 Welcome to the ITU studio at WTDC 14, the World Telecommunication Development Conference. I'm very pleased to be joined by Mr Cosmos Zava-Zava who is Chief of Project Support and Knowledge Management Department of the BDT, the Telecommunication Development Bureau of ITU. Cosmos, thank you very much indeed for being with us today. Thank you for having me. Now you're also Secretary of the Searing Committee and the plenaries here of WTDC 14. I'd like to start off by talking about the actual report that you just brought out here which is tracking four years of achievements implementing the Hyderabad Action Plan. And this is four years on from Hyderabad which was the previous World Telecommunication Development Conference. What has happened since then? Okay, that report is an synopsis of what we did over the past four years since the Hyderabad Conference on Development that took place in 2010. You know the priority areas were quite broad. We're looking at infrastructure, ICT applications and services, cybersecurity, human and institutional capacity building. We're looking at issues pertaining to mainstreaming ICTs in terms of gender, people with disabilities, youth and so forth. And we're particularly looking at growing trend of climate change and its impacts and emergency telecommunications because of the increasing number of disasters. So we tried to profile on a region by region basis the work that we did in assisting countries to implement the Hyderabad Action Plan which contained a declaration, an action plan with those components that I have mentioned. So you will find some case studies in there and some real life examples of how ICTs could change people's lives. And we recently actually went out and filmed some of some case studies, some success stories really from this. So there's been real action that's been happening since then. Absolutely and I'm pleased that the video that our team produced is quite informative. It goes to point that what we are doing is not in vain and we are not just technology people but we are there to impact people's lives. For example, the clip that we have on Japan tells the story of the disaster that happened in Japan which caused a lot of human lives and it displaced many people and some people remained missing. So it really disrupted everything and billions of dollars were lost as a result of the earthquake and also the tsunami. When we looked at Africa we took an example of Tanzania where we were looking at how we could change people's lives by connecting young people at school and making sure that communities are also connected. And we have many examples Costa Rica, how you could be leading a better life, how you could use ICTs to campaign against the smoking. So we tried to make sure that we dealt with the ecosystem of ICTs and tried to change people's lives because technology without impacting people or without contributing to sustainable development or saving lives is really useless too. I was going to say, this conference here, is it very much a springboard for sustainable development? We believe in value addition. When we came from Idarabad our aim was to make sure that we implemented the actions, projects and activities that we agreed on or the Member States agreed on in Idarabad and now we learned a lot during that process and the environment has been changing. So this conference is a springboard to embrace new technologies, to embrace new strategies particularly now that we are coming to the end of the MDGs in 2015, the World Summit on the Information Society goals and the targets and we are embracing a new era, the post-2015 development agenda. We've heard some very interesting policy statements here from ministers from all the different countries represented here. One of them was from Malaysia in fact, talking about the black box and talking about how technology could assist further in tracking planes in real time and that kind of thing. So there's some very interesting issues that are being raised here. There are great issues. I think this conference is not more of the same. It is different and unique because in terms of technologies we are seeing the emergency of better technologies that are imaging, nanotechnologies that are imaging but the applications have changed also. If you look region by region, the penetration level of mobile telephony is increased. We have over now 7 billion people connected and each person has got more than one device. So it's a networked society. Machine to machine communication has become a reality and if you look at internet penetration, broadband is the end thing because by the way I remind you that the theme of this conference is actually broadband for sustainable development and I'm pleased to say that although fixed broadband is not growing at a rapid rate mobile broadband is growing very fast particularly in the developing world. So I think there is a realization that technology, particularly information and communication technology is a game changer and the MH370 tragedy should never happen and this was a quote from our Secretary General. I think the membership agrees. The technology is there, the potential is there. We develop standards. We manage spectrum, we allocate spectrum to countries and regions. There is no reason why a solution could not be found and I know that our colleagues who are in the standardization area are certainly keen to work with the membership and with our sector members to make sure that things like that don't happen in the future and most importantly also I should say natural disasters are happening all the time. Yesterday alone we had an 8.2 earthquake in Chile which caused a little bit of tsunamis and we now learned with sadness that a number of people have perished and we should not be complacent at all and climate change is a reality and we know that most of the regions are grappling with food security issues new epidemics are emerging and so forth so the challenge is still there. We've got a very full dance card here for the conference what are some of the hopes and expectations for this? I think we celebrate the fact that we had a record number of ministers for the first time at a conference of this magnitude a record number of vice ministers, a record number of regulators and a record number of the private sector so the enthusiasm is there, we have over 1,600 participants and it's unprecedented, it's a record. Now having said that it shows that there is a common vision and I think we believe in one thing that we have to change our lives and those of anybody irrespective of where they live where they come from, who they are and what sex they belong to we just have to make sure that everybody has the right to the latest communication services and technologies and they should use it to change their lives and make sure that they contribute to the development of society as a whole out of this conference, looking at the contributions and proposals that have been submitted, it is clear that broadband is at the center of things and it will unlock a lot of opportunities and a world of choice in terms of industry in terms of communication tools in terms of for healthy delivery, education and you can look at another area of human life. Secondly, I think our strength lies in making sure that we provide services and applications to communities and to the people. For example, you know the case of M-Pesa that was born and bred in Africa and mobile banking is an inner thing and many countries by the way small countries are depending particularly in the Pacific and small island developing states and LDCs they are depending on the diaspora who remit funds and mobile services such as that do help delivery of mobile health services is critical there are many people who suffer from diabetes many people who have got weak hearts and the medical fraternity is a great opportunity to make sure that each individual's mobile phone gives a warning to a patient to take it easy or to take their medication so that will unlock a whole new way of doing things and delivering services to communities and to individuals. Third, I think we have always said it is important to police the cyber highway so cyber security remains on the agenda and the member states are keen to discuss and ITU has worked on a cyber security index and I think that is going to be quite interesting this afternoon alone we have got an information session which is going to deal with that and we would like to make sure that people are free to use the information highway but it has to be secured money laundering, pornography and other ills that we have got to stop the other thing is it is useless to have the best technology you may have without building capacity so institutional capacity building and also human capacity building are critical elements and we are going to be focusing on that imagine telecommunications, climate change, mitigation and adaptation e-west management those are some of the topics that are repeatedly coming up and in the future we will be looking at those thank you very much indeed for being with us today that was very comprehensive and very useful indeed it has been a pleasure for me too thank you and thank you for watching