilitator, we will be keeping a close watch on. The second one obviously is AI, where we've addressed it in the past few WISIS forums also. But here again, the risks are increasing, the concerns are increasing, especially when it comes to critical application areas such as health, mobility. Many of these were highlighted, including in the mayor's session. That's another area where we will be continuing to follow the developments closely and highlighting them. And of course, there's always the fear of what is next. Quantum computing, there is a risk that with quantum computing, many of the encryption technologies we have may not be as robust as we've thought them to be. So this is where we organized the Action Line C5 session yesterday on privacy-preserving techniques in a post-quantum world. So we had techniques like homomorphic encryption, decentralized privacy preservation. So there were quite a few of these that were highlighted. There was also this importance of having proper international frameworks because many of these techniques used cross-border transfer of data. So that's something that we need to talk about. So obviously, as many countries use emerging technologies as a driver for the digital transformation strategy, we count on the stakeholders in the WSIS Forum to bring these issues to the forum, to our attention, so that we can act as a stimulus to facilitate global conversation on these topics. Thank you. Thank you very much, Preetam. So as you all heard, the WSIS process is a great example of digital cooperation within the UN family. We work with all stakeholders from all over the world to ensure that our WSIS Action Lines play a crucial role in advancing the achievements of the sustainable development goals. Please keep following us and be part of the WSIS process. Thank you very much.