 Welcome to the ITU studio in Geneva, where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Yesmina McCarthy, who is the head of mobile for development for the GSMA. Yesmina, welcome to the studio, and thanks for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. Now, I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about, you're going to be on a panel discussion this afternoon. I believe it's looking at mobile identity, the sustainable goal 16.9, closing the digital divide using mobile identity. Perhaps if we could talk a little bit about that and give us your perspective on it. That's great. Thank you so much. So my work, Mobile for Development, looks at the ways mobile technology can have a social impact. And when the Sustainable Development Goals launched two years ago, we had SDG 16.9, which talked about the identity gap and people who are living without identification. And indeed, that's about a billion people. So we started looking at the ways mobile technology could, perhaps, close that gap. And now, mobile is connecting about 5 billion people, of which 3.8 billion are located in low and middle income countries. So we're really looking at the ways mobile technology can create identity solutions. And one such example we have comes from Pakistan, where we've been working with Telunar Pakistan, UNICEF, and ourselves, GSMA, on mobile birth registration as children are born. And so in the provinces where we did this, in the Sindh province and Punjab, we actually saw a 200% increase in birth registration for children who were born in that area thanks to mobile being the channel for identity. And what other solutions can it provide in terms of people being more enfranchised? Exactly. Once you have this identity, it opens up all these life enhancing services. So we look at financial inclusion. We know that about 20% of people say they aren't able to access financial services because of the identity gap. And so identity brings you to the digital financial service. We also look at services like health, where we know that mobile is having a very powerful impact on things like nutrition. We look at services like agriculture. And of course, we play a special role in looking at the gender gap, where we do know that there is digital exclusion for women. And part of our work is looking both at digital identity as well as digital inclusion for women. What about the role of 5G? How is that going to help? Well, I think 5G is something that we look at in a very affluent context, where we already have 2, 3, 4G. We are moving to 5G. I think what we see in the emerging market context is we're still pushing out on mobile broadband itself. So our focus is on bringing coverage to the final, to the last mile, as it were, and making sure we have enabling policy environments to close that coverage gap before we get to 5G. And in terms of platforms like eHealth and eEducation, et cetera, perhaps we could maybe look at that as well. I mean, how can these help achieve sustainable development and faster inclusion? So what we've seen, for example, on our health services is that we have more than a million families that we've reached with health information. And it's not just reach. We saw at least 11% increase on the impact of what someone knows about nutrition as well as their behaviors. So that story is really powerful. It means that mobile technology is not just giving you information, but actually changing the way you take care of your family's health and well-being. And in terms of eEducation, any interesting case studies there? I think there's some great examples of people. And the exciting thing about mobile is sort of lifelong learning. And so you have education solutions, which are reaching young people in schools, et cetera. Then you also have solutions which are reaching people who maybe didn't get the best education when they were younger and bringing that additional education opportunity to them later. There's been a lot of talk about AI here about the internet of things. To some people, of course, that's we're still getting them connected. So how far is that ahead in the future? Are we looking at something which is still very, very far out of the reach of lots of people? No. I think internet of things is great because we've got a real leapfrog story there. So if you look at energy, we see these mobile-enabled solar solutions, where you have these small kind of solar kits in people's homes. And those are actually leveraging the technology of IoT. So it means that people without electricity are actually coming onto the grid, as it were, but through solar, through clean energy. And they're using mobile technology, mobile money, and IoT. So I think there's been a real leapfrogging in IoT. You've taken the time to be here. I know GSME are very involved in this event. Why is this event important, do you think? Events like this are so important because private sector is not in this on its own. Private sector, absolutely, is going to work hand-in-hand with government. And for us, digital, really a digital society, is going to be so integral to the countries over the next decade. So we really would like to see increased partnership hand-in-hand between private sector and government to create these enabling policies. We've talked to be here very much about new regulatory frontiers. What do you hope will be some of the key takeaways from this symposium? I think for us, we really want to continue to crack the way we think about digital inclusion for the underserved. We know there are many people, again, especially women and girls, especially low income, especially rural communities, who are not getting the benefits of mobile internet. That will be powerful if we can find innovative ways to work well together. And then on digital identity, we also believe there's some complexities there in order to ensure trust for the consumer. We have to work together, government and private sector. And there are more global scale, looking forward to the goals, the 2030 development goals, basically sustainable development goals. I mean, how achievable do you think that they're going to be, particularly, even if just looking at SDG-16, for example? We're bullish. We are excited about the way technology is accelerating the achievement of the SDGs. On mobile money, we've already reached the target that was set for mobile money on international remittances. And we reduced the cost significantly of sending money between two countries. So we're excited to already have that done. And now we'd love to see progress continue on many of the other goals. That's been my colleague. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much. And then check out more fascinating insights on our ICU YouTube channel and podcasts on our ICU SoundCloud channel as well. Thank you very much. Thank you.