 Hello, everyone. My name is Mariela Machado and I'm program manager with the Engineering for Global Development team here at ACME. The COVID crisis introduced a new hurdle in the journey towards the two India CGs by 2030. It also forced the global development community to consider what we were planning to do differently in this decade of action to actually ensure the delivery in the context of future crisis such as climate change. And what are the opportunities and are for the engineering community as a part of this international mobilization for the SDGs? Today, we have assembled a panel representing cross-cutting stakeholders in global development to share their experience with crisis and recommendations for how to stay the course on their extreme circumstances as the ones we're living in now. We will hear from an UN agency with boots on the ground and infrastructure firm delivering solutions for resiliency and lessons learned from regional responses in Kenya and South Korea. Our panel will be immediately followed by a spotlight on the COVID-19 response executed by the UN's Economic Commission for Africa and their unique approach for driving innovation and investment across the continent. To start off the discussion, I would like to invite our moderator, Ariel Alexovich, and I hope I said that right, Ariel, who is a Sustainable Development Officer at UNDESA and at the forefront of the monitoring, evaluation, and strategic efforts for the 2030 agenda. Ariel, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome and over to you. Wonderful. Thanks, Mariela, and welcome everybody. Thank you for joining us for this panel, Ecosystems for Social Impact. My name is Ariel Alexovich and I'm a Sustainable Development Officer at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs UNDESA based in New York. As the think tank of the UN, our department generates, analyzes, and compiles a wide range of economic, social, and environmental data and statistics to inform and advise UN member states and other stakeholders as they take stock of trends and policy options to tackle common problems. Of course, this year our work is focused on the economic and social challenges related to COVID and how we can recover better from the pandemic. Our department also acts as the Secretariat for the Sustainable Development Goals, providing substantive support and capacity building for the 17 goals and their related thematic issues, including water, energy, climate, oceans, urbanization, transport, science, and technology. We play a key role in the evaluation of UN's system-wide implementation of the 2030 agenda and on partnership, advocacy, and outreach activities relating to the SDGs. So thank you very much to my colleague, Astra, who just gave an overview about what DESA is doing to engage scientists, innovators, and people in tech in the implementation of the SDGs. You are very welcome to follow our Science, Technology, and Innovation Forum in 2021 and also contribute to the 2030 Connect platform that Astra mentioned, which aims to bring together global entrepreneurs, innovators, students, and others seeking to exchange ideas and build networks to help SDG implementation. You can find the platform by googling 2030 Connect or I'll give you the URL here. It's tfm2030connect.un.org. So the UN does this work of engaging with the tech community because achieving the SDGs by 2030 is something we can only do by working together. Everyone has a role to play, federal governments, local governments, the private sector, civil society, international organizations, academia, youth, individuals, and engineers. So we have with us today four amazing panelists to share with us some innovations helping the world recover better from COVID and make progress on the SDGs. We have Siddharth Chatterjee, the UN resident coordinator for Kenya. We have Rebecca Moreno-Humenez, Innovation Officer and Data Scientist at UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency. We have Myung-Hwa Lee, Research Fellow and Head of the Office of National R&D at the Research, Science, and Technology Policy Institute in South Korea. And Michael McWhorter, Vice President of STANTEC, here to talk about some private sector initiatives. So as you can see, we have four smart and accomplished guests here in only 25 minutes to hear from them. We won't have much time for Q&A, but if you have a question, please type it into the chat. If nothing else, we'll share them with the panelists and get their responses so they can be incorporated into the final document for this event. So let's dive right in. All right, with our all-star lineup here representing governments, the private sector and different parts of the UN, I would love to hear from each of you about how you or your organizations are using science, technology, and innovation to aid the COVID efforts where you are. So maybe let's hear from Sidd first. What are you seeing on the ground in Africa? To me, thank you for that question. And to me, Africa in many ways epitomizes what the future market looks like by 2050. This is a continent which will have 2.3 billion people of which 850 million will be young people. So it is going to be a market of consumers and producers. But how do we get them there? So the SDGs, to me, is the roadmap of the Africa's Marshall Plan. And that can only happen when we actually see the advent of true convergences of big data technology and innovation. So let me just give you a little story, which is, I think, pertinent and very germane to this conversation. Back in 2014, I used to be the head of the UN Population Fund. There were six counties of the 47 counties in Kenya, which had the highest maternal mortality ratios in Kenya. But as a result of which, Kenya got held back in achieving, if you recall, the Millennium Development Goal Number 5, which was about ensuring that there was 170 deaths per 100,000 live birds or lower. But in Kenya's case, that wasn't the case. So we decided to go in there into a public-private partnership. So Merck, GlaxoSmith, Klein, Philips, SafariCom, Huawei, and Kenya Health Care Federation joined up with us, UNFPA, UNICEF, and WHO. And in a matter of two and a half years, we were able to actually impact the maternal mortality ratios in these six counties, which got us invited to the World Economic Forum in 2017 in January. And that's when we realized that, look, if we could actually come together and have such an impact in a micro setting, which is very fragile, very insecure, you know, the infrastructure was very weak. Why can't we look at universal health coverage as an opportunity to undertake in Kenya? And which then in 2017, we set up the first SDG public-private partnership platform during the UN General Assembly, led by the foreign minister of Kenya, and several companies, the UN came together and formed this platform. What we have done ever since is really expanded this platform to include health, affordable housing, agriculture, manufacturing, the aim being that we use as an underlying big data technology and innovation to leapfrog the SDGs. And more recently, we went to the Silicon Valley, this was in January, to bridge the Silicon Savannah here in Kenya with the Silicon Valley companies in the Silicon Valley. And it's clear that Kenya in many ways is actually at the forefront of many innovations, whether during the COVID you've seen a student body, which the UN recognized as the students of the year, the UN people of the year, because of creating ventilators, or the kind of, it's really the hotbed of a variety of innovation. So today our platform, what we are trying to do through that is drive this innovation, is drive this acceleration that we need. Because if you remember what the deputy secretary, Jan LaMina Mohamed often reminds us, she says, we have to flip the orthodoxy. And the way you flip the orthodoxy is a new convergence of partners. And therefore, I want to applaud ACME for their leadership and for having kind of pulled this whole event together. And quite clearly listening to Asha's message, I think that is precisely what we echo here out in the field. And that's the only way we will be able to propel that discourse and change that narrative, which actually besets Africa as mission impossible. Actually, Africa is where the new paradigm is going to happen. Over to you, Gary. Thanks, and Africa certainly is the full of opportunities right now. And I hope that everyone hears your words right now and is excited and sees the possibilities there. So let's just shift to your graphic focus and let me ask Myeonghwa, what are you seeing in South Korea? Asia, of course, has been a place where the worst effects of COVID have already been minimized to a large degree. But how are you or your organization using tech science innovation to aid the COVID efforts? Thank you, Ariel. I'm happy to share Korea's experience. In Korea, science and technology played a critical role in quite successfully responding to COVID-19. For example, as soon as the first confirmed case was reported in Korea, the government tried to develop diagnostic kits for massive scale tests. In order to do this, AI technologies have been used for identifying the genetic nature of the virus, so they contributed to developing test kits quickly. Also, Korea utilized smart city technologies to identify suspected patients in a very short time. The locations of confirmed patients are identified by using the details of their credit card transactions, surveillance camera footage, and GPS tracking of mobile phones. Now Korea has focused on developing vaccines and therapeutics to deal with COVID-19. And some corona therapeutics are in phase three of clinical trials. As we have seen in this crisis, I believe that the role of science and technology will become greater in reserving social challenges. Yes, over to you, Ariel. Great. Thanks, Myeonghwa. It's really great what we're hearing coming out of Korea. So thank you for presenting that information. So let me shift to Rebecca and ask what's going on with UNHCR and dealing with COVID in refugee camps. Thank you, Ariel, for the question. And thank you, Puck Engineer, for the opportunity to speak on this panel. And as you probably know, refugees and other displaced populations are some of the most marginalized and most vulnerable members of society. And now with COVID-19, they are particularly at risk because they often have limited or actually lack of basic things like water or hygiene items like soap or access to sanitation systems or health facilities, right? And so it goes beyond camps, right? So as 80% of our world's refugee population and nearly all the world's internally displaced people are hosted in low and middle-income countries. Majority of them, they live in urban crowded areas as well. So they're also at risk. In the sense, UNHCR efforts at a global level have been the focus to help first, particularly these ways, to providing with these life-saving items to support them, for example, access to water in some of the camps, precisely medical care, PPE, or hygiene materials, and also expanding cash assistance to help mitigate the pandemic, negative socioeconomic impact. But again, like the agency has double, redouble efforts on the protection front by improving community network communication and fact-based information. There's a lot of misinformation around COVID-19, particularly in in forcibly displaced communities, as well as becoming a strong advocate to respond to sexual and gender-based violence and child trafficking that have increased dramatically in the onset of COVID-19. But as your particular question on science, technology, and innovation on COVID-19, well, we have UNHCR Innovation Service, a partner up with UN Global Pulse, which is the UN Secretary-General Initiative for Big Data and AI, OCE, Durham University, and IBM, MIT, Watson, AI Lab, to create a computer simulation to understand the spread of COVID-19 in Kutapalong expansion site in Coqs Bazaar, Coqs in Bangladesh, so in the camp, in the Pocampocas expansion site. And this simulation uses a agent-based modeling approach, which is aiming to understand the movement of people within the camp and providing insights around this movement for the potential spread. And derived from this movement, the camp management team can make informed decisions. For example, which ones are the best health measures to be taken according to the movement, like closer of schools or closer of certain areas of shops or communal areas, or where to use more strongly the use of masks, right? I think the camp team, it will be benefiting from this simulation, which is already being tested with them, because they can make decisions after that evidence that we're giving, which is the spread of modeling the spread. And if you're interested to know more about this project, there's a blog that is also already in the UN Global Pulse website, and the research paper is coming soon for those engineering assistants. Over to you. Thank you, Rebecca. That is a really cool initiative. Data is power, as our engineering audience out here knows for sure. Thank you for sharing that with us. Let me turn to Michael. How about what Stantec is doing? What are you seeing in your work? Yeah. Hi, and thank you, as everyone else has said, for the opportunity. I think kind of reflecting on hearing what folks said there and also looking across our portfolio of things that we've been involved with, really COVID has touched everything that we do as communities. And I was going through Stantec has it on our website. We have a list of projects we've been involved with that have looked at this and the breadth of what technology and issues we've had to look at are really broad. Some data analysis things have really needed to be done to understand how transportation systems are changing with everybody's very, very different activities now with the pandemic. And good utilities also need to think forward and consider what all that will look like in the future as well after the pandemic, likely some significant changes there. A lot of what we've done has been trying to help businesses to continue to operate well. Some of the largest hit sectors have been hospitality, restaurants and things like that. And a really large part of what we've been doing in sort of the areas of landscape architecture and your architecture itself have been associated with trying to redesign the places where humans meet so that they are inherently safer with better more warmth because as it gets cold, the warmth becomes a challenge and also better ventilation externally and often naturally so that locations are just safer for people to have dinner and do things like that in a way that is respectful of the challenges that the pandemic has. And then there's been some very important work done with the ventilation inside buildings as well. HVAC has become a really important thing and redesigning of basically every type of building to try and address this. And I think that's been a common trend in pandemics over through history that that's been a real, real key thing. And then some things that maybe you wouldn't think about there's a lot of work has been done. Stantex heavily involved with some of our clients tracking using wastewater sampling to sort of get a forethought as to where the virus might be more prominent and things like that. So if you look at this, it's really touched every part of our life and every community that we work and serve. And so because of that, there's had to be such a broad application of technology and science to really address it. Thank you, Michael. Certainly in the COVID era, any efforts towards improving sanitation are well received. So thank you for sharing that. So everybody, thanks for laying a great groundwork here. And let me ask you guys, what do you need from clients, from donors, governments, technology itself to improve these efforts to make sure that we're reaching everybody? And maybe I could invite Sid to take a stab first, please. Perhaps the sustainable development goals itself issues a clarion call to the entire world of leaving no one behind. And therefore, sustainable development goals 17 becomes even more relevant in this era, or should we call this decade of action to achieve the SDGs. So in a sense, this new public-private partnership model that the UN actually generated here in Kenya has now been seen by many UN country teams as a global norm of advancing the SDG-17 agenda in order to look at real value propositions of, and this is not about aerial, about philanthropy or charity, no, it's about real programs that impact lives and are sustainable at the same time. And that is why what we need is what I call the harnessing of big data technology and innovation to look at this gigantic shift in the way we need to advance the entire growth and advancement of Africa, particularly which I'm interested in, in terms of the sustainable development goals. Over to you. Yeah, I think that really shows that we need more partnerships that can also connect everybody together to improve these efforts. Maybe I'll ask Rebecca from the refugee side in what can happen more to reach these vulnerable people. Thank you. Well, first, to keep up with the continued support and partnerships to tackle now what we call the double challenge now for displacement as a challenge and the global pandemic as well as a challenge. Now more than ever, I think we need the interdisciplinary approach to solve global problems now. I think of the project, as I mentioned, in this project we have social scientists, public health specialists, epidemiologists, computer scientists, data engineers, and education and shelter specialists just to design that simulation. And it's just a computer simulation. It's just one problem and one project, but that could actually lay the ground on a lot of more complex solutions that we can help those who are forcibly displaced in camps, in urban areas, whatever they're located. And then also we welcome those efforts, especially those who are focused on social impact, that they have this interdisciplinary approach and that they're human-centered based. Because I'm amazed sometimes how people design projects for refugees and internally displaced people without ever interviewing them or having any contact with them, right? So I think we need all those people that are working on solutions besides governments or technologies or even engineers to have that particular emphasis on that. And precisely just as a final point, I think also for donors for the technology sector in general, to use responsible data practices such as data protection, privacy by design, as well as a very strong focus on human rights and ethics to develop any technology solution. Because with this human-centered approach that I was mentioning, like trying to talk to those people that are affected, but also this approach on responsible data practices and human rights, we make sure that all these efforts are accessible to everyone and respecting their human rights and obviously dignity and humanity. Thank you. Over to you. Thanks, Rebecca. That's so important. Humans, humans first, people first in policies and when thinking about next steps and solutions. So let me ask Myeonghwa, in your opinion, how can scientists and engineers be better utilized to ensure that each country recover better after COVID-19? Of course, ensuring the social and environmental protections and putting us on a good path as we continue down this decade of action for SDGs. Thank you, Ariel. Let me share a recent initiative which was established in Korea. Last July, the government announced the Korean New Deal Initiative, which includes the Green New Deal. We set ambitious goals to move toward a natural society and a number of bold STI strategies. The projects are, for example, green industrial complexes, green remodeling, green energy, and eco-friendly mobility of the future. Scientists and engineers will play a significant role in developing renewable energy equipment, smart grays for more efficient energy management, and electric and hydrogen cars. I think Korea's current initiative will perfectly fit into the SDGs. Yes, over to you. Thank you, Myeonghwa. I think this sounds really cool and exciting that Korea is framing it this way. Its recovery kind of reminds me our UN Secretary-General has talked about something called a new social contract that is trying to integrate employment sustainable development and social protection. It's great to see a government stepping up to take that on. Let me go to Michael. Michael, how do you think engineers and scientists can be better utilized in these efforts? I think something that struck me personally and us as a company at the start of this was the speed of what had to happen. I think there's been a lot of examples of that. The great developments with vaccines is something that I think everybody in the world is excited about. Speed has been really important. Adaptability was a challenge. We were all sitting there thinking about what February was like and we had no idea what was going to happen or what was happening at that time and how our lives were going to change so quickly. I think in many situations we were able to respond as a species even very quickly to that. I was looking back on some work that we did. There were hospitals that needed to instantly change. We had design teams that worked on things like that and made those changes literally in hours for designs, things that we might have thought about for weeks and months before. That speed is really important. I think we have many technologies which support that now. I think to answer the question, we have these challenges that come to us. We have challenges right now that come to us. What can we do best with science? It's about really quickly sharing the great ideas that we have. Part of innovation is a good idea that turns up in one place. We need to get that everywhere. People who work as engineers and scientists and things like that, we have networks and using those networks and the technology that's available to us. We can share quickly ideas that are solutions. Around the world it's been proven that science and technology and a following of what they tell us is really the key to beating coronavirus. I think if we keep that up with our personal networks and make use of what's there and quickly share information, that is what we can do to best create impact. Thank you, Michael. Absolutely. Looking ahead to 2021, the hot topic will inevitably be COVID-19 vaccine rollout. Thank you for touching on that. Scientists put down a big challenge for engineers with a lot of these vaccines needing cold storage and mass distribution. Thanks for telling us that speed is what we need. We need all these engineers working towards this effort. Unfortunately, I think that's all the time we have. I would like to thank our panelists again for the insights that they've shared today. If you would like to learn more about the Sustainable Development Goals and ways for your organization to be more involved or you individually, please visit sdgs.un.org. Thank you very, very much for joining us and enjoy the rest of the conference.