 Thank you very much. May be seated. I am always so delighted when I see so many of our young people performing. After all, we do know that they are our future. And I had one of the most intriguing experience last night when I got home and my 10-year-old grandson said to me, Papi, I prefer you and I liked you more when you were Minister of Health. I don't like you as Prime Minister. And I asked him why. And he said, because you spent more time with me when you were Minister of Health, you don't now have time for me. So I'm only sending out a warning. But I'd remind him that it's all a part of service. Cabinet colleagues, visiting government ministers, other visiting GSR 17 delegates, senior government officials, ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. It is my pleasure to welcome you to the Bahamas and to address you at the International Telecommunications Union's Global Symposium of Regulations. I am confident that ERCA is ensuring that both first-time and returning visitors are enjoying the best of Bahamian hospitality. I especially welcome and acknowledge Secretary-General Hulun Chow, who visited the Bahamas just last April. At that time, he announced a major partnership between the government of the Bahamas and the International Telecommunications Union to establish new providence as a smart island. I note that my office has been working with your secretariat to expand the project to the entire Bahamas. The project will be known as the Be Smart Bahamas Initiative. The project will result in a Be Smart Bahamas master plan and the delivery of several pilot projects which can be scaled to our entire archipelago, which stretches from the southern Florida in the United States of America to the Republic of Cuba just south. Ladies and gentlemen, as my government carries out its reform and growth agenda, the fuller utilization of technology will be crucial to achieving our goals. I wish to discuss some of the government's priorities and how they relate to smart innovation. My administration is first committed to ensuring greater transparency, accountability and effectiveness in government. We will strengthen various communications platforms through which our government interacts with citizens. We want to share information with citizens and to receive feedback as quickly as possible and to analyze this feedback to drive policy decisions. We look forward to the day when government contracting is seamlessly completed through online processes. We have already strengthened our customs processes through the use of technology to facilitate trade and revenue collection. A signature governance project in the coming month will be the introduction of a center of government approach to ensure better coordination within government. Through this project, an IT platform will be developed to provide up-to-date information to me as Prime Minister and the senior members of the government on the status of priority projects and programs. I am a medical doctor by profession. Most of my career has been devoted to ensuring that our citizens are well or restored to good health. It is therefore a priority of my own and that of my government to ensure a healthy and productive workforce for a modern Bahamas. When I served as Minister of Health, we introduced telemedicine to various islands in our far-flung archipelago. I imagine a day when Bahamians living on every major island and key can perform certain health assessments from his or her home with a medical professional in the capital via a smart device and an internet connection. In the development of our national health insurance program, the integration of medical records throughout the health care system will be critical for improving health care delivery and outcomes. I imagine a day when a young Bahamian mother using an app on her smartphone books an appointment for her child at the health care facility of her choice and the child's records will be readily available when she shows up for her visit. At the conclusion of the doctor's visit, a medical prescription will be seamlessly forwarded electronically to the pharmacist. Ladies and gentlemen, my government was allotted significant funding for piloting a technology program for preschools. We are committed to bridging the digital divides between government-operated and private schools so that every child has the opportunity to thrive in a modern Bahamas. We look forward to ensuring that STEM education is strengthened from preschool through to tertiary and vocational education. Ladies and gentlemen, national security is another area that will benefit from technology innovation. We continue to modernize our immigration processes to add new layers of needed security while minimizing unnecessary delays for travelers. We are committed to protecting our electronic information by increasing our resilience against cyber attacks. We must ensure that our financial systems, government data, and all critical systems are well protected from those who seek to unlawfully access to information. The Bahamas experienced two major hurricanes in the last two years. To enhance hurricane preparedness, we will launch a pilot project called Alert Bahamas. This is a national emergency warning system that will provide national alerts through email and text messages. Can you imagine, with the technology available today, if a hurricane or a catastrophic event is passing through our country, a warning system being utilized using the street lighting system that would continue to flash during warning the public that disasters are coming? So once our nationals recognize that there's repeated and continuous flashing throughout our countries, that would serve as a warning that disaster or hurricane is traveling. Ladies and gentlemen, urban and community revitalization will greatly benefit from the application of smart technology. This includes improvements in our transportation systems. Our plans include the modernizing of our traffic control systems so that traffic lights are connected with sensors to better monitor and control traffic flow within a coordinated network. Included in our efforts to improve transportation is a unified bus system utilizing technology to track the movement of buses for the better management of our public transportation resources and to enable riders to better schedule their movements. To ensure greater equity and broader access to technology by all behemians, regardless of economic standing, the government of the Bahamas will introduce two measures. First, we are pleased that our mobile operators have begun to deploy Wi-Fi services on buses. We are working to have widespread access to Wi-Fi services in the parks and public spaces within the inner city of New Providence with a view to free Wi-Fi in certain communities. And I am happy to announce that already free Wi-Fi has been introduced in one of our parks, in one of our inner city community, our forksail community, and in my own constituency, Gambia. We are presently looking at extending our Wi-Fi program through all government operated parks. Second, we are seeking to pilot smart meters to enable prepaid electric metering in various communities so that consumers can better monitor their electricity usage and top up when needed in a similar way as they manage their cell phones. We also wish to deploy technology to help citizens improve their communities, such as reporting the location or portholes or other matters to the relevant government agencies through their smartphones. Ladies and gentlemen, in my recent address to the Caribbean community's head of government conference in Grenada, I noted how technology can help generate more benefits from tourism, the main driver of the Bahamian economy. Tourism is also one of the largest global industries. I noted that in my specialty area of medicine, I recently saw a television program on CBS's 60 Minutes in the United States that revealed the capacity for information systems to identify trends and deliver knowledge that even the best medical specialists did not and could not have seen in making diagnosis and offering treatment. I suspect that we are in the same place in tourism. It is time that we create marketing and product improvements programs based on facts instead of opinions or gut instincts, which are often proven wrong in the face of new knowledge gleaned from data. By example, we should better appreciate the stored value that is waiting to be unleashed by the proper analysis of multi-year data from immigration cards and from the development of tourism satellite accounts. Tourism officials in the Bahamas are increasingly astonished by the information that such analysis are telling us and the refreshing guidance that it is providing. Ladies and gentlemen, as a low-lying island nation, our development strategies must be smart and sustainable. Eighty percent of the land mass of the Bahamas will be threatened by a one meter rise in the sea level. Even as we urge the larger nations of the world to reduce their enormous carbon footprint and to help small island developing states to mitigate the effects of climate change, we must play our part in developing sustainable energy. A major goal of my government over the next five years is an ambitious solarization program. Further, through our sustainable NASA project, a partnership with the Inter-American Development Bank, we will better integrate smart technology to ensure that we use less energy in our public buildings, schools, and for streetlightings. The best use of technology must be driven by values and principles that will guide our policies. These values must include a commitment to social equity, social mobility, and the advancement of the poor and less fortunate in all of our countries. Let me close by thanking Urca for their hard work in preparing this conference. I again thank the International Telecommunications Union for a meeting here in the Bahamas. I wish you all a successful conference and please do return to the Bahamas and discover the islands of the Bahamas beyond New Providence and Paradise Island. This is only a small segment. Our islands are an archipelago of adventure, wonder, and discovery. Thank you very much and may God bless each and every one.