 Happy Public Service Day to everybody. My name is Marlon Nassis. I'm the Director for Public Sector Modernization. And I'm here to present to you on the topic Embracing Digital Government Post-Pandemic. Very important topic that I'm hoping that I could share and enlighten you on as we move into the next phase as a country in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. So Digital Government Post-Pandemic is about a sustainable digital transformation strategy that provides and drives and loses public sector to harness a new technology to guarantee equitable public access for all, build internal efficiencies within the operations of government, increase productivity while ensuring there is transparency, security and accountability for all, increase in knowledge and information sharing, improve programs and services to create better outcomes for all our citizens. This has to be key as we move post-pandemic. We must provide an incubated environment for new and innovative business, for youth empowerment, for greater investment and prioritization of technology by the government, with the modernization of traditional industries and creation of jobs in the traditional and non-traditional sectors. I think these things would definitely allow us to really boost and generate more capacity and more value within the digital economy. So Digital Transformation Post-Pandemic, who is it for? What do we do and how do we do it? We need to focus on our citizens and residents and visitors, on our businesses and our investors, on our public servants, and government must provide this decentralized access to all of its services. We must focus on the what? It must be user-friendly. Our systems must be inclusive, and we must provide persons with the option to pay online so that doing business with government remains inclusive and remains convenient. How do we do this for our citizens? We must ensure that we transform the public service with digital governance, through proper accounting and accountability, through data sharing and capacity billing, because we know that the introduction of technology would obviously need for, have created the need for us to build more capacity, train, retrain and rescale and retool our citizens, our civil servants. For our business sector, we must be consistent, and we must make this technology applicable for their needs. There must be collaboration with the private sector. PPP, we must explore private sector innovation and know how. Government must also decentralize its services. So at the same time that we consolidate and have shared services and a shared services platform, we must look to develop service bureaus. The system must be mobile responsible, and there must be equity of access for all. And that is in keeping with our concept and our policy of digital inclusion, where we don't leave anybody behind, but create opportunities, and that validates the book earlier, so that everyone can participate in the digital economy. How do we do this? For our citizens, residents and visitors, we must strengthen citizen contact. There must be proper cybersecurity policies and regulations to protect persons identity on the platform. For our citizens, for our civil servants, we must show that there is actionable data that can be used and reused to simplify the work process. And as we said earlier, government must decentralize its services. Government must have a 24-7 access for all persons accessing government services. And at the end of the day, there must be a reduction in the total cost of owning technology for government to really harness and embrace the power of digital transformation. So Karen Mosbuga once said that a digital citizen are those who use the internet regularly and effectively. And that focuses on several key areas, one, equity of access, because everyone must be able to access the technology as we move along the digital transformation agenda. We must encourage this concept of e-participation, e-democracy, where persons see government not only as a place where they go to access services, but they see themselves as a partner with government in the whole governance of the country. Data only once, again, speaking to the removal of these redundancies and silos that currently exist with government. Post pandemic, we must adopt this concept of data only once, but we securely connect and exchange data between systems, between agencies, through the schedules apart from that we'll speak about later on. And we cannot get any of these things done if there is no digital identity. And again, with this digital transformation agenda that we're on, a major focus of this is the establishment of government's digital transformation national authentication framework. Again, focusing on how do we create that value, create opportunity for the citizens, for our citizens as we develop our systems going forward. Digital transformation post pandemic, what is government's role specifically to our youth providing equity and opportunity, ensuring there is business innovation and identity management that must create equity. They must create opportunity and value for everybody. Our youth must be empowered. We must provide new job opportunities so that persons can really embrace technology to change their lives and to build value in this new ecosystem that we speak about. Equity and opportunity, looking at meaningful connectivity. You know, what is the broadband, how does broadband focus in this digital transformation agenda? It must be meaningful so that persons can really embrace these opportunities through cutting edge technology. Business innovation, creation of new entrepreneurial opportunities for our people, integration of agencies to promote data sharing, a single point of entry, business innovation. Again, that also leans on the private sector. So government sees itself as a catalyst to really drive innovation through one of our major digital transformation projects which I will speak of in a bit. And as I spoke of earlier, identity management, which is so key and so critical to be able to identify your citizens, identify businesses as we move down this digital path. We've already started up on this journey. It's called the St. Lucia Digital Development Framework. And this framework focuses on four or five major areas. One focuses on the environmental forces. Who are our stakeholders? Let's take all the demands, dictate what government's policy and government's policy must fit with those demands, right? We must understand the economic environment. Right now we've seen so much pressure internationally on oil prices and food, et cetera. How does government then use technology to help address these specific challenges? And our digital transformation agenda must fit within the national development strategy, that metham development strategy that the government is pushing forward at this moment. Our policy pillars and accelerators focus on digital policy and regulation, governance and funding, which is key to the success of our digital transformation post pandemic. Digital trust is also a very, very important and the security of the platform of this digital technology is that government is pushing forward. Persons must be able to trust government. Our digital community, we see digital transformation starting at the grassroots level. And this is why there is so much of this heavy focus on youth empowerment as we really designed that digital transformation agenda so we can move forward. So we move to digigraph. What is digigraph? Digital transformation post pandemic is a technology driven shift from limited business hours, long queues, long processing times to reduce processing times to secure transactions, right? Internal government efficiency of operations, data sharing, data only once, 24 access. This is that paradigm shift that we seek with digital transformation. And we think through our flagship project, digigraph we are able and we will be able to create that value for our citizens. Digigraph is a one sub shop to government public services where online transactions can lead the conductive government in an inclusive, equitable and secure manner, right? It will aggregate 154 services over seven ministries and 13 agencies, provide a robust platform that conforms to international standards and supports end to end services. It will streamline and integrate business processes to create that public value that I spoke of. And we will do that based on a national authentication framework which would identify all users of the platform. Again, digital government is about adding value for mobile app development, providing identity as a service, having this connected data so that we could really use the information for data mining for decision making. Job creation, again, how do we see this catalyst providing this platform to facilitate the development of or the creation of new jobs, jobs like database development, mobile app development, security analysts, security officers within the platform, service bureau agents. There are several opportunities that we see coming out of the digital transformation and specifically the Digigraph platform. So this is key and you'll notice here that we're looking at some of the other niche areas like cybersecurity, equity of access, data mining, data only ones, industry. How could we then formulate this industry? And through our solution to digital strategy, you'll notice that there are key sectors that are very vital towards this digital transformation and generally I'll be speaking about. And also, what are some of the trends in digital transformation? Artificial intelligence, internet of things, blockchain and security, social media. We do a lot of social listening on our Digigraph social media platform and that is key because it creates this, it's based on this idea rather of digital participation and we really need the feedback from our stakeholders to ensure that we're providing them with what they actually need for their daily lives. Payment platforms, big data, these are all critical to the success of digital transformation post pandemic. And then we wanna lean on two major sectors on the education sector and on the private sector. We must ensure that our teaching and techniques are in keeping with our digital technology trends as we move forward on this agenda, that the curriculum speaks to the demands of the day, that we can retool and reskill and redeploy our persons, our UFSE move along this digital transformation path. On the private sector end, we must be working with government, we must seek to work with the private sector to build partnerships and relationships. Looking at providing opportunities for our incubators for training and internships, providing those persons with access to infrastructure and access to devices and technology that they can use to really build and hone their skills, data management, blockchain and cybersecurity. We see these as opportunities that we can work with the private sector to really start building on this digital economy that we speak about. So I will say now that we need to also support this digital transformation with legislative reform. Some of the key aspects that we are focusing now focusing on the public status sharing bill, the electronic transactions amendment bill and the digital government bill. And these bills are gonna be pushed, I should say, will be forwarded to our AG and the cabinet soon for approval so that we can then move to the next stage of public sector consultation and public consultations that we can get feedback from our key stakeholders as we try to really begin this digital transformation legislative reform to support digital translation. And lastly, I must say that to embrace digital government post pandemic, it has to be all inclusive. It has to be sustainable. It has to be equitable. And we must all embrace our responsibility as we move on this digital transformation agenda. Thank you very much.