 Welcome to ITU Telecom World 2019 here in Budapest in Hungary, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today, Mr Kofi Asante, who is the CEO of the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications Effect. Welcome to the studio. Thank you, Max. Thank you for having me. Nice to see you again. Great to see you too. Now, I wanted to ask you, what are the key priorities for the Ghana Investment Fund for electronic communications? The Ghana Investment Fund for electronic communications, as you are aware, is the investment fund for the nation. And our main priority is to ensure that we bring the digital divide. Our priorities, that is the various things that we look at, is providing connectivity for rural people, providing ICT education and awareness, and also ensuring that digital skills and programs are given out to people who are disadvantaged, persons with disability, women, and those who live in rural areas who are illiterates. We try to work on these ones. Apart from this, we also provide infrastructure for telecommunication. And this is what we do as our main priorities. Recently, we have also got another major priority of trying to provide coding for kids. So, children as early as six years are given training in area of coding so that they'll be able to do programming to provide solutions for challenges that we have in our country. Great. And what are the main challenges in providing internet presence in unserved and underserved communities? And how do you think these can be overcome? In most of the underserved areas, the challenge we have is the provision of energy. Most of them are of great, and also for us to... The population is also sparsely distributed, and therefore there's a need for us to... It becomes very expensive for us to do that. We also have the challenge of getting the acquisition for the appropriate land space that can give us connectivity to cover these areas. And in working towards this, we have to look at how we can do it innovatively. And so, we work together as groups or partnerships. In our partnership drive approach, we make sure that the private sector, government itself, and the communities are all involved. And having talked through and having also looked at how innovative it would be, we now use solar energy to make provision for internet access. But above it all, we make sure that these provisions are made so that they are affordable. So we are approaching it in a way that would make us provide internet connectivity. But give fake on our own. We have got a satellite hub, which we use to deploy for internet presence in very difficult terrains. Let me also add that we make sure that we have mobile internet through our mobile connectivity. So we don't only provide voice, but we also provide data to be able to solve the problem of internet connectivity using the telephone connectivity that we provide. So by and large, we are trying to make sure we have large areas of coverage and we are doing it in a very innovative manner. Well, innovating together and connectivity that matters is this event's theme. So you're very well placed here and you're obviously going very much along the right lines. I wanted to ask you, what single innovation in policy technology or strategy do you think has got the greatest potential to accelerate digital transformation in Ghana? Yeah, we in GIFEC observed that from 2009 to 2016, we were dependent on the traditional way of deployment of telephony. And for that matter, for the eight years, GIFEC was able to deploy only 78 sites. Having looked at the traditional way, which was not helping us to cover much, from 2017 June to 2019 June, we have adopted an innovative partnership. And the partnership has got in it the strategies, innovative strategy, innovative technology and also innovative policies. And this is how we do it. There's a tripartite arrangement where the investor, the technical solution provider and then the telecom or the mobile network operator come together. And through that, we have been able to develop what we call the Rural Star with the MTN. And we deploy the Rural Star in the Rural Community so that we are able to provide voice and data. So innovatively, when we sat down with our research and development, we have now been able to deploy because we have reduced the cost of deployment by 60% for the total cost of ownership. Now, within that period of two years, we have deployed almost 600 sites, which gives connectivity for more than 2,000 communities and the population that is benefiting from this is more than 1 million. We believe that this will be able to accelerate the digital transformation in our country and we've done it innovatively, home-built, taught through by us, developing innovative strategy, innovative policy with innovative technology. That's brilliant. Well, it's really fantastic to hear. I just wanted to ask you, finally, you're here at ITU Telecom World 2019. You're no stranger to ITU events. What brings you here? What's the value of attending events such as this? Well, events such as this are very, very, very educative. Now, like with the Internet, one would have said that there was no need for us to have human-to-human interaction. But the value that human-to-human interaction gives is more than what we do just using the Internet. Here is a platform, an international platform, where we have governments, we have international organizations, we have the regulator, we have the private sector. All of us in the ecosystem to come and think through how we can accelerate the agenda of using ICTs to improve lives. And that is why we are here. We believe that together we can make people improve their lives sooner than later. Thank you very much indeed. You're most welcome. Great to share some insights with you and that's really very good indeed. Now, hopefully we'll catch up with you again some stage in the near future. Thank you. Thank you. I'm always ready and we are working hard to make more people connected and to better their lives.