 Welcome to the ITU studio in Geneva, and I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Professor Tim Unwin, who is UNESCO chairman in ICT for Development, Royal Holloway University of London, and also former secretary general of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation. Tim, great to see you in the studio today. It's always nice to be here, and pleasure to be with you again. Thanks very much indeed. Now, this year we're celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ITU development sector. The ICT landscape, I think you would agree, has changed tremendously in the past decades. ITU is launching a study on ICT for SDGs, and I wanted to ask you, how do you think this study will contribute to responding to many of today's challenges? First, let me congratulate the ITU on this great event. I mean, 25 years, and as you say, the world has changed hugely, and ICTs have been a fundamental part of that. There are those, yeah, not too many people, but there are those who actually see ICTs as being very unsustainable, and doing a lot of damage in the world, leading to greater inequality, leading to higher demands for energy and satellites in space. So, this ground-breaking work by people in the ITU and they brought together a range of primarily economists, is going to try and write about these issues in a slightly different way from the normal arguments that tend to be put out there. So, it's going to be, I hope, a little bit critical, a little bit, actually asking, well, why haven't we had all the benefits that ICTs are often seen as delivering? How do we make them more sustainable? How do we make the interventions that they offer more sustainable as well? And we can look at sustainability in a range of ways. There's obviously the environmental agenda, which has come in through the so-called sustainable development goals, but there's also actually the sustainability of the sector, the sustainability of the economic models, and all those sorts of things. So, we're hoping, and we're having some very fun discussions amongst people from very different backgrounds, trying to resolve some of these issues. So, we're hoping it's not just going to be the same old standard publication ICTs and SDGs, but to drill down a little bit. A second key aspect, I think, is very much around ensuring that it has some practical recommendations. Again, how those are going to come through, but there's little point in the ITU producing a book unless there's some good, clear advice for governments in, okay, if you've got this issue, these are the options that you can choose from. It was lovely. We've spoken before about these things, but I hate the word best practice or the term best practice, because there are just lots of good practices that people adapt to their own local context, and that's going to be a theme coming through as well. It's not a best practice publication, but these are the range of options that if you want to ensure that ICTs can contribute to the SDGs, but also more broadly to sustainability, you might like to take forward and explore. And I think the ITU and the work of the BDT, particularly its focus on development, is always here as a partner to work with governments, the private sector and the civil society in actually putting that rhetoric into practice. So it's an exciting project to be part of. Now, putting this study into context, there are several studies and debates on how ICT key enabler to economic growth and innovation, but perhaps you could tell us a little bit more about the main outcomes of this study, and its added value to the existing discussions, and especially its contribution to the UN and sustainable development goals. Well, we all know there are far too many sustainable development goals, and nobody remembers all of the 169 targets. So we're not trying in this publication to be universal. We're concentrating particularly on three or four main areas. Economic growth is of course clearly important. We're focusing on things like job creation, entrepreneurship and innovation as well. Yes, there have been publications on those, but we're also going to situate it more broadly within other aspects of the SDGs. So how can those contribute to education, for example? It's very sad that there actually wasn't, from my perspective anyway, an SDG specifically on accessibility and affordability of ICTs. And when I was at the CTO, this is something that Commonwealth governments were very keen to see, but it didn't happen. It's also very sad that ICTs are only formally mentioned in four of the 169 targets. But as the work that the ITU's been involved in and other UN agencies in the WISIS process, there's a fantastic matrix which of course shows how ICTs can contribute to everything. But our core focus is on these critical things around job creation, innovation, economic growth, but also how they can influence the others. One of my particular interests and in the work that I'm contributing is to focus on inequality and it's nice that SDG 10 is of course about inclusion. And so the book will look at that aspect because if we don't ensure that the use of ICTs is inclusive, that is going to lead to a much more unstable world, which is unsustainable. So in terms of the content, we're going to be writing around those issues. And yes, there have been other publications on them, but not quite approached in this way. I think a second thing that this book is going to be novel at is, as I mentioned earlier, around the practical implications. Okay, there's no point in writing unless we can come up with something forward looking and things will make a difference. And thirdly, it's an interesting model in kind of co-creation of knowledge. It's bringing a group of people together from very, very different perspectives, different parts of the world, mainly male sadly, and we need to do more about getting alternative voices around the table. But each of us has gone out to our own communities and is working with them, getting insights from them, getting feedback. And really discussing the shape of the book as a whole, and we're just down from a discussion about exactly what the title should be. But also then going through each chapter, there's several of us involved in each chapter, and everybody then puts comments on other people's chapters. So we're having fun things around whether or not we actually need to define terminology. And we do have a get out clause that actually the ITU all too often is quite cautious about defining terminology and enables people to use terminology in its own ways. But there is a UN language, there is an ITU language. And so one of the interesting things that the editorial team is going to have to do is to ensure that that ITU language features. So having great debates about exactly what sustainability means and what networks mean and portals and things like that. Now, you're leading the chapter on critical elements of sustainability and development. Perhaps you could tell us some of these critical elements. Yeah, well, we're using critical in two main ways. One is what are the most important, but the other is actually also being quite critical of some of the notions and arguments around sustainability. There are those who say that sustainable and development actually don't go hand in hand because any development implies change or a sustainable isn't change or it's continuing change. So we're going to tackle those questions head on. We're going to explore the notion of sustainability in a range of ways, particularly around what is the impact of ICTs on the physical environment. I mean, a lot of the notions of sustainability that went into the SDGs came from the environmental debate. And that's going to be quite challenging. There have been a lot of studies which have focused on a particular area of the environment showing how technology can be carbon neutral and companies are encouraged to be carbon neutral. But that is just a tiny fraction of the environmental impact that ICTs and technology more general has. So we're going to be challenging some issues around that. A second complaint one often has about ICT projects, especially those designed to support poorer marginalized communities is that the projects dry up and stop after funding ceases. And many of these projects are funded by bilateral, multilateral donors or civil society organizations. And so the standard complaint is we've done this wonderful pilot project, but it doesn't go to scale and it's not sustainable. So we're going to tackle that head on as well. What needs to be in place for some of the great things that ICTs can do to be sustainable and systematized. And these are things like ensuring a holistic approach, ensuring that the full financial cost of such an initiative is planned through the system, ensuring that projects are designed at scale from the beginning. If you can have a wonderful pilot project that companies will throw lots of money at to persuade the government to roll it out more widely, be that in the health sector or be it in education. And then when you actually realize, well, this has to go to 50 million children in school, the sum's add up and you can't do it. So we're going to be looking at that. We're going to be arguing particularly that whether one calls it a multi-sector approach or a multi-stakeholder approach, definitely not a public-private approach because public-private partnerships tend to ignore civil society and other people as well. So a multi-stakeholder approach is essential but there's remarkably little good practice in multi-sectoral, multi-stakeholder approaches that people could draw on. Everybody talks about them but they still don't deliver them very well. So we're going to be addressing that. And I think a key theme that's going to come through the book as a whole is there's a cost to that. Sustainability doesn't just happen. If you want to focus on it, you're going to have to pay in some way. That payment can be in cash, in finance, or it can be in actually doing things in very different ways that you're not used to changing the organizational approach. Another kind of cost. So all of that in 6,000 words. I've probably said more than 6,000 words in this interview. So it's a real challenge compressing it into something that makes sense and is very readable. It's going to be a book that I hope will be fun to read as well. We wish you the very best of luck with this and thank you very much, Steve, for being with us today. It's always nice to be with you. Thanks.