 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Allow me to express my gratitude to the Secretary-General of the ITU, Mr. Holinjao, for the invitation to address this session of the ITU Global Standards Symposium on the topic digital health technologies for equitable access to healthcare services. In my country, South Africa, and majority of other African countries with youthful populations, our focus on digital health innovations is not for the benefit of the elderly and the disabled, but we are driven by the need to enable universal access to healthcare. South Africans face a high level of unequal distribution of healthcare resources due to our legacy of apartheid or separate development, which is exacerbated by the high cost of healthcare services in the private sector, which services only 16% of our country's population, but at 50% of the country's healthcare resources. The remaining 84% of the country's population receive their healthcare service from the public health sector. The public health system is characterized by a shortage of medical doctors, even though the government of South Africa is doing very well to provision healthcare facilities or clinics toward our goal of at least a healthcare facility within a 10 kilometer radius by 2030. The doctor-patient ratio remains unacceptably high for a country that is based on a curative healthcare system. In addition, the healthcare system, both public and private, is still using manual health patient records. Therefore, although South Africa did extremely well in managing the capacity of healthcare system to carry the burden of the COVID-19 pandemic, the burden of doctor-patient ratio and the manual health patient records made it near impossible for the country's healthcare system to simultaneously treat COVID-19 patients and other dominant diseases. So the breakout of COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need to use technological products in all sectors for survival. As we enter the post-COVID-19 era of the new normal, as we call it in South Africa, we are focused on first tracking the implementation of the national digital health strategy for South Africa. The strategy recognizes digital health technologies as opportunities to strengthen health systems, transform the way health services are provided and the way in which people engage with those services. At the heart of the strategy is a vision for a better health for all South Africans. That is enabled by a patient-centered digital health. The strategy will benefit patients seeking access to healthcare services, healthcare workers to provide better services and health systems managers to fulfill their role, empowering all citizens to better navigate their personal health genies using digital technologies. Ladies and gentlemen, a few years ago, we commenced with a pilot implementation of telemedicine in one of our rural provinces called Limbopon in partnership with Yulet Pakat. The telemedicine enables medical professionals to treat and interact with patients remotely. Thus, telemedicine can be a solution to the challenges caused by their high doctor-patient ratio as doctors can treat and interact with patients remotely. However, telemedicine heavily relies on a stable and secure ICT infrastructure to deliver the health services to remote areas. Due to this dependence of telemedicine and e-health services on stable and secure ICT infrastructure, the telemedicine pilot project in South Africa had to be delayed. It is reported that the lockdown restrictions imposed globally in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic pushed over 58% of the global populations to go online in 2021. However, the ITU's report that indicate that access to internet service is still unaffordable in most developing and least-developed countries and that almost three-quarters of people have never been online in the 46 least-developed countries remains true. With many essential services now being pushed online, there's a real and present danger that those without broadband internet access could be left even further behind. This will threaten the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goal Number Three on SDG Three on Health and Well-Being, in particular for the poor and working class. We therefore must collectively prioritize connecting the unconnected and make data affordable as the currency for the digital economy. In South Africa, we are first taking our projects for universal connectivity as part of our goal of ensuring that 80% of South Africans have access to the internet by 2024. To achieve this goal, our communications regulator, ICASA, is prescribing connectivity social obligations as part of our spectrum licensing conditions to the telecommunications mobile network operators. These obligations will result in the connection of over 18,000 public schools, over 5,000 public health facilities, and over 8,000 traditional authorities or traditional leadership institutions over a period of 36 months. In addition, as a government department and our entities, we are driving the connectivity of over 21,000 government institutions and the deployment of over 30,000 community Wi-Fi hotspots in the next 36 months. This is part of our focused approach to us bridging the digital divide. We are fully aware that universal internet penetration, which is not supported by affordable internet in terms of prices of data, will not resolve our problems of access to internet. At a South African government level, there's an acknowledgement that like water, sanitation, and electricity, data has become a public utility. In a country that provides its citizens in particular poor households with free basic water, free basic sanitation, and free basic electricity, we've started discussions on the possibility and the model of providing free basic data, even if it is just for poorer households and the category that is in South Africa is known as the missing middle. These are households that are neither poor nor rich, but cannot afford services. Far out to the connectivity drive, the government of South Africa is also aggressively driving the digitization of its records and systems while driving a project for a single view of a citizen. In particular, a single view of the poor, whom we call the indigent, so that we can trace and measure the impact of our social development interventions. Our view is that poverty is not a permanent state, but it is a situation that can be reversed with correct and termless interventions. In addition, the eradication of poverty is intricately linked to the goal of building a healthy and developed community and nations. Therefore, the records and systems of our Department of Health are part of our priorities to digitize the country. Ladies and gentlemen, our digitization program will also take advantage of imaging artificial intelligence technologies, such as biometrics. For us, the opportunities and benefits of biometrics are not only limited to the identification of people, but to advance access to services in particular healthcare for those who are illiterate and not able to read and write, because through their biometrics, the doctors will be able to retrieve their data and service them and give them the best healthcare. But through your own biometric, you can walk around with your own healthcare file and make the files transferable as you get treated from one public institution or from one healthcare center to the next healthcare center. So in our view, the ITU offers the best platform in a cooperation and collaboration with other standard-making bodies and should continue to develop standards that are inclusive, open, and support interoperability and environmental sustainability. But those standards must include standards for connectivity because if we cannot attain global universal connectivity, the poor will remain excluded from accessing healthcare and the affluent will remain benefiting and the depending of poverty and inequality will continue and our society will remain unequal, which is not sustainable for all our security. Thank you.