 Chairman, Excellencies Heads of Government, Excellencies Ministers, Excellencies Heads of Delegation, Distinguished Delegates, Ladies and Gentlemen, Chairman allow me to observe protocol as already established by distinguished delegates who spoke before me and convey my warm greetings from the government and the people of the Republic of Botswana. The Delegation of the Republic of Botswana to the ITU Planet Potential Conference conveys its hearty gratitude to the government and the people of Romania for the warm reception we have been accorded since our arrival in this historic city of Bucharest. We wish to hear our voice to the many who congratulated you on your appointment as Chairman of the Planet Potential Conference. Coming in the aftermath of the COVID-19, this conference looks up to your stewardship to realise the outcomes that the world eagerly awaits. We have all the confidence that you will meticulously guide the conference through the loaded three weeks agenda. Botswana pledges her unfettered support. Chairman, Botswana is a landlocked country with a territory of 581,730 square kilometres, a population of just over 2.3 million and a population density of 4.1 people per square kilometre. Being landlocked with a sparse population brings about many challenges to the development of the communication sector. Therefore, the theme of the conference, Connect and Unite, offers hope for our plight. Notwithstanding the challenges, I have just articulated, Botswana is making progress in line with the objectives of the ITU regarding universal connectivity and sustainable digital transformation. At policy level, Botswana has put in place ICT supportive legislative instruments, including the Communications Regulator Authority Act of 2012, the Cyber Crime and Computer Related Crimes Act of 2018, Electronic Records Evidence Act of 2014, Electronic Communications and Transaction Act of 2014, and the Data Protection Act of 2018. In 2021, government put in place the National Cybersecurity Strategy, which has amongst others the objectives to enhance collaboration and cooperation on the cybersecurity issues at national, regional and international level. Being implemented the National Cybersecurity Strategy, Botswana worked with the ITU to establish the Communication Sector Computer Incident Response Team, or COMSET. Currently, the country is in the process of establishing a national SERT. Botswana is pursuing a digital transformation and mindset change agenda, which has the objective to engender and mainstream ICTs across all sectors of the economy. Driven by His Excellency, the President, Dr. Mukwezi Eric Yabetsu Masisi, the digital transformation agenda leverages on the initiatives such as Smart Botswana and the Universal Access Service Fund to achieve country-wide meaningful universal broadband connectivity. Smart Botswana initiative mobilizes all required resources to ensure connectivity to all public sector establishments and defines desirable standards to ensure quality connectivity. To this end, government aims at modernizing delivery of public services to the citizenry before 2025. Of paramount importance is a country's ambition to graduate from a middle to high income status through the development of ICT infrastructure to support the digital economy. Efforts to connect all public schools to the Internet and provide ICT gadgets to students are progressing in earnest. Similarly, ICT connectivity is targeted at all public institutions, including health facilities and tribal administration and civic centers, country-wide, particularly in the rural areas. The program in place is to connect more than 500 villages to high-speed networks by 2024. These initiatives are bearing fruits as Botswana boasts of the highest mobile penetration rates in the developing world. The mobile subscription reached 210 percent tele-density as at March 2022, with an equally impressive mobile broadband penetration in access of 2.4 million subscribers as at March 2022. LTE coverage covers 89 percent of the population. At the rate at which we are going, I am confident that Botswana will achieve meaningful universal connectivity by 2024, as pledged during the partner to connect roundtable digital coalition discussions held during the World Telecommunications Development Conference held in Kigali, Rwanda this year. Chairman, our notable progress is not without challenges. Botswana is very much challenged when it comes to availability of relevant local content. Cybercrime threatens to negate the digitalization drive that, as a country, we are pursuing. We are experiencing daily threats aimed at our national critical infrastructure, some of which are successful. Global ICT prices, price increases and limited supply of ICT equipment, occasioned by the advent of COVID-19, has affected the pace at which our digitization trajectory was intended to progress. And finally, transit costs from undersea cables, systems, landing stations are for us a reality that we never forget to highlight. We are therefore looking forward to this conference, whereas as a collective or through bilateral agreements with individual member states, we hope to find possible solutions to some of these challenges. We thank you for the opportunity to share our efforts in the quest to achieve meaningful connectivity for our people and the world at large. I thank you.