 on digital transformation beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. But before we are delivering and delving into the topic, I would like to give the floor to our technical moderator, Alina Hangergut, who will provide the house rules of the meeting. Alina, the floor is yours. Yes, thank you, Mr. Jaroslav. So dear participants, thank you for joining this meeting. As you all know, my name is Alina, and I'll be the technical moderator for this meeting. So before starting the session, I would like to give some instruction on the Zoom platform. The meeting is entirely remote and held in a webinar format. You are invited to use the chat for any comments. You may also use the Q&A function to ask any questions you might have. My colleagues will be monitoring, and any comments or questions may be read out if I'm allowed. The meeting also benefits from live transcription and English-Russian interpretation. Please select the live transcription and your preferred language from the bar and bar of the Zoom interface. For speakers, please ensure that you have chosen the appropriate channel interpretation that corresponds to your spoken language when you would like to intervene. The meeting is being recorded and live-streamed on YouTube and Twitter. The recordings will be available on the website around 24 hours after the event. And every effort is being made to facilitate the smooth flow of this meeting. Thank you for your cooperation, and I wish you a successful meeting. Over to you, Mr. Jaroslav. Thank you. Thank you very much, dear Alina. Dear ladies and gentlemen, during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technology has become a lifeline for millions of people around the world and a critical tool for mitigating the net led to greater digital reliance and impacted the way policymakers, entrepreneurs, and professionals make decisions. Businesses move towards digital delivery of services and products, individuals turn towards digital entertainment, communication platforms and e-commerce. Schools move to online learning and digital classrooms and governments relied more and more on data, on citizens' health and economic indicators to establish policies. In addition, countries with top connectivity infrastructure could mitigate up to half of the negative economic shock of the pandemic. This outcome is likely to stay in what we call the new normal and the pandemic is only one driver of the current trends. Some other important drivers include continued economic development, demographic changes, climate responsibility, and social well-being. But to capitalize on this unique opportunity to accelerate digital revolution, many challenges need to be addressed. Over the last five years, we witnessed continuous growth in most of areas of the ICTs, information communication, technologies, infrastructure, access, and use in Europe and CIS regions. The Europe region, covering 46 countries globally on all ICT indicators, with 88% of households having internet access in 2020 and with about 82% of individuals using internet in the same year, but a greater and more diverse emphasis. In the CIS region, the percentage of individuals using the internet reached 82% at the end of 2021. However, there is still a persistent use gap where individuals are covered by the internet, but not using it due to the lack of the affordability relevant content, skills, and meaningful and qualitative access. The last year have exposed these divides and showed us the dramatic impacts of being excluded from digital worlds. In addition to the divide in internet use and access, women are also underrepresented in the ICT employment sector. One of the main barriers and to it is the stereotypes. This starts at the early age with the greater, with the gender gap in science, technology, engineering, and maths education also called STEM. The lack of exposure to STEM education also leads to less technological literacy overall if the involvement of women and girls in technology does not increase digital product services and platforms that are being created will not address the needs of half of the population. For example, applications of platforms might not sufficiently address privacy issues or might expose sensitive information which makes women vulnerable to harassment or violence. And these results is a vicious circle where digital inequality and gender inequality fit one another. ICTs are also crucial in the learning process. Not only it helps to keep on providing education during the pandemic but it can also enrich teaching by providing access to a wide range of quality content and supporting inclusion with assistive and adaptive technologies. But countries face multiple barriers in this regard. The unequal infrastructure in households and schools contributes to the digital divide which mainly affects marginalized gender. Dear ladies and gentlemen, in light of these trends, policy development focusing on digital inclusion, access security skills and sustainability is becoming defining a characteristic to cheer, to reach the United Nations 2030 agenda for sustained development. This argument is also put forward by the UN Secretary-General report on our common agenda and he is at the center of the UN efforts to foster human centered digital development. At the global level, the UN Secretary-General roadmap on digital development set common goals to ensure meaningfully and inclusive connectivity for all while mitigating potential negative impacts such as online risk and harms. At the European level, the IT is pleased to co-chair to gather with colleagues from the UNICE and UN Digital Transformation Group and for Europe and Central Asia which regroups expressions of 20 UN agencies with a range of expertise and experience. This group aims to provide a platform to work as one UN on the cross-cutting topic that is digital transformation. It aims to uplift the potential of each agency to widespread the role of ICTs as development enablers and that can facilitate the capabilities of countries to reach all the 17 sustained development goals. ITU, within its capacity of the UN Specialized Agency for ICTs and Digital will continue to implement projects, programs and activities jointly with member states in line with regional initiatives for Europe and the CIS region. These initiatives cover a wide range of topics mirroring the needs of regions such as developing ICT infrastructure, building citizen-centric digital services, spouring a digital innovation ecosystem, fostering digital inclusion or reinforcing cybersecurity. The World Telecommunication Development Conference which will be held from 6 to 16 in June in Kigali, capital of Rwanda will set our next round of priority areas and for coming four years. In addition, it will be enriched by the inputs of youth and developing a special plan of action at the Generation Connect Global Youth Summit. To fast-track the commitments of the governments, businesses and social, civil society and academic sector starts advancing digital development, identifying areas of partnerships and collaboration and mobilizing new resources, the ITU has launched the Partner to Connect Digital Coalition referred as the P2C. Together with the U.N. Secretary of General Envoy on Technology, P2C provides an action framework focusing on connecting people everywhere, empowering communities, building a digital ecosystem and incentivizing investment. And with these, I would like to call on all stakeholders today's session to submit your pledge to foster SDG-focused digital transformation through the Partner to Connect pledging system. Dear ladies and gentlemen, we look forward to today's session and before giving the floor to our first guest speaker, I would like to give the floor to my dear colleague, Elisabeth Turck, Director of Economic Cooperation and Trade of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe for her opening remarks. Elisabeth, the floor is yours. Many thanks Yaroslav for the floor for inviting me to be here with you today all and what is really excellent opening remarks. You covered such a breadth of issues and you're close with this very pertinent call for submitting a pledge. So it's my great pleasure to join you all here for a second set of opening remarks, Excellencies Distinguished Delegates, Heads of Delegation Distinguished Speakers, Dear Yaroslav, Dear Maria, Dear colleagues, great pleasure to be here with you today at this side event on digital transformation beyond the COVID-19 pandemic and as we just started this side event is held in the context of the UNECE Regional Forum for Sustainable Development in 2022. Now, I'd really like to thank ITU, Yaroslav and Sarah for convening us and at UNECE, we are very proud to co-lead with you this ITU and UNECE together the UN Group for Digital Transformation in Europe and Central Asia. And here my thanks also specifically go to Maria Rosaria Cicciarelli, the Chief of Section in UNECE who is co-tearing that group together with you, Yaroslav. Now, looking at the group, the group really aims to facilitate cooperation and collaboration across different UN agencies in the field of digital transformation. And for us at UNECE, that's really particularly relevant right now because our member states, our 56 member states, they have identified for the next commission session that will only happen in 2023, the topic of digital and green transformations for sustainable development in the UNECE region. So I'm really delighted that our membership has recognized the importance of digitalization for also for sustainable development and the importance of the digital transformation. And I think that gives particular relevance also to the session we are having here today. Now, Yaroslav, you've already referred to the COVID pandemic, which now it began more than two years ago. It has really sunk the global economy into deep, deep, deep economic difficulties. And it continues to take an unprecedented toll on human health and life. But also the COVID pandemic has been really a driver for digitalization. And throughout or from the beginning of the first days of the pandemic, new technologies proved to be necessary and proved to be efficient for, for example, continuing to facilitate trade through paperless digital trade transactions, allowing to keep essential goods such as medicines flowing. And obviously also for all of us, digital technologies have proven essential as we moved to home working and to continue our operations like that. Now, today, after more than two years into the beginning of the pandemic, ICTs, they sort of form the backbone of much of the economy, e-commerce and digital trade. They are in playing an increasing, ever-increasing important role. And they also help us find sustainable trade solutions. And I think that's really very interesting in today's session that we try to zoom into some of these sustainable trade solutions and that we more broadly look at the role of ICTs for the sustainable development goals. And ICTs can really improve people's lives in fundamental ways and support the SDGs. Now, we know that each regional forum looks as a specific set of SDGs and we see them on our virtual backgrounds. And to just flag briefly, for example, ICTs can definitely help advance progress on SDG4 quality education that has been very well documented throughout the crisis. The ICTs can help SDG5 on gender equality and the other side, you've just also mentioned some of the challenges in this regard. The ICTs can definitely support SDG14, life below water, and I'm proud to refer to the UNICEF Black Standard here, and also contribute to SDG15, life on land. What we have seen is that emerging technologies, now be it 5G, big data, with internet of things, artificial intelligence, together they have really provided us with many, many new solutions to support health, education, gender equality, and various sustainable development objectives. I would almost so go so far as to say that ICTs can be a cross-cutting enabler for the SDGs. However, all of this is not so straightforward and it's really important to look at some of the challenges. And again, you've mentioned them so eloquently and I would say one of them is really the digital divide. Clearly, we still have big differences in terms of accessibility to digital tools. And in some recent UNICEF publications, we have also dived into this digital divide. And we see that on average, if we look at the UNICEF region, connectivity, internet access, for example, as measured by the percentage of population using the internet, it's clearly evolving, it's clearly increasing. But that increase still marks some fundamental differences between countries and I think it's all our joint endeavor to close these differences and narrow these differences. And I guess this is also for us, as different agencies in the UN, a real call for collaboration and for cooperation and to join hands to bridge this digital divide and to also address some of the other challenges, be it privacy, be it environmental rebound effect and so forth. Now, let me turn briefly to what UNICEF and what particularly the Economic Cooperation Trade Division can contribute to all of this. In UNICEF, we put great importance in promoting the digital agenda to realize the sustainable development goals. And if we look at the contribution of Economic Cooperation and Trade, this is really mindful. Like PPPs and infrastructure investment, what we are looking at is crucial, for example, to closing that digital infrastructure divide. Our work on innovation, including innovation policies, can really help harness the benefits of ICTs and new technologies. And clearly, trade facilitation, and here I'm looking at Maria. Trade facilitation can provide many, many benefits and benefit itself from advanced technologies, be it through facilitating trade, improving logistic chains, multimodal trade and transport connectivity and so forth. Now, on the side of UNICEF Act, the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business, I think there is also happening a great deal in terms of today's topic. And I'm proud to say that UNICEF Act has developed over 40 recommendations and some 400 E-Business Standards since it has been established. And all these are instruments available globally free of charge and you can use. Now, a few examples concretely in terms of contribution to the SDGs of UNICEF Act. Clearly, our work on multimodal trade and transport reference data models is crucial here. But also if we look a little bit more at the SDGs, for example, our contribution to SDG-14 through the UNICEF Fishery Language for Universal Exchange of Lux is crucial. Our contribution through the E-CIT standard on the Convention on International Trade and Engagement species. And I'm very pleased to have with us today at UNICEF Act expert Mr. Norbert Fafina who will speak concretely on that contribution of UNICEF Act and some of the environmental dimensions of the SDGs. Now, I think there are many interactions, positive interactions between digitalization and the SDGs. And I think there's a lot of interesting things to be discussed today in this session. And with this, I would close my opening remarks since I am delighted that this is happening today. I think we provide a very important contribution to different other international processes as you, Yadavzap, have mentioned them before. And also to the UNICEF Regional Forum. And I look forward to joining hands between the different agencies together with our membership and with our experts to taking that very important topic forward and to pulling our efforts to harnessing the benefits of the digital transformation for the Sustainable Development Council. So many thanks again for having me here with you today. I wish you all fruitful deliberations and special thanks also to Sarah and Charles for the very great cooperation of all of us here today. Back to you, Yadavzap. Thank you very much, dear Elisabeth. So, ladies and gentlemen, today's session will be moderated by Ms. Natalia Moccio, Regional Director of the ITU Regional Office for Common Wealth of Independent States and by Maria Rosaria Cesarelli and Chief of Trade Facilitation at the UNEC. But before passing on the floor to them, it's my great pleasure to introduce the first speaker of today's session, our ITU Youth Envoy of the Generation Connect Youth Group for Europe, Athena Vasilopoulos. Ms. Vasilopoulos will share with us the perspective of the youth concerning the future of digital societies and the economies. The current youth generation being the first generation of digital native, it is of utmost importance to include them in the policy discussion on this topic. This will also be the objective of the Generation Connect Global Youth Summit that will be held in Rwanda in Kigali from the 2nd to 4th of June. Athena, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Yadavzap, for this short introduction. So, hello, everyone. My name is Athena Vasilopoulos and I'm happy to be here today as a representative of the ITU Generation Connect Europe Group. So, in the light of the upcoming World Telecommunication Development Conference, the Europe Youth Group has worked hard to develop a youth declaration defining the regional priorities for Europe related to digital transformation for the next four years, but from a youth perspective. This declaration aims to be taken into account by member states when reflecting on their digital agendas and also address digital dimensions related to SDG4, 5, 14, and 15. So, regarding SDG4, Quality of Education, we often talk about youth as digital natives who we assume know how to navigate the online ecosystem and have the necessary digital skills. But, as pointed out by the research by your stats, we're reminded that 95% of those who access the internet daily do not inherently possess the skills for safe and effective use of digital technologies. And according to the same research, engagement is found to be often limited to entertainment and communication with only 13% of youth engaging in programming activities. For this reason, the first point highlighted in the declaration which also constitutes the first suggestion of policy action from the Europe Youth Group is the importance of capacity development to help youth develop the necessary skills. And in that respect, we ask that the ITU facilitate a bottom-up multi-stale coder advisory group to develop a digital-skilled curriculum and teaching guidelines to be rolled out across Europe for various educational institutions to ensure that youth develop the necessary skills to use technology effectively but also safely. And I'd like to emphasize the word safely as the lack of cybersecurity awareness is also one of our concerns. And from a cybersecurity perspective, humans are the weakest link which also further emphasize the importance to act. Regarding SDG 5, gender equality, as we ask member states and other stakeholders to support youth in developing the necessary skills, we would also like to highlight the challenge of digital inclusion and efforts that need to be provided to ensure that under-deserved groups of people who may experience inclusion based on their age, gender, geographical location, socioeconomic status, or even language are included. And regarding gender specifically, the gender gap in digital skills is a pressing issue. Currently only around 18,5% of the almost 8 million ICT specialists in Europe are women. And to respond to the growing demand for ICT and STEM skills, avoid a shortage of skills and develop a balanced workforce, we ask you to ensure that digital inclusion and more specifically gender equality is being prioritized. Finally, regarding SDG 14 and 15, while emerging technologies offer indeed a tremendous potential in working towards the UN sustainable development goals, these technologies also have an environmental impact that needs to be considered. And we as youth are already bearing the largest burden of climate in action. And the way technologies are managed can exacerbate the issue. So we ask you to consider environmental cost and make it count as much as monetary costs in your decisions. Overall, regarding the three points that I just mentioned, we are very concerned by all of this and we ask you to be part of this decision making process, namely as youth envoys like myself to ensure that our concern are highlighted. Thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you very much Antena for this inspiring word which calls us to take action and even more and to foster the meaningful engagement of the youth in the policymaking making and the most important in the implementation fostering digital development. So now, ladies and gentlemen, it's my great pleasure to give the floor to our regional director from the CIS States, Miss Natalia Mochu for the moderation of the session. Natalia, the floor is yours. Thank you very much Yaroslav. And thank you to Elizabeth as well for the warm welcome of our session today and to be inclusive language wise and make use of the interpretation that we have today. I would switch to Russian language and invite you to use the channel that is more convenient for you. Thank you very much Yaroslav. Dear colleagues, dear friends, my name is Natalia Mochu, I am the regional director of the International International International International Association for the CIS region and it is a great honor for me, a great joy to moderate today's session with our colleagues from the European Economic Commission with whom we work closely within our group on digital transformation. Our first session today will be dedicated to the role of the ICOT and the digital aspect of reaching the goal of sustainable development of 4 of providing all-encompassing, fair, high-quality education and the feeling of learning throughout the rest of your life. I would like to greet our speakers today within this segment. This is Mrs. Algeta Dono from Albania, Mr. Talant Sultana from Kyrgyzstan and Mrs. Anna Mikovskaya-Raleva from North Macedonia. During our discussion, I would also like to invite all the participants to ask your questions and comments, to write a chat and at the end of our segment, if we have time, we will try to sound or ask these questions to our speakers. Dear ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues, we all know very well that education sets the foundation for improving the level of life of people and plays the key role in providing a way out from the ICOT. Over the last decade, in the sphere of expanding access to education, increasing the school education at all levels have achieved significant success. However, as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of our region's countries were or are completely or partially closed to schools which, in a negative way, seemed to be at the level of education. According to the UNESCO monitoring, at the end of February of this year, the restrictions in the school work and the pandemic have preserved three more countries, at least three countries of our region. Nevertheless, the domestic introduction of distance education has become a new norm. The government of all our countries is taking measures to adapt to the legislative basis on the implementation of digital educational platforms, digitalization of educational materials and, especially, the current issue of digital elimination, digital destruction, and the provision of adequate universal school education and digital skills. And we would like to touch on all these aspects in our current segment. So, let's move on to our discussion. I would like to introduce our first speaker, Aldetta Dona. She is a national agency for the issue of the information society in Albania. She is also the director of the IT department of the Department of Health and Social Protection and has a wonderful experience of managing large IT projects. Aldetta, based on your experience, how would you describe the main difficulties and solutions related to the supply of electronic control of the system of education and the supply of education at home and how you can use the potential of digital technologies to provide equality in the field of education? Look at your opinion and your experience. Aldetta, you have the floor. Hi, Milan. It is a pleasure to participate in this event and to present the national agency of information society in Albania's vision on digital skills and education. Albania is currently in the process of penalization of the 20 to 26 digital agenda and one of the four pillars of this first cutting strategy is the e-learning and digital skills. Of course, this cross-cutting strategy aims to trace the path and stimulate investments in the key areas of advanced computing and data handling, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and, of course, the advanced digital skills necessary to deploy them. As I said with digital skills as one of the four pillars of the digital strategy, we are working on development of the skills for all citizens in order to create digital workplace. This will be achieved, of course, through a multidirectional plan that will develop the ecosystem as a whole through opening of the boot camps and coding schools from one hand to the establishment of technology education centers in the community to increase the digital literacy for all age groups and, of course, the introduction of coding as part of curriculum from the first grade of elementary schools. I will start from this last one to elaborate a little bit more. With the increase in presence of technology in everyday life, coding has become one of the most important topics and Albania is in the right moment to invest in technology that helps coding. The government will enable the new generation to be prepared for the basics of coding as well as to code in real environments without the difficulty of lack of technology. For this reason, we are working in two directions. We will include coding and ICT subject from the first grade of elementary school bringing completely a new concept of teaching in this, of course, is a project in cooperation with the Ministry of Education, which we set up a working group that will draft a new curriculum for this purpose. Coding games will be included in the pre-university education management system, which is a current system developed by NICE which is being implemented throughout the country and that connects all the stakeholders in one place, teachers, students, parents, and various civic employees from the education system. The curriculum that we are designing includes blog coding through interactive games to make the ICT class as attractive and interesting as possible for the pupils. Of course, the benefits of learning coding at an early age actually extend beyond the ICT. It helps children develop the critical thinking and problems solving skills as well. We plan to pilot this project in this year in 100 schools and to extend it nationwide in the next year. For this reason, the investment in special laboratories is necessary as well. This is the second direction that we are working on regarding digital skills and coding in schools. We will build smart labs starting with 100 curriculum pilot schools this year and these smart labs provide an interactive learning environment that will have smart boards to facilitate teaching by demonstrating live the solution of coding through size and better organizing information on the board through multimedia videos, images, audio, and animations included. And of course this will help also the teacher to make it more easy to explain and to help the children to exercise in all the coding games that they are going to be involved. Another area that we are going to focus which is also part of the Albanian digital agenda is to encourage coding also for the job market. Our target is to have 10,000 coders by 2025 and this will be achieved through the model of bootcams and coding schools. We are working with the Ministry of Education also in this direction to find the right government mechanisms within this year to promote the ICT academies with a specific focus on all the fields and also the advanced one like cybersecurity experts, software testers, business analysts, also digital technologies like AI, national learning, blockchain, etc. Another direction we are working of course is in our innovation hub Techspace, we are building partnership to have more incubation programs and to help startups with the necessary programs and support that they need through having intensive trainings, workshops and mentoring in order to raise them to the market potential and as I said at the beginning the other direction we are working is of course the establishment of technology education centers in the community in order to help the citizens throughout the country to increase the digital literacy for all age groups. Thank you very much. These words briefly our directions that we are working on advancing digital skills and increasing digital literacy in our country. Thank you. Thank you very much Algeta for for sharing your experience and it is a pleasure to note such a comprehensive approach which is taken in Albania which is aimed at all citizens and citizens of all ages and such great attention is paid to school education starting from the very initial level which will help to raise the generation of people who will focus on the use of technology as simple as possible and will act on the development of the national economy so thank you very much for your speech and for the information that you shared with us. I would like to go to our next speaker this is the talent of the Sultan which represents the division of the Internet community in Kyrgyzstan and the talent coordinates including the village regarding the construction of common networks for access to the Internet learning digital skills creating educational online platforms also the talent is a member of a multi-faceted group on Internet management and the talent of your organization does a lot to provide the liquidation of digital corruption in Kyrgyzstan difficult geography and remote regions in your country please share how digital technology can help to increase the quality of education and provide the level of education and what is your experience in this work thank you very much Natalia for a very good presentation you have already told my presentation I will tell you in more detail I would like to share and if I do not upload the video please take a look I would like to start from the call of the Sultan and the call for developing countries and in Kyrgyzstan these calls are even brighter because Kyrgyzstan does not have access to my country it is the farthest from my country in the world it is one of the most mountainous countries in the world 93% of our mountains and again internet cable and connectivity is a very difficult process and it becomes expensive and in these countries we do not have a big country 6 million people so local content but on the local music on which all people who live in regions Kyrgyzstan is difficult but I would like to say that the Kyrgyz government very actively began to help schools and students and teachers during the pandemic so that the learning process does not stop we have a country of about 2,300 schools and almost all schools during the pandemic were connected to the Internet Ministry of Education and our large operators including Kyrgyz TV but about 40 schools the most difficult and remote areas of Kyrgyzstan remained without the Internet and I just want to illustrate what the situation was we have all these schools for example there is the village of Enilchek it is located there there is a house where snowmobiles live I see here a participant of the Kumar Klychek he knows this area very well because he created national parks to save snowmobiles and during the pandemic students had to leave this village because there is no Internet and they cannot continue even online and they left the nearest village there is another village Kizuloy because there is no Internet and this school director had to leave for 40 km the nearest place where there is Internet to download materials and come to school through the project of these materials another village was interesting that we think that digitalization helps the process but sometimes it complicates the process of teachers because if the teachers used to write and send it in a digital way now there is no Internet they had to go somewhere once a month where there is Internet all these reports are sent and then return to their village where there is no Internet to feel the situation in the remote regions what we tried to do to solve these problems in the framework of the Internet first we tried to bring the Internet to the box Internet in the box and we brought all these schools Internet in the box devices and what we discovered the content that we loaded first of all, there is not enough secondly, when his father passed away he turned out to be very heavy of course, if we live in big cities we do not feel it but if you are a schoolboy in a village where you have to pay to load a book you have to first spend your money and secondly, you have to erase your photographs, your favorite videos to load educational materials that is, it is really such a complicated problem and we were very happy in this regard to work with the initiative Giga, which together is carried out with ITU and UNICEF and we are very happy that Giga chose Central Asia as one of the pilot regions where you can test different models for connecting schools to the Internet and for testing operational models so that this connection was stable and we hope to prepare the so-called playbook where we write different ways for connecting schools to the Internet and different ways to provide stability and let it stop and then maybe try to add something Thank you, Natalia Thank you very much, Talant and I think you paid attention to very important aspects having the experience of working in the field where schools teachers students and the moments that you noted of course, digitalization gives a lot of possibilities but at the same time, it opens up the difficulties that people really face in such countries as Kyrgyzstan where there is a complicated geography where there are many remote regions and really Kyrgyzstan is in this sense a unique country and part of the removal of the sea and mountainous terrain and thank you very much for putting forward the task of finding some new ways to connect I think in Kyrgyzstan we have to find the approaches and new methods that will allow connecting schools to the Internet even in the most remote regions and students will not have to leave and another aspect of the availability of content in the national language where children speak is very important thank you very much for the talent that you noted such specific examples and shared your experience I hope that we will have interesting questions in part of your experience moving on colleagues, I would like to invite one more of our speaker this is from the copy Anna Mikovskaya Raleva who is the coordinator of the Macedonian center of civil education and also has a rich experience in the field of analysis evaluation of the policy in the field of education gender equality human rights Anna, please tell me in your opinion what opportunities will be provided to strengthen the education system in terms of its quality and what problems will be faced by the government and also what measures they should take in order for education to be of high standards and to act in such a fair inclusive education of digital development in our region Anna, please thank you thank you to the previous speakers their presentations were very interesting and congratulations on the important things they are doing in their countries especially in Kyrgyzstan when I compare my country North Macedonia which is rather small in territory and almost completely covered with internet and we still face a lot of challenges it is really interesting to hear how they overcome the challenges they face in their country and learn from each other's stories so I'll start with the positive aspects of how my country tackled the COVID pandemic and the challenges it presented and then go on to the challenges we face and how they can be overcome in the future first I have to say that while the COVID pandemic represented a shock to the education system at the same time it opened the system to the possibilities of digitalization in education and since the educational system went almost completely to distance learning nationwide distance learning platform was established connecting all schools in the country and also additional platforms for digital education materials were developed and are still are continuously filled with also the national TV in the beginning of the pandemic was used to target groups of students with lack of access to internet the overall crisis actually encouraged the Ministry of Education and Science to provide special focus on the digitalization in the newly developed policy of primary education concept where the use of digital means in support of the education process were more specifically elaborated and they were insured in the relevant flaws and I believe that general message has been received by the system that there is a necessity to collaborate with partners outside of the formal education system in order to quickly adapt to the changes and this entailed joint plans and activities of the education institutions with the private sectors, the CSOs the donor agencies as well as parents as in the form of partners of the system. My organization Macedonian Civic Education Center also collaborated with institutions in the development of instructional materials and capacity building of teachers for effective use of digital tools to achieve the learning goals and although many stakeholders were involved in the process some of the available studies show that the end users, that is the students and the school staff still feel that they were the least consulted party during the development of the measures although their experiences were continuously surveyed from the system and from outside of the formal system by non-formal groups and now let's go to the challenges still despite of this on behalf of the institutions and the overall community we have still witnessed large digital inequalities in our country starting from unequal coverage with digital infrastructure access to technology digital skills of teachers and school staff. Actually last year the Macedonian Ministry of Education and Science identified that about 15% of students do not have access to a digital device and internet in their families and they are not in a position to provide this. So unfortunately the national and local governments did not manage to provide equal access to the required tools for each child and adapt the policies to the needs of each community hence the students which were the least privileged when it comes students which were the least privileged they were faced challenges when it comes to following the everyday curriculum but also when it comes to developing their digital skills and although there are no official data with regards to the achievements some anecdotal evidence shows that the already existing achievement gap between children with different socioeconomic status has widened during the pandemic this is I think an overall issue within the different countries and this means the students who needed the most supports were not adequately and sufficiently supported by the system while there were attempts by some communities to overcome these deficiencies they were in medial measures and were not systematically planned and in the end I would conclude with two recommendations one refers to education quality which must look at digitalization through the prism of quality instead of only quantity this means that we should bear in mind that technology should not be used only for the sake of technology in education but for the purpose of enhancing learning and better achievement of the learning goals the technology should be perceived as a tool for enabling every child to achieve the learning goals and attain the needed circumstances and this requires flexible and adaptive use of technology is not one size fits all of it and the other conclusion refers to the role of digitalization in supporting equality and this entails two factors I believe the first one is the necessity to implement the same standards for digital infrastructure in all schools regardless of where they are located and the socio-economic status of their students and this policy has not been systematically developed and enforced in the country yet and the second aspect refers to the teachers as we know that with most education policies skill teachers are the key factor for education quality so in-service and pre-service programs which integrate digital tools and contents and the universal learning design as an approach to learning should be the next required steps because so far the capacity building activities for teachers have been mainly basic referred to the technical aspects of technology use but they neglected the methodological aspects and this should be tackled through the future so I believe these are the main steps that the systems must take to ensure that digitalization is used to support education quality and reduce inequality in education thank you I would like to ask another question everyone you noted in a different scale the other aspects of work from different levels and I would like to tie this aspect to what Yaroslav noted at the beginning that at the present time international communication, understanding and realizing the importance of cooperation, initiated such a platform partner to connect. It seems to me that the examples of the work that you realize in your countries are beautiful examples of commitments that can be presented on such a platform, which MSA is currently developing partner to connect and we would like to invite you to join this partnership. Nevertheless, I would like to ask one more question to all of you very briefly. How, in your opinion, multi-faceted partnerships can contribute to the development of super technologies and thus contribute to the achievement of the goals of the development in particular in the field of education? Could you give some specific examples of successful partners that you are involved in or suggestions for those partnerships that you and your organization could participate in? Algeta, just two minutes. Please share your views on the importance of partners. Yes, this is a very good question actually. The multi-stakeholder partnerships of course between government and agencies, private companies but also nonprofit organizations help not only to run things faster but also help in developing the ecosystem as a whole and thereby accelerate the achievement of all SDGs, especially in this case that we are talking about digital skills. Because as I said also in the presentation in the case of Albina, we are working in multi-directional elements to enhance the ecosystem as a whole in this direction. Of course throughout the years we have had some very successful collaboration in this area. Since we are talking with digital skills we have the support of nonprofit organizations. Of course we have worked in close collaboration we are working with the Ministry of Education. With the nonprofit organizations we have worked for our tech space which is our innovation hub for different incubation programs and of course they are also supporting us right now with the ICT curricula and SMART Labs. So building partnerships helps not only in the development and accelerating the processes financing also is very important but also helps in bringing the best experiences because sometimes this partner has implemented successful projects in other countries and bring up their experience and expertise also in our collaboration. So we see it as very important and we are always trying to include all the necessary stakeholders in developing our ICT agenda. Thank you. Thank you very much Algeta. You mentioned the initiative of MSA and NSF-GIG which you are also participating in. What other possible partnerships do you see and their role? This initiative which I noted in the GIG brings great prospects I think for our countries and of course the partners we are talking to we have great expectations and we would like to build this cooperation not only on both sides where GIG and the internet community will have a lot of involved participants and for example we have implemented one project in the village of Susamir-Kamenit-Network and this partnership turned out to be involved and the central state as the Ministry of Education and also the local municipality where the school performed and the owner of this infrastructure was involved an international partner who gave us know-how and financing and what is very important the private sector was also involved in order to get this project to be of such stability and now at the level of the village there was a special non-commercial organization which manages this common internet network directly deals with the private sector with the provider which gives corporate social responsibility in this village so that both schools and hospitals and municipalities could have access to the inexpensive and quality internet and this example we want to try in other places so that this is part of our playbook with which we want to share with all partners and the whole world Thank you, Natalia Thank you very much Anna, what is your perspective what is your vision? Well, I'm going to speak more generally about how we should develop the overall digital competence of the youth today so they can adjust to the world of tomorrow as we know the digital competence is emphasized as one of the eight key competences for lifelong learning but however its definition is constantly changing because what was considered to be digital literacy 20 years ago has now changed significantly and involves more and more complex skills which are necessary for the future so the education system needs to be very fast in adapting to the changes and for this trick in order to do this it needs to partner with different types of stakeholders because the formal education system is usually slow to adapt to the changes so it needs support by the overall skills development ecosystem in the country and outside of the country and this includes non-formal education institutions for more adaptable to the digital transformation needs civil sector organizations which have access to different funds which can be used in synergy with the budget funds and also bigger emphasis should be put in the schools on extracurricular activities because the extracurricular contents are more easily adaptable and flexible so this requires systematic mapping of both stakeholders according to their line of work planning of the involvement of which and I believe that the general development of the digital competence will affect in the overall digital development then achievement of other system of development goals not only quality of education but in general the goal system Anna, thank you very much and you also touched important important aspects related to the constant evolution of technology development and the need to answer new opportunities digital technologies and develop system of education in order to be able to use these opportunities fully. Dear speakers our Algetta, Anna, Talant, I would like to thank you for our segment such a live discussion despite the fact that we have snow behind the window I think our discussion today seemed very very important very filled your real experience and you touched all aspects related to the achievement of education and the development of education system through the Ministry of Education through schools, teachers, students creating the appropriate content including in the national languages and difficulties that we see on this path and the importance of quality and available access to the Internet and we saw some examples of the difficulties of countries in our region are faced with such basic basic things as connecting to the Internet that we are all used to today and of course it is worth noting that for the achievement of quality education and the purpose of the development dedicated to this you all noted the importance of diversity on the level of the state between the government and the structure between the private sector that allows to provide quality education and also noted the examples of international partnership such as the GIGA initiative such as the partner to connect platform which the UN international agency and I think we all need to know and tell and share information about the existing partnerships so that countries can use the opportunities which are on the UN platform Thank you again for such an intense discussion and over time I see that we just went a little beyond the timeline of our segment Thank you very much and I would like to go to our next segment which will be dedicated to at least an interesting and important topic about gender equality and I would like to on the virtual stage of our speakers is Mariana Petrovich this is Mariam Torosyana, Bojana Zoric and as I understand we have George Anthony Giannumis which will be included a little later if not yet included Dear colleagues let's go to our second segment which I continue to moderate and I would like to answer by anticipating our discussion of course the problem of gender equality in the area of access to digital technology in our region as we can see statistics are not as sharp as in other regions of the world according to the users of the Internet among the women of the European part of the region occupying the leading positions in the world at the same time, the countries of the CIS region also demonstrate good indicators in the part of overcoming the gender gap but together with the level of such professional increase of women in gender equality of course leaves to wish the best statistics and Finan already shared numbers in increasing women in the professional sphere of the CIS I will add a little more statistics in the middle less than 1% of girls and teenagers want to become professionals in the area of the CIS in comparison with 5% of their peers young people despite technological progress and the pace of digital transformation in the society there are still some stereotypes about the theme of education and IT professions we see that the level of computer pregnancy among women also also has where to develop so we wanted to with the participants of the second segment our panel discussion the role of the government of such other interested parties in overcoming the difficulties that we still face today in providing gender equality in digital world and how these tasks we successfully overcome together and I would like to present the first of our outstanding Mariana Petrovich she is a professor of Cafeteria Management and Economics of Belgrade University I would like to note that in 2011 Mariana defended the candidate in terms of modeling the policy of telecommunication within the process of comparative analysis and such a scientific approach can bring to our discussion Mariana please tell according to your opinion are there in our hands in the hands of the government such effective tools overcoming digital inequality and of course share your experience academic so to speak how to attract girls in the theme of education and in the sphere of IT in general Mariana, please thank you for introducing me and good afternoon to you all it is a real pleasure to participate in this session and discuss such an important question although I sincerely hope we get to the point where we don't have to anymore so this is indeed the specific challenge for policy makers since the question is still on the table even in countries with high gender equality indicators and strong public policy instrument for rising the interest of girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and I will share with you some findings from the analysis within gender equality index that was and thematic focus digitalization the future of work published by European Institute of Gender Equality and the same thematic focus was published in Serbia last year so these findings come also from this kind of analysis and the situation is particularly pronounced in the field of ICP as you already mentioned which is why it is important because this field is seen as the most prominent one in terms of employability or simply put getting a job keeping a job and building career nowadays but the question is also delicate because segregation path extends from education to labor market you mentioned already that the interest of girls, young girls is lower when it comes to these fields but even those young women and girls that end up in this profession choose this profession our experience in vertical segregation and even a gender pay gap so the question is rather challenging and what is needed is to establish some kind of balance between imposing and inducing interest here because there is evidence that including STEM content through obligatory subject may be counterproductive and lower interest especially of girls and this relates to the discussion we had on the quality of education because one of the paths to follow is introducing STEM content through intersubject competencies within something we call next generation learning concept where the learner is in the center of the learning strategy where we focus on the personalized competence-based education and I'm not just talking about formal education here but also further training that is needed now to cope with job automatization computerization in new forms of work on online platforms so as already said in previous discussion digital competencies are evolving and they're already seen as transversal ones and employability skills regardless are we speaking about the STEM sectors or any other job or profession so when we have this personalized personalized approach we need to acknowledge some findings from the both thematic focus the European level and the one published in Serbia that there is a need to incorporate also something called career guidance confidence and self-perception if we really want to fix the numbers not just by traditional policy instrument we are using so we need to have a more delicate approach here just simply put it is about shifting focus from bringing girls and women to STEM for girls and women and it is aligned with the evolution of the digital divide where we move from access to use to usability although we know that access is still an issue for some marginalized groups but we want to let's say shift our focus we need to shift our focus to usability how to exploit digital technologies in concrete fields of both education and work we know that there is math anxiety there is technology anxiety whether we are talking about young people or young women or older women now working in service sector that are afraid of digitalization and that their job will be replaced by some algorithm so in this sense it is important to bring the topic around innovations not just digitalization and something that is maybe scaring young women today so this will not only help to rise anxiety free interest in formal education in these sectors further training but also will empower women to work to new forms of work in digital work and I am particularly speaking about gig economy work on platforms where the analysis show that the some stereotypes are also evident the women the work on platforms are more educated but earn less and there are some challenging tasks here that need to be addressed in future and this is the flexibility to work on the platform it offers many opportunities but it also poses some additional trust to women in terms of arranging and balancing between work, family and other obligations so also on platforms we have something that is comes from the traditional labor market when we say about ICP fields even women that choose ICP will decide on database administration rather than programming software development and also on the work when we come to the platform work women also will rather choose to are more represented in translation accounting and etc. and much less in software development which are the most paid jobs here so I will just put a summary as a kind of summary and say that the analysis we had in this gender equality index and thematic focus say that we need a kind of sophisticated approach that will not be only about the importance of rising numbers of women in STEM sectors but more seeing the digital competencies as something that is unique that is present in any profession today in the labor market and that we need to devise all our actions through the line of employability not just employment in ICP sector but employability the equally important is to get the job but also to keep it and build a successful career I would like to note the following I really liked your new challenge to bring STEM to girls to women I think you can accept it as a role model and use such approach in attracting more women in this interesting attracting industry and you also noted the approach support or development of innovation not just digitalization I think it is also interesting and in this sense it is a great transition to our second speaker who is sure not afraid not innovation not digital technologies is Mariam Tarasyan from Armenia who founded the institute of high-efficiency innovations who are the foundation of the platform SAFE YOU and already more than 5 years work in technological startups a wonderful example of girls in ICP who are social entrepreneurs with experience in the field of law human rights social anthropology and I think they have a wonderful experience and knowledge to share with us your experience Mariam please tell me what in your opinion would you like to do to overcome gender inequality on your example with what difficulties did this girl who decided to create her startup it would be interesting to hear your experience in this in this direction and of course what state measures are necessary to overcome gender inequality and to achieve such parity Mariam please I invite you to take the floor Thank you very much Good afternoon everyone I will continue in English So as a founder of SAFE YOU platform which by the way was created during the pandemic which corresponds to growing numbers of domestic violence and general violence against women and girls I should say that this pandemic which is violence against women and girls which is also a second target for SDG5 still with us and it was with us even before pandemic and it requires some joint action but the definition has a very important role to play here and as we speak about governments first thing that I would urge them and what we are doing also with different governments that we are working with as we are already active in three countries with SAFE YOU platform and by the way it's very symbolic that the next country we are going to implement SAFE YOU is going to be Rwanda Kigali and because when we were starting with SAFE YOU we were concentrating on prevention of violence against women through responding to violence against women through prevention, protection and prosecution of cases because we also understand that this violence against women is a major obstacle for women economic empowerment where also the central role plays education so we created this platform as a direct response to violence against women but it also has components as a platform and mobile application to create educational community where women also have access to information and we saw that it proven itself as a very successful application especially for women in regions that are more underrepresented in education and in economy so and the other part of it is data driven so we are analyzing data as data science and machine learning together to understand what are the narratives what are the concerns of women growing interests including STEAM and how we inform how we can inform decision makers as we are also working with ministries to implement first of all mechanisms if we talk about violence against women but also have programs and policies in place that are adequate and needed so it's more moving from policy making to decision to data driven decision making in this field which I will highlight as one of the most important things for governments as to engaging more women and girls in STEAM I think I would definitely agree that we need to talk more about innovation and creativity and also I would add here also the format of social entrepreneurship and social change that women can bring to this world of innovations and technologies and here it's very important to create the synergies between those actors who are from civil society organizations who are kind of change makers because they help us to change social and cultural norms that are unfortunately depriving women from being active participants of economy and tech industry and from other point of view the synergies we need to create between private sector, tech, private sector and startup ecosystem so that we all can contribute from our side because gender inequalities are such a sensitive subject but it's also very general so it requires a holistic approach to this issue and also as a social entrepreneur in tech and solo founder I can say that it's yes it is challenging to be an entrepreneur in the field especially when you are it's a mission-driven social change innovation and being surrounded with men usually more working for commercial startups rather than doing something for social change but it's also very important to play this role model for young girls because it helps them to see that it's possible and I see more and more startups because I'm also mentoring a lot of startups to pursue the same journey so I would say that we need all actors here to be engaged and also look at the most vulnerable groups that are actually women and girls that are affected by wireless and how we can create this reciprocal thing from steam to this women because this industry itself has a big academia has a big positive influence on this issue because this culture the startup ecosystem tech industry they come with already established culture where inequality is already on the table so it has positive effects so now we need also to bring this women to this sector and I think in Armenia we have more than 30% women in this sector which is a big achievement for us and it's continuous work done by different actors in the field so and the last thing that I would say to summarize yes and the data driven policy making is crucial second is highlighting women's leadership in innovation and in technology should be another important step because it will change social norms. Thank you. for inspiring your performance and the example that you give to your country. And I hope that you will soon be presented in Rwanda. We are really looking forward to a conference on the development of international solidarity that will take place in Rwanda in June of this year. I would like to invite and give a word to our next speaker. This is Bojana Zoric, who is a senior political analyst of the Regional Cooperation Council and has a regional perspective. Bojana coordinates the work of the Council on the issue of conducting and annual public opinion of the Balkan barometer. And in general, she is the coordinator of the Regional Cooperation on the issue of the Council. Bojana, please share your views, your opinions, what obstacles are there to bring the stem to the girl, as Marianna noted at the beginning of our discussion. And of course, what measures you take, what measures are necessary to take in your opinion in order to overcome existing barriers. Bojana, please, your words. Thank you very much, Natalia, for the questions and for the invitation. Let me start by congratulating US organizers for setting up this really worthwhile discussion. It's not because the gender equality between women and men is universal human right, that it is important to discuss the implementation of SDGs that we are actually doing today, but because gender equality and women's economic empowerment through STEM and other disciplines is basically an essential element for the economic growth, for promoting social development, social entrepreneurship that our speakers talked about, but also enhancing business performance. And this is precisely the starting point that we in the Regional Cooperation Council took when we started dealing with gender-related perspectives. We started back in 2020 by joining efforts with UNDP and launched Women's Economic Empowerment Framework for joint actions in the Western Balkans. As we sought a necessity to not only raise awareness on the importance of talking about women's and girls inclusion in all societal spheres, including STEM, but we also understood that only with targeted actions we are able to address existing structural deficiencies as they appear on the ground. So within this framework we defined five key pillars to achieve in, of course, the long-term perspective the goal of Women's Economic Empowerment in the region in the Western Balkans. One of it is promoting women's leadership and access to decent work, which is quite important. The second is bringing transformational changes to gender equality both in private and public sectors, supporting and accelerating women's entrepreneurship, investing in care economy as we know that the most of the burden actually falls on women and equitable distribution of unpaid care work. And the last is basically bridging the gender digital divide in STEM careers. And this initiative that we took STEMs also from the Common Regional Market Action Plan that was endorsed at the highest political level by the Western Balkan leaders as they also sought the necessity to encourage the men to pursue entrepreneurial careers, to increase their participation in education and STEM careers but also to take part in digital upskilling, also to establish women entrepreneurs network and women-led innovation teams, which goes hand in hand with the digital skills development. Last year we made a breakthrough in our work in STEM with the launch of the regional network of women in STEM in the Western Balkans with a joint effort with our international and regional partners we are seeking to provide an enabling environment for young women and girls with adequate mechanisms, instruments and tools to be able to compete with their male counterparts on equal terms. It means to attract, to recruit and retain which is very important women in STEM majors at universities but also fields in general but to create also deeper STEM talent pool in the region and to bridge the gender digital skills divide in STEM disciplines because they are pertinent in their existence in the region but also we see it as a more global development. What we are now doing at the regional level is we are rolling out a wide regional campaign in STEM for STEM role models that will become operational from May to October this year precisely to promote successful women as role models that then young girls can relate to and identify with so we could encourage their increased participation in STEM fields and subsequently encourage them to possibly take on those STEM careers and this our program will be followed by mentoring and coaching programs to assist young girls to enter STEM fields let's say more smoothly and to showcase good practices to involve practitioners to introduce similar tools in their business and educational environment not necessarily at the regional level but we can start from a small scale local initiatives and then we will be able to scale up at the regional level. When we talk about the situation in the Western Balkans on average there are more young women STEM students in graduates in the Western Balkans than in many for instance EU countries but the share of women in STEM education is much lower compared to other fields. As an illustration and following up to what Valid Mariana said between 70% and 85% of graduates are women in health less than 40% in agriculture and only 20 to 30% in engineering so that is basically the situation today not only that as we see in the region women have less experience than men when they start to business and they are also less likely to borrow money for their business which then subsequently leads them to earn 30 to 40% less than their male counterparts which is really quite a huge gap and having having recognized that and also talking at the regional level with a lot of the women STEM practitioners women entrepreneurs we decided also to pursue more vigorously the women entrepreneurial segments as part of our regional framework so we basically only reason to launch the regional flora or mechanisms to to gather women entrepreneurs in the region and to increase the knowledge and awareness about their role but also to share knowledge among themselves because what we see is that they are not as connected and they are not sometimes able to share their experience and very valuable devices of how to start business with for instance their counterparts in Serbia and Bosnia Herzogovina in North Macedonia and etc. One of the major issues that we are now facing in the region is female unemployment rate last year and also it was of course impacted by the COVID pandemic but even prior to that it was problematic unemployment female rates in the region was 15.6% which despite a positive growing trend that we observe it remains more than double compared to the EU average so basically we really need to address this problem and to act. We as a regional cooperation council of course we are facilitator and coordinator of different regional initiatives and what we are trying to do really to gather people, gather practitioners, experts and decision makers to sit at one table and to discuss the challenges to share best practices and to see how to address them and we are not talking only about local authorities, national administration but also civil society NGOs and other partners international and regional ones that would be able to come together and discuss how to address these issues. So I will stop here for her now hoping that I have answered your question. Thank you. Thank you very much. We are a little late but I did not want to worry you because I think these examples of initiatives and activities and projects that you realize on a regional level for the Balkans region are very interesting and I hope that as a result of the discussion some of those present today on our sessions are interested to know more information or turn on your regional networks for girls or think about creating some similar products for your region and I think all the information that you shared is extremely interesting therefore I thank you for for such a reminder and full-fledged discussion. And we have one more speaker left. I hope that Anthony joined. I saw that he was in touch with us. Anthony, are you with us? Yes, thank you. I will not repeat the question. I think you know perfectly well the topics that we are discussing. What measures should we take? What do you need to do, colleagues? Before Anthony, I will give you a word. Let me introduce you and please excuse me. Anthony is, Anthony Giannumis, if I correctly translated your name, is a professor, a professor of universal design, information, communication technology in Oslo Med. Anthony heads and participates in large-scale research, innovation projects in more than 17 countries. And I am glad to note that Anthony participates in including international international communication with this and other topics. Anthony, please, your word. What do you think that you recommend to us? Thank you so much, Natalia. And thank you everybody for who is on the line here today. This is a very exciting opportunity to talk to you all together and to talk about these really critical issues. I want to move from kind of a broader discussion around pipeline issues when we talk about how women are raised, how they are educated and how they become professionalized. And I want to talk to you about a different kind of pipeline. I joined the social media platform Tiktok last year. And if you don't know Tiktok, it's basically a social media platform where you scroll through those videos and you enjoy watching people do funny and weird things. When I first joined the platform, you know, you register your name, you put in a little bit of information, your gender, your age and things like that. And the algorithm behind the social media platform then presents you with the types of content that people who are similar to your age and your gender would like. And of course the first thing I was talking about was the content that used women and women's bodies to, I guess, entice me to continue to use the platform. And I faced a really important decision at that point. How do I handle what the algorithm has given me versus the kinds of content that I want to consume? And of course the sexualized content was not why I joined Tiktok. I wanted to find other people who were talking about the real substantive issues and I eventually got into areas that were discussing the research on issues around LGBT rights, around transgender rights and around all the issues that we fundamentally care about when it comes to gender equality. Now my experience could have taken a very different turn had I liked and subscribed to and just lingered long enough on other kinds of content. And this is the kind of pipeline I want to talk about because there's been research specifically on Tiktok but it applies to almost every social media platform that uses an intelligent algorithm to determine what kind of content people like and enjoy. There's research that shows that people, especially young men, can become radicalized very, very quickly. And so there's a pipeline that exists that starts very innocuously. It might be some jokes at the expense of some celebrities. It might be some jokes about women and how they exist in the world. And then as you kind of interact with that content, a young man might be presented with content about how to pick up women or how to get a girlfriend. And then that slowly accelerates and it becomes more and more misogynistic until at some point in time they become male misogynistic, male supremacy content. And so this pipeline is a pipeline of radicalizing young men into areas of society where women's rights are not only just not acknowledged but they're actively oppressed. And this is an important pipeline for us to think about when we talk about issues around gender equality because it's not on the women to make this world a more vulnerable place. It's on all of our responsibilities. It's on all of our consciousnesses. And so the issues around men's roles and ensuring that gender equality exists in society are really important and we can't take that, we can't leave that out of the equation when there are online platforms that are, the entire business models are geared towards extremist women. And so I wanted to start off just by talking about that because it's really important for us to consider the ways in which we're approaching the issues of gender equality in our world. Gender equality is not something that only benefits women, it's something that benefits all of us, men included. Misogynistic attitudes, internalized misogynies and toxic attitudes. And so I think when we're approaching these issues around STEM pipelines, when we're approaching these issues around education and rights, we can't stop by saying, okay, we're seeing what the impact is having on women and on women's rights and leave it at that. We have to also take into account how men can be part of that equation, how men can also support the achieving the goal of gender equality. And I say this not just as an academic, I say this as a teacher, because I am tired of young women coming to my office and confiding in me the sorts of discrimination, the hostilities, the microaggressions, the outright harassment that they experience in educational settings and in professional settings. One of my earliest experiences as a scholar as an academic was when a young woman came to my office and she sat down and she seemed frustrated and exasperated and I asked her, you know, what's going on? Are you upset about your classes? What's going on? What's happening in your life? And she confided in me that she just attended a conference and at that conference she was giving out her CV to the different people who were there advertising their jobs and their companies and when she went to ask for one representative's business card so that she could send him her CV he said, yeah, I'll give you my business card if you give me your phone number. And so it's this sort of tit for tat very subtle yet clearly misogynistic behaviors that exist in the world that continue even in a country like Norway where we've achieved substantial strides in women's rights that these issues still exist. I'll tell another story about when I was supervising a group of bachelor students and these are three women who are doing work with an external vendor and that vendor was selling medical supplies and so he wanted a website created, he wanted these these young professionals to create a website for him and this was going to be graded as part of their final thesis. And at one of the meetings he sat them down and said look, I've been working on this website for some time, last year I had a group of men working on it but I really wanted a group of women because I think you'll be able to make the website prettier. And this kind of attitude undermined my students' basic abilities to create new technology in a way that's professional and in a way that's highly advanced just because he assumed that because they were women they would be able to design a more aesthetic user interface and this is just nonsense. So I want us to really think critically about how we approach gender equality in today's world. I want us to think really critically about the new ways in which misogyny and which toxic masculinity enter our society. And I want to call on all the men out there who are watching this series to stand up especially when you see your colleagues say and do things that are impacting the lives of the women in our world. I think this is incredibly, incredibly important. Now I have the honor of leading a high scale research project called Equals EU. It's an amazing project that brings together 25 countries around the world focused on gender inclusive innovation. And we're working very hard to ensure that a new generation of young women are able to be elevated and to become the future leaders in this space. I'll wrap it up by just saying thank you again for this opportunity to talk about these issues and I'm happy to discuss further. And really in achieving such a gender equality equality part of the solution of this task should be both men and women. And everyone should understand and realize that without without a man it's impossible to achieve a balance for a woman. And without a woman it's impossible to achieve a balance for a man. So the role and support and participation of men and men in this sense is also very important. And thank you for touching such fundamental things in our discussion. Considering that we've had enough time for the next segment respect Mariana, respect Bojana, respect Mariam, respect Anthony I would like to sincerely thank you for such an interesting discussion. I think we touched various aspects and gave each other food for the next thinking. I would like to invite you to share in chat some resources that you have in order to get familiar with them. I hope that our discussion gave the same inspiration and gave examples of what is done in different countries in different corners of our region in order to achieve more justice and more equal opportunities for all of us. Thank you very much and I would like to finish our interesting important discussion. I would like to wish all of you great success in what you are doing and with pleasure to convey my word to the moderator Rosarie Ciccarelli from UNC to continue our event. Maria I thank you and I convey my word to you for the next meeting. Thank you. Thank you very much, Natalia. It was very interesting to hear your speakers and your first conclusions. I'm now going to introduce the next two segments. They will be on SDG 14 and SDG 15. Let's start with the first one. First, let me, sorry, I was already going inside the segment and I forgot to thank ITU for their great effort in the organization of this event and of course Charles from my side from UNC so trying to catch up with the time. Let's start with this segment that is on SDG 14, live below the water. We will have two speakers for this panel, so Rodin and Manuel and I will first of all introduce a little bit is SDG 14 and just participants of course are invited to put questions and remarks in the chat and our speaker will try to address them. So SDG 14 live below water as the objective to save the life underwater and it looks at conserving and sustainably using the ocean, seas and marine resources for sustainable development. This SDG focus on pollution, protecting and restoring ecosystems reducing ocean acidification developing sustainable fishing and increase scientific knowledge, research and technology for ocean health. World fish stock are being depleted by overfishing and illegal and reporting and irregularly fishing and this not only the fish stock but also the coastal communities that rely on fishery for economic survival and depend on these for their food source. To address this problem as Elizabeth highlighted in her open speech UNEC has developed an open and global standard that is called FLUX to allow the electronic exchange of fishery data and FLUX provide an harmonized message standard that allows fishery management organization to automatically access the electronic data for fishing vessel and here we see the link between ITC and our fishery stocks and on these sorry I would like to introduce our first speakers that I'm sure will take over from me on this subject so Mr. Rudin KII has been working for more than 13 years as a civil servant in Albania and where is now in charge of the fisheries and aquaculture sector in the ministry of agriculture. Rudin expertise range from development and preservation of blue economy, regeneration of the marine environment food safety and consumer protection traceability of fisheries and aquaculture product and sustainable fishery management strategies to reduce illegal and reported and regulated fishing so if I may my first question to Rudin will be in our opinion how can innovative ICT based solution and emerging technology support governments in mitigating environmental risk and challenges and use sustainably natural and earth resources and interiorly marine and terrestrial ecosystems so Rudin, the story is yours. Thank you Hello to everybody and then as you mentioned I will focus my intervention in the fisheries sector on the fisheries expertise resources expertise on fish and ocean and then as you mentioned before all in all the fish and ocean of the earth the fisheries resources are over exploited now so let's say that the modern technology in the last years modern technology digital technologies are put in place to make possible the control of fishing activities in a manner that would be not possible with traditional let's say control activities basically there are two systems that contribute to let's say to control fishing activities and where and when they are happening let's say and they are the GMS that is the vessel monitoring system for monitoring the activity of fishing vessels as well as the use of and the monitoring of the fishing activity for vessels that are larger than 12 liters and the other one is the ERS system that is electronic reporting system for recording and reporting data from fishing activities these are basically the two main electronic systems that help us to in addition to physical inspections and control activities these two systems help us to let's say to supervise the fishing activities in a manner that was not possible before with traditional control in Albania the GMS system, the vessel monitoring system which is a totally based monitoring system is compulsory for all fishing vessels as I mentioned before greater than 12 liters in order to ensure that the rules on which vessels can see where and where are respected since in Albania this system has started installation of boards of the fishing vessels since January 2021 and from May of 2021 it became fully functional the other system the ERS system that is used to record reports for fishing stories and also to send data on fishing and lending to the authorities is now still not in use in Albania it is used in new member states we have with our law we have provided the basic legislation to start to implement even this other system in Albania and now for this year we are we have program to approximate the commission regulation of new 1303 of 2007 that will allow us to make this the system fully operational at maximum we figure by the end of of 2023 because it will it will ask some time to become fully fully functional this the key element of this ERS system is the electronic log book where as I mentioned before the masters of the of the fishing vessels to record and report all the data of fishing activities to the authorities through electronic through electronic means no more we say further because until now not in new member states but in our country this is done by writing manual reports and every master of this has 48 hours to submit to the authorities of this report on the fishing activities with this electronic log book we say it will be possible that the authorities will have all the data and what is happening of reports in real time so this is the way how how let's say digitalization and digitalization process can be used to ensure a sustainable level of exploitation of fish fish stocks industries and all I don't know Thank you very much Rudin for telling us more on the implementation of ITC solution in Albania and I've been in Albania several times and I've seen how great you are and how willing you are to use new technologies and I am sure this will be a great success also not only for the VMS that you have already implemented but also for the ERS that you are now almost launching yes so of course is very important especially for a little sea like well I'm Italian so the one we share you know the Adriatic to be sure that all our resources are not deployed yes and we can keep them for the future generation and of course then we can support all the other countries doing the same to have a better control over fishing and preserve our ecosystems so with this I think I will give for now the floor to our next speaker Manuel Dacosta Cabral and I will come back to rubbing later on so now Manuel is a senior consultant for international connectivity and submarine cables in the general directorate of information and innovation of ANACOM and is was part of the Portuguese representative to ITU where he has been the chair of COM ITU and he was also a policy officer at the European Commission in the G Information Society and Media and Manuel I would like to ask you our first question if you allow me how I will ask you the same question that I just asked the previous speaker how can innovative ICT based solution and emerging technologies support government in mitigation and helping our ecosystem and avoiding that we have risk and challenging in our use of natural and earth resources so Manuel the floor is yours Thank you Maria Rosalia and thank you for all team that has been organizing this event Saira, Jaroslav, Natalia thank you all for inviting me to participate in this regional forum so as you were saying it's very important also for us to be involved in these activities that allow in the future that our resources are kept and passed the next generation hopefully in good shape that we are working on as well so it's a pleasure to work in this participating in this sustainable development event so your question is very good because I am part of the Portuguese regulator for telecom and how a Portuguese regulator gets involved in these activities related to the sea preservation and so on so our start and the start of our activities actually began a connectivity problem we had to address connectivity between Portugal, mainland and our two islands two archipelagos Azores and Medea so this is a ring an existing ring that has about 4,000 km connecting through submarine cables and we are on the verge to replace this system to build a new submarine cable system a new generation with a larger capacity capacity and so on and while we are in this process we realized that we could have some innovative services some innovative solutions to these submarine cable systems and so we decided to evaluate the possibility of having smart components meaning to smart here means scientific monitoring and reliable telecommunication and so we realized that telecom submarine cables can be used also for humanitarian purpose such as environmental and seismic detention service science communities and people having in mind the production of early warnings in case of tsunamis and earthquakes with sufficient time lead to increase significant disaster mitigation saving injuries, lives and property also smart systems integrate scientific sensors that will enable both telecommunication and sensing functionalities for ocean and climate monitoring including ocean bottom temperature pressure, vibration accelerometer, salinity well then these the sensors what the sensors read it's very much up to the to the owner of the system let's say but we have a number of possibilities we also enable these smart sensors to enable disaster warning early warning and alerts for tsunamis and tentatively for earthquakes so this is very important that these sensors are not do not place a burden on telecommunication operation so they are a complement to the connectivity purpose of the smart submarine cable and so this is a good combination this is innovative process there are some studies some projects to have these smart functionalities in other submarine cables so but Portugal in these camera we have what we call the camera connecting continent as a Portugal mainland can be one of the first in the world to have these smart functionalities so based on these we are able to produce an entire ecosystem of data processing data storage of the storage of the data that we will be collecting from the bottom of the sea and with this we believe that we are contributing for a blue economy that is our intention as well with this process so thank you very much thank you very much to you for this very interesting piece of information and I think it's great that you are using these well you started from a from a problem this connectivity problem and you find solutions that are going behind the problem that you were supposed to address so connect your two islands and finding a way to support the sustainable development of your coastline trying to prevent an early warning and inform on time if there are a problem of earthquake or tsunami and this is a very relevant point that of course could in the future once that Portugal will will have implemented it could be exported to other region of the world not only of Europe and I think this would be great so with this I would like to ask my two finalists another question how can multistakeholder partnership support digital development and thereby accelerate the achievement of all SDGs and if I can first address this question to Rudin Rudin the floor is yours okay I think that the multistakeholder approach is important because it's not let's say at least in the speaking sector it's not enough that only the authorities may verify but also the other stakeholders may be from a business do verify they have to adapt their let's say of aquaculture funds to the modern technology in a way that the cooperation has to be in two ways so the pipe has to have feedback from the electronic system so maybe the authorities the government in some cases has to let's say to finance even the with some grants to support this digitalization of the private sector because in the teacher sector it's not so let's say so easy for the teacher to make investments only investment so otherwise this is something that helps the authorities to have a better of the resources between our planet are not so many and quite everything is over exploited so I think this is the way how they I don't know if I have answered the right yes indeed yes thank you Rodin and I think you are completely right because if I'm thinking about the our fleet in Albania but in Italy but also in other countries in a lot of cases they are formed of small vessels so private owners and these small SMEs should be preserved to avoid that they are taken over by large companies that can afford these IT system exactly so I completely agree with you that there should be a partnership between the government and the private sector especially to preserve SMEs in this sense and thank you very much Rodin if I can ask the same question to Manuel yes thanks for the question so yeah well as we had this partnership on top of our agenda first of all to address the connectivity problem then we articulated quite closely with the regional governments and several ministries in Portugal obviously along with the operators as for smart cable smart sensors let's say as we were as I was referring before this is an innovative process so we created an internal domestic group consortium let's say being part of the the national one the geophysical institute and also the telecom the institute of telecommunications so combining the several layers that say the several areas which we support with these smart cables and in terms of this is in terms of domestic partnerships in terms of international partnerships we have been closely working with JTF on smart cables it's a joint task force which was promoted by ITU UNESCO the intergovernment oceanographic commission of UNESCO and also the WMO the World Meteorological Organization and so these these agencies are combining their forces in these JTF smart cables and we are quite glad that the UN system has a role is paying attention to smart cables and seeing the benefits of this new solution thank you very much thank you very much Manuel and I think this is very much needed because early warning system I have to go outside the country you know in this globalized world where we are and we have seen with this tsunami it can start in one country and then it can arrive you know farther to other countries far away from the initial point of the earthquake so this international partnership in my opinion is really needed and it's very much welcome for all the community and also support ecosystems so thank you very much with this I would like to thank my two speaker for this panel and considering that we have some delays I would like to pass to the next panel I'm just going to check if there is any question in our chat I don't see anything for the time being so I will pass to the next panel and thank you once again to Rudin and Manuel to be with us and discussing these very interesting topics so our next segment thank you so our next segment it will be on and last segment will be on SDG 14 we are going to have three panellists for this segment so we will have Chevella Coraya Chevic Ingrid Take Norbert Parfinger that will tell us more on the implementation on ITC and SDG 15 Life on Land SDG 15 wants to protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems sustainably manage forests combat the certification out and diverse land degradation and biodiversity loss main targets of the SDGs is for example conservation, restoration and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland water, promoting the implementation of sustainable management of all types of forests and ensuring the conservation of mountain ecosystems and promoting a sustainable use and management of waste. An example of what UNEC has been doing linking ITC with this SDG 15 is to support the development of electronic permits information exchange EPICS and this to help the Siding Convention fighting illegal trade of wildlife and this is helping ensuring that proper controls on international trade in animals and animal product will enable also the enforcement of strict sanitary standards and therefore important steps to limiting the risk of zoonosis and the transmission of viruses from animal to humans and this link us back to COVID-19 that is also part of the topic of this discussion and with this I would like to pass to our first speaker that is Chevella Korea Chevich sorry if I'm missing out Chevella is the head of transport and environment energy and regional statistics department in the agency of statistics in Bosnia and Herzegovina and we are very pleased to have you here and my question to you is what are the effective policies or actions that governments can put in place to make digitalization and digitalization processes green and sustainable and Chevella the words is yours sorry I think you are muted you have to unmute yourself thank you I think it's fine now no yes we have a problem can you try again no you are muted I apologize I think maybe she needs to disconnect and reconnect again so you keep having this problem can we disconnect the headset Chevella can you try once again can you hear me now yes we can hear you that's great thank you this problem yes sometimes we have this thank you very much Maria so answer for your question proper management of waste is an essential component of sustainable development so there are a number of indicators of sustainable development goals specifically designed to monitor waste and the impact of chemical and waste on the environment and human health better understanding and more data on e-waste will also contribute to the achievement of several goals of 2030 agenda for sustainable development so e-waste calculation is an integral part of the methodologies for the calculation of weight of electrical and electronic equipment placed on the market and for calculation of the quantity of e-waste generated thanks to the cooperation with the sustainable cycles program from the United Nations University Rectorat in Europe Bosnia-Segovna adapted e-waste calculation tool for the calculation of e-waste in the currency so Agency for Statistical Bosnia-Segovna successfully calculated national electrical and electronic equipment put on the market data in accordance with the requirements of directive of Europe parliament and council on waste electrical and electronic equipment additionally total e-waste generated both in terms of total weight and per capita was calculated also so example of effective action at the national level to make digitalization and digitalization processes green and sustainable is cooperation between Agency for Statistical Bosnia-Segovna and Federal Environmental Fund in Bosnia-Segovna after sustainable cycle program support was provided to the Agency for Statistics on e-calculation tool for the use Waste Management Information System of Federal Fund for Environment in Bosnia-Segovna was put into operational use on the 1st of January 2021 what is important that is Agency for Statistics of Bosnia-Segovna actively participate in the construction of the information waste system and statistician in fact have access to data from waste information system for statistical purposes as well as for international reporting and this also includes monitoring of flows for electrical and electronic products which are entered into system by the e-operator and comparison this data with import export statistics data for e-products and final use of this data in e-waste calculation tool and calculation quantity of e-waste generated so in general this cooperation between these two institutions facilities, processes of waste information system development enables comparison and control of data between these two institutions it can be considered effective applied actions that make digitalization processes green and sustainable so effective actions to make digitalization and digitalization processes green and sustainable on the regional level can also be undertaken through a new project named regional e-waste monitor for the western Balkan countries project started at the beginning of this year jointly implemented by the E2 office for Europe UNEP Europe office and UNEP Vienna program office and UNITAR cycle program so this project aims to address this lack of internationally comparable e-waste this is through assessing e-waste statistics management practices and e-waste legislation landscape in the western Balkans to produce finally regional e-waste monitor as well as providing training of how to make and collect e-waste statistics for the western Balkan countries so overall goal of this project is to assist beneficiary countries in making digitalization policies and strategies green and sustainable as well as based on evidence with the particle focus on e-waste management to reach the project goals regional e-waste monitor for western Balkans project will produce regional and nationally comparable e-waste statistics for the five western Balkan countries including this project using widely accepted approach of UNEP partnership for measuring e-cate for development and use for SDG monitoring this data shall be intraragional and internationally comparable to this end the project aims to improve both data quality and data availability and in addition to increasing regional capacities to produce e-waste data and so this is for government officials, statisticians and other relevant stakeholders such as industry essential for the sound and mental management of electronic waste so representative of agency for SEPICS are participating in this project, this regional project and we want to share our experience again by adapting the e-waste calculation tool for the calculation of e-waste in cat so this is briefly from my side thank you Thank you very much Chevella for this very interesting piece of information and it is in fact essential that countries work together, special neighboring countries in order to have the same approach on the problem this problem of e-waste and managing it electronically and in this way you can of course have a better cooperation and speed up the processes so this is a very interesting project and if Ingrid allow me, I would like now to give the floor to our other speaker Norbert Puffinger because he's also going to talk about e-waste and it will be interesting to listen to him just after Chevella so Norbert Puffinger Norbert is a 90 business analyst at the Environment Agency of Austria he works on national and international e-government solution with a focus on interoperability, electronic data interchange and standardization is a long-term contributor to the United Nations Center for Trade Facilitation that I manage and electronic and then he is the coordinator of the UNC FACT Environment Domain so if I can ask you Norbert how can innovative ICT based solution and emerging technology support governments in mitigation and risk and challenges and how sustainably use of natural and natural resources can be also preserved with through these innovative ICT based solutions please Norbert Thank you Maria for the introduction and for the invitation to this interesting and important forum Indeed I want to talk about the management procedures related to waste and to the transboundary movements of waste and the technological solution I want to talk about is electronic data interchange EDI it's actually compared to many of the other solutions we've heard today not that innovative it emerged in the 1970s but nevertheless it can contribute a lot to an improved environmental management transboundary movements of waste there is the Basel Convention since 1989 which defines the control procedures and these control procedures they involve business to administration data interchanges for each individual shipment of waste involving data interchanges prior to the shipment and then after the shipment to track the waste where it has been treated and when the treatment of waste has been completed etc. so this is a whole lot of data to be exchanged very frequently and EDI is very well suited of course for such life and real time data flows when I started working in the environment agency the authority I worked for the Ministry of Environment it still handled all this information on paper so economic operators would submit all this information on paper to the authority there is a photograph from the competent authority where there are piles of paper in the background it's not a stock photo it's an actual photograph from the competent authority and of course EDI can help a lot to reduce the administrative burdens both for the competent authorities and for the economic operators so EDI in itself is not such an innovative technology but it's a building block and a starting point that can help apply lots of other innovative solutions examples are quite obvious they're quite simple examples such as formal validation rules an example is those transpoundery movements of hazardous waste they need to be conducted under consent by competent authorities and the formal validation rule can just check is the mass of the transport waste doesn't it exceed the consented mass of waste so that's a simple example of how the IT can support the competent authority in looking into the right places for assessing environmental risk there are several other such means the statistical means so that authorities can quickly detect events that deviate a lot from the average there are artificial intelligence means for example artificial intelligence can be used for risk classification and of course what's also very common is as we deal with large amounts of data in order to cope with these large amounts of data visualizations can help a lot diagrams etc one main effect is that competent authorities are better in control of assessing the environmental risks and of taking actions if needed but as said another effect is that the administrative procedures become much more efficient both for competent authorities and for economic operators and using EDI is also an opportunity to introduce such life and real-time data interchange on a larger scale if I look at the competent authority it still deals a lot with annual reports from economic operators but it is possible to increase the amount of life and real data via electronic data interchange thank you very much Norbert for this interesting panoramic I think interesting to listen to you after Chevella because we can have a kind of full picture of the application of ICT in E-Waste and of course even if you are using ADI that is an old tools that doesn't mean that it is not applicable anymore and from there of course we are jumping to AI that is implementing and is supplementing our tools at the moment and I know that your project between Austria and Switzerland is very successful so I hope this will be used in other countries soon so with this I go back to Dr. Ingrid's page and sorry for changing at the last moment the program Ingrid is a biologist with a strong background in applied special statistics and over the last 15 years she's been working as a researcher in the field of ecology and evolution and as a professor of biostatistics she currently works in a geospatial and land degradation specialist for the world the overview of conservation approaches and technologies where she supports country to achieve their SDG targets and we are very pleased to have you here and my question to you will also be an innovative ICT based solution can emerge and emerging technologies can support governments in mitigating environmental risk and challenges and support the sustainable use of natural and earth resources inter-area conserving marine and terrestrial ecosystems thank you very much Ingrid and the floor is yours Maria, sorry and first I would like to thank ITU for organizing this event sorry and FAO for nominating us to speak today I'm really happy to present work at perspective and experience we are a global network on sustainable land management and we are talking about SDG 15 so land is at the center and land is very important it's the primary source of natural capital and we derive a wide range of ecosystem services connected to food security, climate change biodiversity which are key to achieve all SDGs unfortunately in the region and in the world land degradation is threatening our livelihoods and health and scaling out sustainable land management is key to reverse and avoid land degradation so how can new technologies and ICT-based solutions so you were asking Maria can support the implementation and scaling out of these sustainable land management practices and I would like to focus my answer on one of the most direct contributions which is by facilitating transparent and easy access to geospatial information maps and spatial data are key for informed decisions and these maps needs to be of course relevant and validated and can be used to prioritize for example areas for different types of interventions the famous question that we have always is what to do where they can support land use planning processes and optimize the investments which is a huge concern for governments and this is a time of opportunities for informed decisions as our colleagues shared before we have a massive amount of available data for example coming from health observations but we also have new technologies and algorithms data mining machine learning and to extract information from these massive data sets and we also have easy access to high performance computing services to process these data sets and there are also as Norbert was saying visualization is key and when we talk about digital maps we need to be able to look to visualize to explore these maps and not being a GIS expert not being an expert on the field and there are many platforms and ways to facilitate this access and visualization of the maps so I would like to comment on an example last year together with FAO a decision support system was developed in Turkey and then upscaled to 17 countries in the region and this decision support system was its main objective was to support mapping of land degradation and monitoring progress towards SDG 15.3 which is a target related to land degradation now achieving a land degradation neutral work and the system is basically a Google Earth Engine app and allows users to run experts only by using a link to visualize explore of them statistics but most importantly also combine these different layers using multi-characteria assessments so for examples they can decide which they can use different variables different criteria where are the key biodiversity areas where the area is integrated the different land covers etc and choose and visualize areas that meet all these criteria so I would like to point out that really for example these tools like Google Earth Engine are very useful to to bring these new technologies to achieve the GEE Google Earth Engine not only offers the possibility to build these apps which are open you can access the code you can modify them but it also allows to provide a data catalog of free geospatial data so you can access all this massive data for free and you can also process it in the cloud and it's important also to mention that a key issue is data transparency and knowledge sharing these were crucial for integrating and using available resources particularly national indicators in our experience successful and sustainable use of these knowledge platforms and Earth observation data by decision makers because that is always our end goal we don't want to create tools and that that is not used we wanted to be used this happens this this is successful only when there are long and medium term processes that involve discussions negotiations feedback and capacity development and here the science policy interface plays a very important role in these processes because it allows the exchange and joint construction of knowledge which enrich a decision making and following the principles of open science not just any science but open science will accelerate and maximize the contribution of new technologies to achieve SPG-15 so transparency and collaborative production of fair data fair data as in findable accessible interoperable and reusable and very important and the COVID-19 pandemic has made it very evident and clear to all of us the importance of following these principles and I would also like to comment on another example of the power of new technologies to achieve support achieving SPG-15 and as in WCAG host the global sustainable land management database and many countries in the region have documented their practices the technologies and their approaches for sustainable land management there are more than 300 practices documented in this global data base from the region using standardized tools and methods and this has facilitated local national region and global knowledge sharing and comparative analysis of which good practices work where how and why and what are their costs and benefits so that's from my side, thank you very much Thank you very much Ingrid it was very interesting and you are completely right we need to scale up land management and be sure that we are going to preserve our ecosystems and geospatial information RK for governments and local and also national government to be able to come up with informal decision sometimes there could be things to control but then if you can check the territories as you were mentioning using ITC and using you were mentioning Google Earth but I'm sure there are a lot of other system but you know these geospatial tools it would be much easier for them to control their territories and manage carefully their resources and I cannot agree more with you that we need standards for knowledge sharing and they have to be interoperable reusable and accessible and this is something that we do every day in CFAC so you just open this is an open door on my side so if I can quickly ask the last question to you well actually Ingrid you already replied to me on multi-stakeholder partnership and support on digital developments for SDGs you know you mention all the wonderful work you are doing also with the project in Turkey and the country around it I don't know if you want to add something before that I pass to the other two speakers on this no, yeah basically in both examples partnerships were key to support digital development and build synergies to SDGs and today more than ever we need partners to partner up and share their knowledge results and capitalize on the results of others because the costs of not doing so are too high thank you very much and let's see if Chevella wants to add something on multi-stakeholder partnership and how they can support SDGs okay I will introduce you with example of multi-stakeholder partnership according to this frame of directive you member sees have obligation to set up electronic registries for hazardous waste in the carriage to set up electronics registries for other ways as well so this position reflects broad-based shift towards use digital platform to collect and report data across many sectors to build and sending of the use and the potential of these approaches for waste data management Europe Environment Agency have initiated project focused on electronic registries for waste so as the first step the Europe Environment Agency started with online survey to compile national information and generate insights into the use of electronic registries for waste data management across Europe Union member countries and also Canada countries so survey covers background system information, user experience challenges, opportunities for added value through enhanced analytics so this multi-stakeholder partnership can be considered I think strongly as a poor digital development and this accelerating also achievement for sustainable development costs Thank you very much Chevella and Norbert, would you like to add something on this? Yeah, I can just confirm and add that in the topic I've been talking about cross-border tracking of transponder of waste that's of course a cross-border topic and it involves authorities and economic operators it involves economic operators from different economic sectors there are logistics operators which not only deal with waste but also with various other types of transport so interoperability is key to electronic data interchange and for interoperability there is the need of these multi-stakeholder partnerships and of standardization and I think there is place for that and also in this particular case that I've been talking about we are also working with the Basel secretariat so there are recommendations for all Basel parties Thank you very much Norbert and thank you also to my other two speakers Ingrid and Chevella this was a very interesting discussion and it's really interesting to see the pieces are putting together and now they are interconnect and how is important to communicate and to interact among stakeholders and among countries and with this considering that the minutes delayed I will give back the floor thank you to all my speakers Thank you very much for this great session and great moderation as well of this session sincere thanks for this and congratulations to the distinguished speakers so ladies and gentlemen thank you very much for participation during today's session let me express special thanks to all those who have contributed to this session also who have used the chat room in order to provide some insights and clarifications and additional pointers I think we have got extremely rich content and reference points for further discussions and further collaboration shedding the light on the critical role of digital and to accelerate the achievement of the SDG4 5, 15, 14 and 17 being huddled through the 2030 agenda it's important to capitalize on the role of the ICPs but also address the barrier imposed by them to ensure that no one is left behind and we have series of different takeaways for each of the SDGs and this makes us extremely happy because those takeaways will be building the foundation of the inputs to the Regional Sustainable Development Forum happening next week and we hope to see you all at the discussions and advocating for the power of the digital but let us take a look at a few takeaways from the SDG4 point of view and also SDG5 point of view and 17 and then I will hand over to our colleagues from UN ECE but before I'm diving into these I wanted to still to double check if we have with us the youth envoy from the CIS region so I'm checking with Sara Sara do we have our colleague with us who is youth envoy of the CIS youth group so maybe we can give her the floor for some short fantastic so Emilia I'm handing over to you and looking forward to your inputs before we are concluding on all main takeaways the voice of you youth is very important to us over to you Thank you very much My name is Emilia Volkova I'm a CIS youth envoy Thank you very much to all speakers for a very interesting discussion I would like to share it with you As you have already noted, all speakers of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 demonstrated that the digital world is an integral part of the modern life and, of course, education is not an exception Education is based on improving social and economic solutions as social and economic projects become more interesting and effective because all the habits of a young youth are important and so, in most cases, well, probably such opportunities like that are the most important because we do not have It is not a preface to each participant's access to the Internet. And here I would like to note the presentation of the talent of Sultanova and emphasize that even a remote school, as was demonstrated in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, is not an obstacle to connect the school to the Internet and with the help of the Giga initiative it was achieved. As for the youth in general, here, as Algietta Donna noted, state institutions and non-governmental organizations can create various initiatives and form educational centers that can help with the purchase of digital skills and their development, as, for example, was done in Uzbekistan. In addition, it is important to take recommendations that relate to the increase in the quality of education and the increase in the qualification of teachers, which Anna Mikovskaya-Leva shared with us in each country. Now, the local digitalization of the educational sector is taking place and I believe that we must ensure that this transformation will be inclusive, at the same time, keeping the wave of growing inequality with the help of partners, as was noted by all speakers. As for the gender gap, as Natalia Mocho noted, less than 1% of girls and adults want to become professionals in the KT region, compared to 5% of boys and less than 20% of women are working forces in the system. The gender gap is especially great in some of the fastest-growing and the highest-paid professions of the future. Such as informatics and engineering. In addition, as Maria Tarasyan noted, the sharpness of the violence against women and the KT plays an important role in its decision, for example, with the help of the creation of mobile apps and increasing the awareness of women. Gender stereotypes and cultures in which men dominate are all factors that provoke the gender gap. And in order to overcome this gap, as the representative of the youth, as Maria Petrovich noted, I think it is necessary to provide women with the opportunity to develop skills and confidence in themselves in order to succeed in mathematics and natural sciences, to provide girls with the right passion and the opportunity to get education. For example, it is possible to provide language for technical use, as well as the creation of centers that teach women and girls digital skills. In addition, it is important to cooperate with the creation of a pleasant working environment, including providing equal wages of labor and increase the awareness that women are also capable of, like boys, and attract more women to the development of their careers in the system. And that is why such initiatives such as the celebration of the International Day of the Girls in the KT are very important. As for the Tsur-14 and Tsur-15, as Rudin Kihayash noted, the use of the KT in the water sector plays an important role in improving water use and the Susha ecosystem. Modern technologies, such as the system of monitoring of ships, the innovation system of wiring cables and the introduction of smart systems, as Manuel Dacosta noted, and the system of accounting, as Karajchevich pointed out. The introduction of the system is capable of shortening the amount of paper of Robert Bluffinger. In the satellite image of artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, the network with the expansion and coverage of mobile telecom connections opens new opportunities for the support of the government, the organization and the community in the protection of restoration, restoration of the water-based ecosystem. These technologies can significantly increase the effectiveness, the operability and the activity of the system in the management of natural resources that contribute to the use of natural resources on the planet, on the Susha and in the water. It is very important how all the speakers were demonstrated, and I, as a young man, completely agree with this, that the state, private companies, all the various international organizations, startups, must sign a contract and a partnership and include all this in the state programs to solve the problems with which the data is faced with. And at the beginning of the discussion, to give the opportunity to the young man to express his opinion and ideas, to be heard and to include the young man in the process related to the achievement of TSU. Milya, thank you very much for all these insights. It's an amazing message which concludes this meeting with the voice of the youth. I hope that we will hear much more of those pledges during the upcoming regional forum Sustainable Development. We are looking also to the next week, the youth forum but also the youth discussions at the forum itself. One more time, thank you very much. Ladies and gentlemen, this brings us to the end of our meeting. Let me only highlight a few takeaways focusing on the different SDGs that we are properly also prepared for the next week with the concrete messages to be inputted into the larger discussions on the digital taking place next week but also going beyond to the level of the HLPF. So regarding the quality of education we have definitely agreed that the COVID-19 pandemic has provoked a shock for education system but it also opened the system to the possibility of opportunities for digital education. The crisis encouraged ministries to put a special focus on digitalization in the new development of policies addressing digital and ICDs. With the increasing need of ICD tech and digital skills which is seen as the cross cutting character of the future of work it has been highlighted that governments are at the tipping point to redesign the education curriculum to include STEM and ICD education at the youngest age starting with the elementary schools. This can be done for example by providing coding classes but it's also important to include these subjects into extra curricular activities which offer more flexibility and adapted approach to the needs of students. Developing ICDs and STEM skills is not only important for digital and ICD related work but also for developing analytical skills that is necessary in most areas of work. For these to be enabled there is a need to develop multi-action plans and apply a whole of ecosystem approach and to partner across different ministries especially between ministries of ICDs and the education but to use digital and ICD tools connectivity and more precisely access and the affordability of connectivity of utmost importance to ensure that all are able to enjoy the full fruit of digital work. However we have seen that geographical differences can refrain the spread of connectivity especially in remote and rural areas where the server increases pre-existing inequalities. Not only access to the connectivity is important but also adaptability for the end users such as the needs to adapt to the content of online tools and services into the local language. The switch from analog to digital can also be particularly difficult for teachers which have been highlighted on the front line. Hence terror support to teachers and educators need to be provided through providing skills that goes beyond basic digital skills also through providing capacity building. We also hear that quality of education must look at the digitalization through the frames of quality instead of quantity. Tech should not be used for the sake of tech only but for the purpose of enhancing learning it should be seen as a tool that enhance every child learning goals. For this it's of prior importance to implement flexible and adaptive ICT tools and services. There is also necessity to implement standards of digital infrastructure in all schools and foster digital skills for all teachers as it is the key for quality education. So for this to be possible there is a need to invest in the infrastructure development which can be done for example from by the ITU Unicef Giga project but also the need to collaborate with partners outside of the government such as with the CSOs private sector parents and donors community but also partners at the local level such as municipality which is especially important in the rural and remote context. In this context the partnership building plays a quite important role and that's why we one more time use this opportunity to call for the action and pledging at the partners to connect digital initiative which you should definitely be part of in case we want to contribute to digital change. But let's take a look very quickly at the gender equality as the G5. Gender equality is still a topic of matters for policy makers events in countries where the gender equality index is high. This gender inequality is particularly pronounced in the ICT and STEM fields this inequality starts at young age in the education field which then spread into the labour market and the interest of girls in lower is lower in this field but even girls and young women choosing and this professional experience segregation and gender pay gap. This demonstrates that involvement of women and girls in the STEM and ICT sector does not translate into strong participation in such sector with women ending up to have lower grades jobs and not necessarily represented in managerial positions or entrepreneurship sectors. To tackle this issue it was recommended today to undertake a flexible approach which also resonates well with the recommendations put forward in the SDG for and especially a need to find balance between imposing education and raising interest in the ICT and the STEM topics. With this flexible approach it is recommended to introduce STEM education as a cross cutting character of education curricula but also to implement personalised competence based approach and not only in the formal education but also in trainings or extra circular curriculum activities. Such personalised approach needs to include career guidance and self confidence and perception trainings. A stereotype is seen to be one of the major impediments of women and girls inclusion in the ICT and STEM sectors. Panelists also put forward the importance of providing care support. So ICT tools and services themselves can also be a solution to foster gender equality digital services on tools can provide a response to the domestic violence which was in particular importance during the COVID-19 pandemic when the women suffering from the violence were more isolated than ever. The startup ecosystem and the tech industry can also support women that face domestic violence to be empowered as they have established a culture with harmonised approach and where inequalities is being pointed at which in turn have a positive effect for women empowerment. ICT can also support the elaboration of data driven policies and programs which have been highlighted as a key during the COVID-19 pandemic and will continue to be in the new normal. A positive effect of women and girls empowerment in ICT and STEM sectors and to raise their interest is need to provide role models in this field. We have seen a great example with the network established by the RCC and with this I would like to mention also the girls in ICT celebration which aims to provide the role models and to foster girls and young women interested in this field and we hope that many of you will be able to join and the forces on the 28th of April this year and encourage many stakeholders at the national, regional and global level to mark this important celebration in the calendars and to make proper action and to also engage the others. Ladies and gentlemen, so of course the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the inequalities that can be celebrated by the digital divide but today's session gave us recommendations to ensure that all can enjoy the full fruit of the digital society and economy and to foster the use of technologies for goods. One more time we're very much impressed with the number of examples used where the partnership responding to the call for supporting the implementation of the G17 was very much visible and we see that this is also the future to engage the new stakeholders who never were even thinking about being part of the larger community trying to advance digital development across the world so that's why ladies and gentlemen before concluding I would like to pass the floor to my colleague Elisabeth Terp for final words and after this I will say a few words. Elisabeth, the floor is yours. Sorry Jaroslav, you will have to do with me because Elisabeth unfortunately had another engagement so she couldn't stay so I will try quickly to wrap up the two segments on STG-14 and STG-15 STG-14 as we said looks at the conserving and the sustainability of ocean seas and marine resources country are really encouraged to step up efforts in implementing digital solution for sustainable use of resources underwater and we recall the use of UMFLAX to provide an harmonized message standard to allow fishery management organization to automatically access the electronic data from fishing vessels such as vessel and trip identification, fishing operation or fishing data and coming from this standard several systems were developed for example the vessel monitoring tools and the electronic reporting system and countries are encouraged to implement these systems in order to help us keeping our resources and passing it to future generation. Marine ecosystems should be preserved also using ITC tools that are used for other that have other scope for example in the case of connectivity we have seen that we can use solution already in place also for other scope for example through the sensor to preserve our environmental impact of the human activities and also as early warning in case of natural disasters and government led multi-stakeholder partnership both at domestic and international level are indispensable to achieve our goals if we can pass to SDG 15 and a strong link is here also with the pandemic because if we preserve our life on land we will also be able to fight viruses and on this I go back to the example I made on the support to the site is convention to try to avoid illegal trafficking of wildlife that could spread zoonosis and either viruses and ITC is indispensable there to be able to exchange electronic certificate and also this was also true for SDG 14 check what is reporting Israel in trade transponder and on the trade transponder if we look at e-waste this ITC will be even more important to be used not only new technologies like AI but also ADI is there to support us and looking at efficient use of waste resources that can be recycled in a circular economy and monitor the waste of chemicals that can be very dangerous for our environment and then finally also looking at ITC for avoiding degradation of land through tools like geospatial tools that can support governments making informal decision and all this information of course they need to be shared among partners and among countries with this I think I I wrapped up thank you very much Maria Rosaria this brings us to the conclusions of this meeting we have still one minute to conclude so ladies and gentlemen on behalf of digital transformation group for Europe and Central Asia and all UN agencies involved in making this event happen we would like to thank very much all participants for taking the time to be with us to contribute to listen and to spread the news and also to act as the ambassadors in the upcoming regional forum my sincere thanks to Elisabeth Turk for taking the time to join and to address the meeting also to our regional director for CIS Natalia Moccio Maria Rosaria for all your contributions and also let me raise the round of applause for those who are also passionately making sure that all content curation and also all other aspects are taken care of with the excellent results and with the input to the next week event Sara thank you very much Charles thank you very much Irina thank you very much let me not also forget about mentioning our youth and voice who made special efforts in order to bring the messages of the young generation digital natives to these discussions as well as interpreters captioners and we hope that next week we'll be able to see you at the series of different digital related events which start from Monday with the youth and also with the peer learning session taking place on the 6th as well as the special event on the digital inclusion in the morning so there is a lot what expects you next week but for now we would like to thank you very much for being with us and we hope to co-operate in the future on the digital for development so let's partner to connect and thank you very much and have a nice lovely day thank you thank you thank you very much bye thank you Aristotle thank you all bye bye