 Greetings to everyone from a very wintry Vancouver. I would like to thank Tian, Guard and Mariana for the invitation to participate in the ICDE UNESCO Policy Forum. And since I can do this virtually, I believe technology will have a major role in shaping the education and learning agenda as we move beyond 2015. Thanks to the growth of mobile telephony, technology is becoming ubiquitous and pervasive. This is a significant change over when we started out with the first set of Millennium Development Goals or MDGs in 2000, when the world was in the grip of a dot-com boom. At that time, technology became part of MDG-8 relating to a global partnership for development. In the post-2015 development agenda, technology is more likely to become cross-cutting across all the goals rather than a separate goal in itself. This is one key difference between 2000 and 2014. The world has changed in several ways. There are one billion more people today than there were in 2000. This has resulted in mass migrations of people from rural to urban areas and from one country to another. Climate change has become a more dire issue than was the case in 2000. And national economies are much more fragile after the global economic crisis. The UN High-Level Panel has identified several goals. One major difference between 2000 and now is that at that time the world aimed to reduce poverty. Now it seeks to not just reduce but to eradicate poverty completely by 2030. And education and learning will be central in this push towards development for all. As we know UNESCO's post-2015 education agenda calls for equitable and quality lifelong learning for all by 2030. Here we note three important elements, a call for equity and inclusion, an emphasis on quality and a shift from universal primary education to lifelong learning. The Edgar IV report spoke of lifelong education in the 70s, while 20 years later the Jacques Delors report made the transition to lifelong learning. In the last four decades we can see the shift to more learner centric approaches and the view that learning can take place in a variety of settings and contexts. The spectrum of lifelong learning includes formal, non-formal and informal sectors. Commonwealth education ministers established an interministerial working group in 2012 to identify the priorities for education in the Commonwealth to feed into the post-2015 development agenda. The working group proposed access, quality and equity as the three overarching goals for education which you will note are very similar to what UNESCO has identified. So in which ways can we as the ODL community contribute to the post-2015 development agenda? Let me look at three different dimensions. One, by promoting the use of open and distance learning and appropriate technologies to achieve development goals. ODL has primarily been used to expand access to formal education. However, more players in development need to be aware of how the use of ODL can support learning in the non-formal and informal sectors as well. ODL is already doing this and has deployed distance learning methodologies to reach illiterate goat herders in India or the Bhattwa community of beekeepers in Uganda just to cite two instances. But we need to scale up these interventions if achieving development for all is to become a reality by 2030. We need to convince major donors that ODL can be an effective means of implementing lifelong learning but we need concrete evidence. More research and data are needed in the non-formal and informal sectors to convince policymakers that ODL can indeed be an effective strategy for promoting development. Two, we can contribute by supporting the establishment of ODL institutions that are relevant to the needs of the 21st century. As countries try to increase access to higher education, more open universities and dual mode providers will emerge in both the public and the private sectors. As you know, Asia has the largest number of open universities and we are likely to see the next wave of growth in Africa. What will be the model of the open university for the 21st century? We know that open universities are built on very sound philosophical principles but will we see a shift from an industrial model of the 20th century to a more connected model for the 21st? Will there be a greater emphasis on lifelong learning and outreach activities in the new model? Will we see a greater linkage between the learner's needs, the ability of the institution to respond to these needs and the requirements of the labour market? New models are emerging in Asia as the Chinese RTVU are making the transition to open universities. The Botswana College of Open and Distance Learning is poised to make a shift from being a college offering secondary education primarily to an open university. Have we studied these emerging developments to define the contours of what might be viable models going forward? Finally, my last point, the emphasis on lifelong learning means that the global community is moving towards creating learning societies. It is important to realise that learning is more than formal education. Stiglitz and Greenwald's recent book, Creating a Learning Society, shows that societies progress when they are clear and I quote, what is to be learned, the process of learning and the determinants of learning, unquote. A learning society can be created not just by developing sound educational policies alone but also by trade, industry and agriculture policies. Stiglitz and Greenwald point out that, and I quote, every government policy has effects, both positive and negative, on learning a fact that policy makers must recognise, unquote. The ODL community cannot work in isolation. It needs to take a holistic approach within the context of developments in society. We have decades of experience in innovations in teaching and learning. How can we continue to reinvent ourselves to contribute to the post-2015 development agenda? I hope these observations and comments will generate some ideas for framing the proposed recommendations and for shaping a collaborative research agenda to promote lifelong learning and development for all. Thank you very much for your kind attention.