 Welcome to the World Summit on the Information Society 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland. And I'm delighted to be joined by His Excellency Majed Al Mesma, Director-General of the Telecom Sector in the United Arab Emirates. Your Excellency, we heard this morning in your opening remarks because you're a principal sponsor of the WISIS Forum that the United Arab Emirates is making remarkable steps towards becoming an information society. Well, first, thanks for having me. There he has a successful story. It started in 1998 when the Prime Minister decided that the government now need to shift from conventional government to a e-government, electronic government. And that took a while until 2013, I would say May 22nd, May 2013, where he came again and announced that the government entities will have two years' time to transform from e-government to smart government. Everybody was asking, they were asking, what is smart government? And that is a government that goes to the customer and does not wait for the customer to come to it, meaning that the government services will be offered 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 a year. What sort of services can you get 24-7, 365 days a year? Let's say, for example, paying your fines, buying things, getting any governmental business that you need to finalize, issuing a license for business. Any services that comes under governmental, the task for those entities to transform their services to become possible for the customers to use their smart phones to execute the transactions. Transactions, it starts from entering a request or an application, uploading the necessary documentation, sending, waiting for the approval or request for additional information, and it ends paying the fees. And all of the government ministries managed to make this transformation within two years? And it's been divided to certain services. They have completed phase one, and it was May 2015, 96% of the selected top priority services been executed and transformed. And now the second phase is 2018. And one of the most important elements of that deadline, which is 2018, is entities, they should encourage 80% of their customers by that time not to come to the entity's locations. They can do everything online. And what's the response been of the people? You don't have to wait till the beginning of the week to go and finish a transaction. You can do it during the weekend. In fact, you can even do it while you are in bed. Let's say that you got up at night and you decided you want to execute a transaction. You could do that. And this is, by the way, it's convenience rather than making the customer coming to the government to finish business. Now the government made the service available in his or her hand. You can just buy a few touches and the transaction is done. So would you say that the UAE is now a model for the rest of the world? We are trying to really deliver the best to our nation. And when I say this, the government just recently appointed a minister for happiness. Part of her duties to really achieve that task, and that task is very broad. I would say utilizing or using the ICT as an enabler to reach to that goal, it will be the easiest way. And if you have an ICT proper solid infrastructure, then you can have everything. If we hadn't had that solid infrastructure, we'd have been announcing that the services should be transformed to the mobile handsets. For Excellency Majid al-Masma, Director-General of the Telecom sector for the United Arab Emirates, thank you very, very much for giving us that insight into what I might say is the happy world of information and communication technology in the United Arab Emirates. Thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Please do tune in to the ITU YouTube channel in the coming days where we will be interviewing ministers, experts from the private and public sector on how information and communication technology can really impact people's lives.