 His Excellency Paul Kagame, President of the Republic of Rwanda, the Honorable Minister Paula Ingabiri, Minister for ICT and Innovation of the Republic of Rwanda, Mr. Hulin Zhao, Secretary-General of the ITU, and my fellow elected Directors Mario Manjevic and Chai Sabli, Ambassadors, dignitaries, esteemed colleagues, dear friends, good morning, and welcome to the 8th World Telecommunications Developing Conference. I thank His Excellency, President Kagame, and his team for their extraordinary efforts to ensure that this event delivers the powerful outcomes that we are all working towards. In some sense, this event may feel familiar, familiar to many of us. We understand the structure. We know how things will play out over the next two weeks. We've all been there before, right? Wrong. This event may have the same name as previous World Telecommunications Development Conferences, but in all important respects, this is a very different ballgame. In the five years since we last came together, for the WTDC, the world has changed unrecognizably. We faced a global pandemic that devastated our communities. Inequalities have grown. Energy and food security concerns are growing. The climate crisis is accelerating, and our SGG targets are falling by the wayside. Digital technologies can help. They can help in each and every one of these areas, and yet their promise is still not being fully realized. All of us have worked so hard, with enormous dedication over the years, to make universal affordable connectivity a reality. Our efforts have borne fruit. In the last five years since we last met, we did succeed in bringing 1.5 billion new users online. But yet, the reality is that we're still not shifting the dial fast enough. We're not shifting the dial fast enough to get the world's hardest to connect communities and people living in LDCs, LLDCs, and SIDS. That's why this conference has to be different. Ladies and gentlemen, the UN Secretary General at the last General Assembly said that the only way to confront the critical issues that our planet and our people are facing is going to be through collaboration and cooperation on a truly unprecedented scale. Digital inclusion is going to be the bedrock of that global collaboration. Not as an end in itself, but as a means to empower people to improve their lives. That's why a more people-centric approach has to be at the heart, at the very heart of our work. And that's why this conference features new elements, new elements that have been designed to shift our thinking, to mobilize our collective energies in new ways. One of these new elements, you've heard it already mentioned, was our Generation Connect Global Youth Summit, which took place last week. This groundbreaking event brought together young people from 115 countries to debate issues that concern young people in the next generation. Their call to action will serve as an important input to the work of this WTDC. And as one of our young leaders, Sinead, brought to us yesterday at the Broadband Commission, she said that we don't want to inherit the future, we want to build it. Another innovation is our network of women that so many of you are generously supporting. And I want to say that we were thrilled at the Youth Summit. We actually achieved, Mr. President, you would be very happy. We achieved parity in the number of female and male delegates. We got to that 50-50, which is quite historic for the ITU. But perhaps the most important of all of our innovations that we have brought to this event is Partner to Connect, the Partner to Connect Digital Coalition. It's a coalition to connect the world. We have mobilized over 200 pledges with more coming in. Tomorrow we'll be announcing some new ones. These pledges made by our Partner to Connect partners are going to be showcased throughout this WTDC, kicking off tomorrow with the high-level roundtables of the Partner to Connect digital development series. Partnership, of course, is not new. It's not a silver bullet. But I think as a community, we have too often failed to take a holistic, whole-of-society approach that really pulls parties together, galvanizes all resources, and most importantly, monitors our progress in a collective manner. It's time for us to do that so that at our next World Telecommunications Development Conference, we can report on truly transformational change, especially in the communities that need it most. Ladies and gentlemen, let me close with some inspirational words from one of my favorite holiday films. It's a Wonderful Life. Anybody ever see It's a Wonderful Life? It's a great holiday film, and it's about a man named George. George was an ordinary man, and George did lots of good in his life. But somehow, in the middle of his life, he sort of lost his way. He lost faith. He lost faith in his ability to make a difference to his community. And because the film is a fairy tale, George is briefly transported to an alternative future, a future in which he gets to look back on what his life or what the world would have looked like should he not have existed. The film is so adored because it illustrates the immense power that each and every one of us has to influence the lives of others. It shows that our smallest decisions can have a truly profound effect on the shape of the future. That our actions ripple outwards, assuming a significance and an impact that we could never have imagined. That each and every one of us has the power to change the world. And that by working together, we can achieve the impossible. Ladies and gentlemen, let's remember this over the coming two weeks, and let's allow it to guide our decision-making, to inspire us to be bold, to go the extra mile, to try something new, but most importantly, to put the interests of people and planet first, and work together as collectively as we can towards our common goal. We, the digital community, hold in our hands the solution to so many of today's challenges. We can truly change the world. So let's use this conference to do just that. Thank you.