 Bismillahirrahmanirrahim, Mr. Malcolm Johnson, Mrs. Lakshmi Puri, the officials from the New York City, City Hall, the Civic Center. We are standing here. Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, a very good evening. It's a matter of immense honor for me, as well as for my country, when I'm receiving this Global Achieve Award. It's been conferred on me by ITU and UN Women. And I'll take it up as not just a recognition, but also a challenge going forward. Thank you, ITU. Thank you, UN Women. This award belongs to the people of Pakistan. And this award belongs to the young girls and women of Pakistan. Today, I stand here as one of the millions of emancipated women of my country who, undoubtedly, provided the right opportunities are capable of rising to any level of success. I attribute this award to my political leadership. I would not have been here if I was not given the confidence and if I was not given the opportunity to deliver from a platform. And I thank my political leadership, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, the Chief Minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, the Finance Minister of Pakistan, Mr. Ishaq Dar, who provided me this platform to deliver on our collective dreams for the people of Pakistan. I would like to acknowledge the efforts and hard work of my team at Ministry of IT and Pakistan Telecommunication Authority, the regulator, who relentlessly pursued the vision and direction for bringing this about. I'm a very hard taskmaster. And sometimes I say, I'm not just carrying a stick with me. But they know there is an unseen stick in my hand all the time. And this would never have been complete. And my this achievement today would not have been possible without the role of my family, my mother, my husband, my children, who are praying for me all the time and basically keeping me encouraged and going. My family members are also sitting here in the audience. And their smiles tell me that even if I can't make a phone call to them all the time, they know that I'm working. And I'm working for the people of my country, wherever I am, however I can. And I know that when you work hard, nothing but success comes after it. There are billions of women who, if provided the right opportunities, have the potential to contribute to the achievement of the ambitious global development agenda. And this global development agenda, the nations have collectively set for themselves. I'm also a firm believer that the ICTs can be the standalone tool and the main catalyst for achievement of all the sustainable development goals that we signed off recently. There is a need now to maximize collaboration and joint working under a strategic global partnership to open up the universe of ICT-powered opportunity that the women of the world have been waiting for and in which they well and truly deserve. Some incremental initiatives that I started work on, this is not something that I thought myself. Over the past two years, the engagement with the global partners like ITU and its purpose-specific fora has been a source of real inspiration for me, particularly in the areas of ICT for girls and women empowerment. In the last two years as a minister, I engage myself heavily with the ITU initiatives and I tell you it is a very strong forum to convert you, even if you were not. But in my case, it was a right-of-way sink-in with the ideology with which I took my role as a minister, reaching out to the underserved and unserved, reaching out to the most disadvantaged and taking out the real potential because potential lies in the hands of both men and women, but particularly bringing them on board the young girls is my aim. My ambition is to have the inclusiveness overcome the digital divide. So during this process, not only have we benefited from global experiences and best practices, we have been able to make initiatives in Pakistan that have gone to help others in this quest. Seeing the young girls at the tech stalls here today, it strengthens my belief that the girls are capable of overcoming all barriers and challenges. People ask me as a minister, do you face challenges? But I tell them there are no challenges, but there's only one thing that I know that men create the challenges and the women overcome them. Find the solutions. And I very successfully do that all the time. So learning from them, my heartiest congratulations to the GemTech Award winners sitting here and the co-global achievers who make me so proud. And it is my firm desire and commitment that Pakistan will continue to participate constructively and contribute positively to all global platforms as a thought leader on the current and upcoming ICT initiatives, and particularly for women empowerment. The recent programs that I've started, my whole thought process goes around the girls and women when I'm sitting in my office, when I'm outside my office, when I'm in the parliament, when I'm thinking about what policy initiatives we are taking. The girls and the women have a share in every single project that I conceive. And I know that in the future also, I will continue to do that. Whether it is a tech city project, whether it's ICT for Girls, where we are teaching coding in cooperation with Microsoft to the most disadvantaged segment through Bethel Mall. And it's very interesting. I want to share the Microsoft story with you. I had conceived this project, and I wanted to do ICT for Girls project. And we had designed it for as one of the initiative was going to the Bethel Malls, where the completely disadvantaged segment of the girls come for learning how to paint and how to cook and learn all those technical skills, but not really technical per se. So the Microsoft team was visiting me, and I said, I'm starting this project. And there is a huge software licensing fee attached to it. So could you help me find out the solution where you could sort of consider giving me a discount on that? So the Microsoft said, what exactly are you doing, minister? I said, I'm trying to develop the coding program for these girls. I want to teach them coding, cloud computing, web designing. And I want to bring these girls into the mainstream too. I don't want them to keep on looking at men to feed them all the time. They have to have that employability potential. They have to have that empowerment that they really and truly deserve. So they said, okay, minister, we could do two Bethel Mall centers with you. I said, that's very nice. What would you do? They said, we will train them. I said, fantastic. But I said, just two. I mean, I am going to do about 150 as one program within the larger scheme. I said, minister, give me 15 minutes. I said, you take your time. They came back within three hours. And the country had said to me that they have taken out their entire CSR from that region. And they will partner with me, do the work and teach coding to the first 50 Bethel Malls, which has a turnaround of 5,000 every six months. So Microsoft came out on their own. I'm grateful to the Microsoft team for starting this project with me. So this is how things work. You think of a cause, you start the process and you will realize that people will join you. And that's the positivity I carry. This is the belief I carry that if you take one step, you go 100 steps in the process. My same goes for the Tech City project. I've put a quota of 30% for girls. And you know, men all the time, they tell me these things that minister, you won't find the girls in technology. You're putting a 30% quota. It's huge. And the moment I start working for girls and the boys start complaining and the men say, oh, but think about the boys also. You're only thinking about the girls. It's 30%. And the rest of the 70 would be boys. But I tell you, my girls are so talented. I know they're capable of even capturing the space from within that 70% as well. But that's how I look at them. And then even in the telecenters, I'm building 500 telecenters about in four, five acres of land. I've kept 50% quota for girls, special 10 computer cure six, just for them to, for e-learning, for learning everything that they possibly would want to do in a secure environment. Because Pakistan, they're all sorts of mindsets. And I want the parents to feel that their daughters are secure when they're going out to do any process of technology. So they have separate units for girls only. So, and then the policy initiatives. We are working on a cyber crime bill and we have put in special provisions for securing girls and children online. And then same goes for other policy initiatives which we are taking in our country. And I can see that going down the road, the way we are spreading the optic fiber cable and providing rural telephony and underserved parts of my country, we will have a more ubiquitous and lesser digital divide as we go ahead. So it's my firm desire and commitment that we continue to work like that as a team. And with this reiteration of our commitment, I would like to once again thank the ITU, the Secretary General, Mr. Hollenzau. He's not here today. And Mr. Malcolm Johnson, thank you very much with every Secretary General, the UN women, for this honor that they have conferred on me. I fully believe that both UN women and ITU will be at the center stage to bring nations together to maximize ICT contribution for achievements of the target set by the Sustainable Development Goals. We have a much bigger role to play. It's not about just goal five. Frankly, I feel that all the 17 goals have ICT as an enabler. And we need to put down the KPIs and indicators and work together to make sure that we can have a yearly review and going forward, we can actually achieve it sooner than 2030. Thank you again, ladies and gentlemen. And thank you.