 Rwy'n credu bod hynny'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'r unrhyw gwaith eich gwirionedd ar y gynnwysau cyflunio rhaid yma eu dynnu'n gwybod o'r Ffwllgor Llinegarol. Ymgyrch yn gwneud y gweithio, mae'n rhan o'n 175 oes o perioedd, o'r gweithio lleolion yng Nghymru, o'r unrhyw o'r bod yn gweithio'r gweithio'n gyfeithio'r cyffredinol, My name is Carolyn Keenan, and I'm your moderator for this session. I've been involved in entrepreneurship and innovation in higher education in the UK for the last 80 years, and I'm probably a super forward to be involved today. So the ITU Innovation Challenge winners that we're going to meet today have gone through an incredible journey, and one of which I've been involved in a small part in being one of the mentors, and it's been fantastic to get to know them and to hear more about their truly innovative ideas. After winning the challenge, they participated in an intense week-long bootcamp which was jam-packed with sessions on creating sustainable innovation ecosystems. They were learning how to refine their idea and, of course, the importance of storytelling in their pitch, which we will be in spades today. They all recorded their two-minute video pitch with the support of their mentors and submitted this film to you, the audience, to those during the forum. So today we are delighted to be watching the seven most voted for pitches. The criteria used to shortlist the ones that we're seeing today was three, and it was the potential for funding, whether it was an impactful solution in the age of COVID-19, and whether there is the ability for it to be replicated. So you're going to see seven videos in the next hour, and I'm delighted to be joined by the jury of experts who will select the best three from the pitches that we see, and those three will be announced in the awards ceremony this afternoon. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce the mentors of the jury that you can obviously see up there on the screen. So I did say hello to Sylvia Hull, Barbara Lawrenceon, Norman Shrepple, Sophie Asitum, and I'm not sure whether we've been joined by those yet. You may be joining us in a little while. So hello to everybody. An unenviable task, I think, that we've got today. So the way the session is going to work is that each shortlisted pitch will be played, the two-minute video will be played, and then the jury have the opportunity to ask questions of each of the entrepreneur that's pitching. Before we get underway, I'd just like to say huge thank you to all the participants, all the mentors, all the ITU challenge winners, and also the organisers in the background without whom none of this would be possible. So yeah, huge thank you to everybody who has made this such a fantastic event. So we are now turned to the first pitch. So I'm delighted to invite, or we'll see the video for Health Tech Lab by Ivana Kostic from Serbia. Hello from Belgrade, Serbia. My name is Ivana. Have you heard about the glove for the blind and visually impaired people, which can help them with more than 10 different functions, some of them being recognizing the colours or seeing the bus number or moving around freely? So this is just one of more than 60 innovations coming from Health Tech Ecosystem of Serbia supported by Health Tech Lab. Health Tech Lab is the first Health Tech ecosystem of the developing countries such as Serbia. In the near future we'd like to see more of these innovations coming from other developing countries of Asia, Africa and South America. Currently there is a huge inequality gap in terms of developing countries being able to develop their own Health Tech innovations. But we would like to develop a global network of Health Tech ecosystems of developing countries being supported by Health Tech ecosystems of developed countries of UK, US and Israel. Furthermore there is a huge brain drain, around 10% in developing countries which could be cured only by boosting local development. Health Tech Lab is inviting all interested partners to develop their own Health Tech Lab chapters in their own regions as well as all other members of international organizations such as UN, World Health Organization, Gates Foundation and many others who would like to support us and bring this global network into reality. Thank you. Barbara, did you like to say a question? I did raise my hand, I wasn't sure you were saying it. Sorry, sorry. Sophie's mouth is moving but no sound was coming out. Okay, no, Barbara. Thank you, congratulations Ivana for this beautiful pitch and presentation. My question is, I am wondering how do you see the leadership of your lab? Because it's a beautiful idea but everyone will want to be part of it and what will be the selection? Can everyone join and can be everyone leader? So I'm just a bit curious about the feasibility and the leadership issues that may arise from this. Is my question clear? Yes, yes. Thank you so much first for the opportunity and then answering your question. The idea is to create Health Tech Lab chapters, local chapters. We already have as Health Tech Lab Serbia and as the originating Health Tech Lab ecosystem specific documentation and guidelines and know how that we would deliver to the local chapter and so we would like to have a specific person from local Health Tech Lab chapter that would be the leader that would then manage and that knows the whole situation that would gather the all interested parties of the ecosystem that we would suggest that should be there. And considering the person who should be the local leader of the local chapter we would suggest someone who is not directly involved either in government or medical system or entrepreneur, but it's interesting in building the local ecosystem just in order to be independent and to be able actually to communicate with all these parties because we would have different organisations with different logistics and focuses and you know it's good to be someone who is communicative enough and willing and motivated to actually build the local Health Tech ecosystem. I hope this answers your question. Hi Ivana. Hello. Hi now you're hearing me good. Congratulations on your very noble and ambitious goal. I have a couple of questions. The first is how do you sustain yourself? How do you make sure all the people that work on that project are paid for it or are they all volunteer? And how do you engage other outside of your local place right now in Serbia so that they join you? How do you enthase them to join your cause? So the first part of the question, first it was volunteering from my side and from side of co-founder Damian definitely but we're now building membership and sponsorship packages so basically we have the members that are startups and all other parts of the community and also a sponsorship out of health and tech companies that are already developed and that would like to invest in development of innovative ideas in our ecosystem and we would definitely suggest that model for all other ecosystems but it would be also great to have support of international organisations that could additionally support this global network so we do have a model that is functioning here and that we would suggest to other chapters but it would be great definitely to have additional support. And about the motivation, it's up to now. We have partners that will develop health and tech club in the region of the western Balkans and also contacts in Ghana and Washington DC and Ukraine that are ready to do it let's say tomorrow and all of them are inspired by their own challenges in their own local ecosystems and actually they require specific guidelines and mentorship and to further develop and support innovations that are there and they're happening but they're on their own and they would probably just disappear or go into some other developing country to be used and developed. So I think by involving other members or motivated entrepreneurs from other countries and showing our results and everything that we have done that they're inspired to actually develop it locally and in their own countries. Thank you. Thanks, Yvanna, and yeah, Norman has a question. Yes. Thank you, Yvanna, for the great idea. One question on... Basically the knowledge it will be circulating in the network, the clubs itself as we know that health techs or digital health is actually not really a problem about health because there are so many great ideas. It's more on integrating this in awfully complex health systems. So my question is a little bit kind of who comes together in the clubs. You were saying it, but maybe you can say a bit more on that to make sure we don't have to just detect but everything else that is necessary to make the tech something meaningful. So maybe you can elaborate two, three sentences on this, thank you. Yes. So our ecosystem, can I just confirm that that is the question to explain a little bit better about who comes into our ecosystem. So what we do, Damian is another co-founder that is not here today with me, but he's always supportive about everything we do and he's a patient and he was for a long time the president of the patient associations of Serbia. So we also include patients in our events, hackathons and they're always at the center of everything that we are doing and of our ecosystem. So together with startups, patient associations and patients are actually in the middle of our ecosystem because we would like to include them in almost all the decisions and startups are there actually to resolve thanks to different technologies, the challenges of patients and citizens. And then out of that we include the government that we have tight collaboration with for all the policies and changes that need to be made in order for these innovative ideas to get to the patients and to the market. Then we also have funders from different stages and involved in different ways. Then definitely companies, health and tech that we also interact in different ways with medical systems of social and medical care and also collaborators from, let's say, incubation and acceleration programs from Serbia locally and internationally that can actually further support mentoring all the ideas and startups. OK, thank you Ivana, that's really interesting and I think really comprehensive answers to the questions there. So I think now we're going to move on to our next video. OK, thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, we're going to see next video from India, but the idea from Indonesia. It's never easy to speak up about your harassment story publicly when I'm hoping that my story can inspire you to end the culture of humiliation. My name is Agita and I was affected by harassment. For years I've been working abroad, I was humiliated, discriminated. I was cyber bullied by the whole entire cork is in my office and not even my HR department able to help me. I lost everything. I lost my job. I had a mental breakdown and not even once I had a suicidal thought. So I went back to my home country, Indonesia and I realized there are over 83 million people exactly experiencing the same thing as I did. Online abuse. Operasmen doing working from home. Domestic violence way increased since the COVID-19 over 300% within just three months. So this is what motivated me to finally build bullied Indonesia. The online platform can help you if you're a victim of online abuse or domestic violence to connect you instantly with licence and accredited psychologists and lawyers. We've been suffering in silence for years and we need your help more than ever. So please help us and let's save more life. Thank you, Agita. Is there a jury that would like to ask a question first? Sylvia, would you like to ask as you did last time? It's good that we take turns a bit. Thank you very much for that presentation and that video. May I explain a bit more? This idea is focused only on your country what will be the impact in your country by using this app and this is also something that we plan to scale up and maybe how you also think you can make it sustainable. Sylvia for the questions and it's really delighted to be in here. So let me begin, I think, with the statistic of how many basically in Indonesia who's experiencing online abuse itself we have about 83 million people. In total Indonesia itself have about 294 million people. And in terms of the mental health and having a depression itself we have about 17 million who are not getting the right mental health care so far. So obviously we started in Indonesia since psychologists and lawyers obviously have limitations in terms of jurisdictions to basically counselling someone who is a foreigner. The idea of bully Indonesia is an online platform where people are basically able to get help at the moment when they need it. So there is a mental stigma in Indonesia where people are basically not being able to see it as a psychologist. Secondly people do not want it to meet the lawyer because they have no idea how much money they will spend. And it's very common Indonesia to know that whenever you go to the lawyer you have to spend a certain amount of money. So with this online platform basically people will know to whom they want to speak to and what kind of help they're basically required for the cases and then how much basically money they have to spend or even a time. So the idea is very simple this online platform is able to connect the victims or the users to the psychologist and lawyers. They have basically an option to choose either they want to speak with a psychologist alone or they want to speak with a lawyer alone. In the same time we have different options of basically how we would like to sustain our idea. The first one we stay for free obviously for everyone who needed and everyone who's basically not being able in the long run counseling and therapies. And that's going to be handled by the trained volunteers. The trained volunteers themselves who are the students in the last semester of their study with a background of psychology and law whether we train them and then we provide them with recommendation letter and the certificate in the end. So they will be providing a free counseling by the live chat only by text. Second one basically for business to clients so the B2C part and that's going to be handled by the licensed psychologist and licensed lawyer. And how it works is every single counseling it takes 60 minutes and the psychologist and basically the lawyer have an option whether they want to deliver with text audio and video everything integrated with our platform and we as a bully Indonesia we take the transaction fees. Now secondly for the business to business so what we provide is not just the platform for the employees or the students to be able to enjoy the privilege for getting the psychologists and lawyers for free but they also we provide with the anonymous reporting platform where we understand that there's a lot of a sexual harassment done and happened at the workplace or even in the university one of the issue is the victims not being able to share it to the HR department or probably with the teachers. Now with the reporting platform that we built the victims can always take anonymous so it comes from our end and it will be directed to the HR department or the lecturer in the university so this is for the bundle that we providing for the company. Any other questions? Sophia Hello Hi Sophia I really commend you on your bravery and courage and I wanted to help out people so that they do not go through what you went through it's really admirable so kudos for that. Now I understood that from a business standpoint you charge fees to the psychologist and lawyers to whom you bring business, am I right? Not particularly, so basically we charge the fees through the users or in here probably basically we because we have a different kind of in-house psychologists and lawyers with a different experience so obviously it is not right for us to label their own price for the counseling so they have their own basically flexibility to quote how much that they will charge for counseling meaning for 60 minutes. So we charge to every single transaction that done through our platform. Do they pay through your platform? No, they pay them through the platform. OK Now how how do you advertise? How do you make sure victims know you exist? How do you grow? Are you big? Are you small? What's the trend? Yes, we started in May 2020 and then one of the strategy we use is basically instead of obviously building or growing our own community because we're very, very small at that moment so we partner with the mental health clinics, we partner with a law firm, we partner with the mental health organisations, communities NGOs and even a government who already have an established followers or even the community. So we already working very close to it National Cybercrime Agency in Indonesia that's for the law perspective and then we also have been working with Ministry of Women Empowerment and Children Protection in Indonesia so we've been invited to basically have the platform for us to speak about our platform and among that we have already about 90 plus partners and that's arranges from media NGOs as well as university schools and and community community kind of like an NGO youth. Yeah. Alright, thank you. Last one How many users have gone through your platform already? How many victims? And do you have a WhatsApp number that people can text or a phone number directly that they can call? Yes, so we do have a WhatsApp number and then for the past three months we've been providing about 207 cases and for in total including with our awareness and activities we've been providing about 25,000 beneficiaries in total. Thank you. Barbara, do you have a question? I think I had the answer through the Sophie's question and response so thank you very much. That's great. Thank you. So thanks very much Agita and I think now we will be moving on to our next video and this is Tafazo from Zimbabwe telling us about Agro. My name is Tafazo. I grew up in a household that relied on farming on a three hectare plot in Naughton where our family was caught up in what is known as the small water farmer trap where we would spend all the money from the last season to buy new inputs for this season we spent countless hours in the field and suffer highway stages of farming inputs to our produce which left us with a poudre harvest and negligible profits that barely sustain us. Statistically speaking each farming cycle would lose 30% of the inputs that include land, water and fertilisers due to lack of knowledge unguided farming and practicing ancient farming techniques using predated methods and farming tools each harvest we also lost 40% of the produce due to rotting and lack of proper storage facilities before it even reached the consumer. Inefficient agricultural supply chains led us to sell our produce to the middlemen at lower prices hence a loss. Compounded by these problems we barely tend in a profit each cycle and hence we could not purchase more land or machinery hence we did not have collateral that led us to be called unbankable by the traditional funding system such as agricultural banks hence we could not access funding. As you realise you tripped in a vicious cycle of poverty without financing suffering heavy losses without new technology and using predated methods. With time I gradually realised that 7.1 million smallholder farmers in Zimbabwe and over 300 million smallholder farmers in Africa since faced similar problems. It became more of a personal mission for me to solve this problem and that's how agro was brought. It is for them to access a self-serviced agricultural platform to bridge the agro sector. Agro is for smallholder farmers like my family I like to be able to access debt free funding to be able to get predictive and reliable markets to extend their shelf life and to have access to smart agricultural solutions to ensure maximum productivity and zero wastage in the agro supply chain. Help me make a difference and help me ensure that these smallholder farmers do not fall into similar traps like we did with your investment and this disruptive idea of personalised agricultural landscape. Brilliant, thank you. Very passionate pitch there. Who would like to... Norman, do you have a question? Thanks for the pitch. Sounds like a great idea. Now coming from a bit kind of international collaboration I know there's a lot of donors working on very similar topics so my question to you would be did you study the analysis in that space and what will you do better in terms of the other platforms the other solutions that have been already proposed so maybe if you have done some benchmarking or look at your competitive advantages in terms of other players who are in that field. Alright, thank you for that question. So starting with the competitive advantage well if you realise that there are lots of jobs that are focusing on these problems are merely just being another middleman they're going to take the produce from the farmer then resell it at a higher price to other consumers what we're doing is creating a digital platform where farmers put their own price put their own quantity what they want to sell and the person can buy directly from the farmer we are responsible for the logistics then also pertaining to that we offer a wholesome solution where we hope the farmer get access to smart precision farming technology through renting and farmer input schemes where as a community they can rent a drone or new farm system such as saw sensors as a community which lessens the price for them then also when it comes to rotting and wastage of produce we also offer upscaling of the produce where we dry it using solar dryers or we freeze it then we package then we sell it for them so we're offering a wholesome service compared to targeting one problem at a time which becomes a problem for them. Thank you. Thank you very much for this proposal I just wanted to understand is your idea already have you already put into practice have you already worked with some farmers tried it out and see if this has been useful for them and also how do you handle the issue about connectivity in the rural areas of Zimbabwe do you have enough connectivity do you do this through a mobile phone or do you do it through a mobile phone or do you do it do you have to go through a laptop is it an easy platform to use? All right so pertaining to that I'm going to start with the ease of access and the accessibility to the farmers in the rural areas so what happens is this platform is accessible through WhatsApp and statistically speaking WhatsApp is accessible to more than three quarters of the Zimbabwe population so they can access through WhatsApp or text services then we guide them through it then when it comes to the traction yes we have started when we started we started in May then since then we have been updating and adding more features to our platform currently we are carrying out a test pilot in Norton and Dombosha which are one of the areas that we are targeting on and we have 107 farmers so far and we have also moved over 20 tonnes of produce and have opened investment for over 20,000 Zimbabwe for farmers in our country Thank you Anyone else have any questions? Barbara Thank you very much It's very nice and interesting and as Norman said there's a lot of things going on in this sector and we understand that for this challenge the idea is to strengthen your ecosystem so we understand how you're going to work with the agricultural ecosystem with the farmers and the suppliers but I haven't really understood how you are working, are you just a startup or are you also working with other digital actors for the supply chain so I'm not sure what is your ecosystem as such Do you understand my question because I understand what you are working who you are working with but are you just standing alone are you just one group of developers or do you work with many other partners in your digital ecosystem for this project Particularly for this project we are a startup so we have a team of eight people that are working on it as an individual group and we also rely on the agricultural extension offices which are from the government which are accessible to everyone I think that's the part that we take on Great Thank you very much Thank you So you don't bring money you don't bring loans to farmers you bring anything else knowledge access to tools access to seeds, is that right Pardon, I didn't get the first part about loans Do you help farmers get loans or do you get them instead of giving money you give the tools that they need to perform better agriculture So what happens is we have three platforms for that the first one gives them access to funding which is not debt funding the traditional loans because they do not have collateral we give them funding through contract farming where we go to a food processor and to tell them we are farmers that can produce let's say 10 tons of tomatoes for you then they give them the funding we provide the knowledge the technology for them to use they submit their projects to the processors that means both of the value chain members are getting value All right, cash advance Yeah, in the subway Okay, good, thank you Thank you very much So next up I think we're going to hear from Zona from Canada and Pakistan on teacher kid make individual life Hi, I am Zainab and I believe every child should have access to education and digital literacy and here is my story of innovation that I call Takmeeth teacher kid make individual life Maria is a young girl 12 years old who lives in a small village almost half a century old Now imagine a place where no internet no electricity no school and no teacher but there is Maria and 50 children like her who need education and are digitally isolated from the world So one and a half year back we reached out to her in her own community and presented a digital learning solution a technology integrated solution with content delivery digital assessments and evaluation based on data analytics and artificial intelligence Do you know what happened in this one and a half year? Maria learned and learned to become the youngest entrepreneur in her own village She dreamed to become first doctor in her village and this year she internationally presented her idea world peace This is just one story I have 1500 more stories from 30 different communities across Pakistan but this is also a reality I have 22 million children in Pakistan and 258 million children across the globe who still need access to education and digital literacy I want my innovation to reach every child without education and digital literacy till there is no child left behind Let's join hands to teach a kid and make a life Join me in this mission and support a dream of Maria and millions of children like her Thank you Thank you Zeynab Such an important issue that you are addressing there Who would like to ask the first question Zeynab Barbara Thank you Wonderful Zeynab It's a very beautiful story I have a very short question How do you handle the language issue with your solution because in many countries because you are very ambitious in many countries the more you go in the country and the more different languages are being used So what is your solution Is that all in English or is that also you using NLPs to have it in other languages So what is your solution for the language barriers and overcoming this barrier Yes and this is the issue that I faced in my country also So what we are doing at the moment is that we are making use of the available resources we have community based facilitators and they speak the native languages and they are the source who are facilitating the whole process in Pakistan we have some content that is being developed in the local languages or the Urdu language, the national language so we are making that available but as we spread our wings in other countries I know this would be a challenge of the language but I think there are some open resources educational resources available in that particular language and we can make use of that so we are not actually developing the content we are making use of the open educational resources and aligning them with the curriculum needs or the learning outcomes they need for their children and starting from basic and then progressing them to the higher learning outcomes So this is what we are doing Sophie Enfos and then Norman Hi Zineb on your endeavor How many children have been taught or are being taught right now and who paid for their education? Yeah So at the moment till now since 2017 I have reached out to 1500 out of school children in 30 different communities across Pakistan different cultures completely rural areas some are the interior communities where there have been no school and some are like terrorism affected areas of Pakistan also and if I talk about the model of funding yes there are two things when I started off I started with the funding from the Pakistani community and the pool of donors in USA in different regions fundraising on annual basis and directing those channels for these kids but now I believe that it's not a sustainable model and I see a product in this technology while I was developing that is the data based evaluation of the students learning outcome and that is a product that can be offered to the students and schools in the established school system now if I offer the schools that yes I have a technology that can tell you through data driven model why your child is performing the way it is performing I can make use of that product and generate a revenue stream and direct it for these children so connecting the children who are in school and those who are not in school through this revenue channel that is my plan and I'm taking a transition towards it now thank you I like it and Norman do you have your question I was wrong thank you there was a kind of being answered now thank you okay great and Sylvia did you have a question as well I think it's fine I think she's been quite accepted thank you okay that's great thank you Zeynab I think you gave such comprehensive answers to the questions there so we'll move on to our next pitch and this is Chidi and he's going to be telling us about publicity four years ago my twin brother made music so I'm told him about an aggregator in the United States that can help him make money out of it he distributed his music with them had huge sales and was so excited unfortunately your platform and other existing aggregators pay royalties via PayPal which here in Africa we do not have access to so you had to go for the alternative payment method which was check two months down the line the check never came he reached out to the platform to know why and that's when they discovered that somebody in Oslo, Norway intercepted his check used the fake ID and took his money and my twin was devastated a year later he said to me I'm not the only African creative that has gone through this kind of problem why don't we create a platform that solves this kind of problem for African creatives and publicity of the sport hello everybody I'm Chidi Wogel and I'm co-founder and CEO of Publisher a platform that has helped over 6,000 African writers musicians, filmmakers and video game developers typically those from low income and disadvantaged communities to aim over $240,000 in revenue from their ebooks audiobooks, short and feature films music videos, digital music and video games thanks to our partnership with the International Publishers Association and the International Publishing Distribution Association our services have no charge but we take 25% of the revenue we generate for them and this goes back into helping more creatives and creating a self-sustaining company every day we discover local African talent and we give them a platform to do what they love doing the most while we handle the business of transforming that creativity into work for them joining us as we empower the African continent and simultaneously change the African narrative by promoting the beautiful culture and heritage of the African people to the rest of the world one continent at a time thank you thank you Chidi great pitch I like the movement in the pitch you should have had some music in the background OK who would like to ask the first question Sylvia thank you very much thank you that was a very good pitch and I just want to better understand because you already mentioned revenue and that you have around 6,000 artists that are using your platform who are you selling to who is it in the African continent or are you also scaling up and being able to offer these products in other markets so just to understand the market opportunities here and thank you for the question so we sell to everybody we sell outside Africa and we sell within Africa we have 413 partner stores this includes local and international stores we partner with Amazon Bensonobyl I-Tunes I-Flakes and Hulu TV we partner with 413 stores and also in Africa we partner with Habari Okada Books and Spinlet so we distribute to these platforms because they are well established and hundreds of thousands of people are constantly using these platforms to discover new content and so what we do the entire process is very simple once we get a content from the creative we fine tune the content industry standard this includes book editing music remastering and so that we do that so that they can compete on a global scale then we distribute it to our partner stores which receive millions and billions of views every day and then we aggregate their revenues and these creatives we have a centralized dashboard where they monitor their sales across all these platforms so they can know where they are performing best and where they are not performing good and then I would get their revenue and pay it into their local bank accounts or into their mobile money wallets for those who don't have bank accounts and so we also have an awful insubmission process because we discover that a number of them don't have internet access so we have a platform where they can submit their content to us without internet just using things like a hard disk or just sending it to us via SMS so this way we are able to also reach out to people that are not that are in remote villages and just able to help them in living from their creative content here Barbara Yes Thank you Chidi You've made a wonderful pitch and it seems that we don't even see any problem in your solution it's like just wonderful and so many opportunities so now I would like to ask you the question if you had to pick just one challenge that you think could make you fail in your proposal what is it and how do you address it because I'm sure on a daily basis you're facing obstacles right but it's not that beautiful there must be challenges so you can just pick one Yes so we're company like every other and we have challenges when we first started the company the first challenge we had was low sales and we discovered that the reason why we had low sales while starting out was because a lot of the content that we were distributing were being returned back to us and the reason was poor quality first before distribution and that gave that challenge but now we have another challenge which is piracy we discovered that some of the content that we distribute other people are distributing this content illegally and so we also we partnered with Google Play in 2018 and part of the partnership was to fulfil its publishing request in Africa and with that connection we were able to reach out to them and ask them if they can help us to support us to be able to track where our content are that we do not we don't know about and so we've been able to also be able to find out where our content are that we don't know about and we are able to mitigate this challenge but however we still have a loophole because we discovered that not all content are on Google Play that are also on other platforms we have content on Amazon that are not on Google Play and so we still have some piracy issues on Spotify and other places and so we manually at the moment we are manually figuring out how we are going to find where all these places are but at the moment we have been able to reduce it by over 70% because Google Play has a lot of content Thank you Any other questions Tofa Tiri? Oh, Norman Just very quickly I love the idea What would you say is your market the kind of content of the market of the content here is this kind of platforms that are mostly finding the market in Europe and North America or is this kind of particular platforms actually targeting an African market because I think it's very different if you try to bring content to local market or regional market or to global one so just to clarify do you feel like it's the big platforms that basically operate in Europe or North America or is it more like regional or African platform you are working with? So like I said earlier we have 413 partners stores and some of them are local stores and some of them are international stores and when I say local stores I mean that they are owned by Africans like Boom Play and when I say international we have Amazon, they are owned by Western companies so we distribute to all of these stores because we discovered that it's kind of international we also have Nigerian music played in all parts of Africa when I travel outside of Africa I hear Nigerian music when I travel to Kenya and other parts of Africa I hear Nigerian music so we distribute to all these stores however we only target 5 countries at the moment so when we say we only target 5 countries this means that we only receive content from these countries so we are working with creatives when I say creative I mean writers musicians, filmmakers and video game developers we are working with those from Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya South Africa and Egypt and the reason why we are doing this is so that we can give them quality service because we don't only do distribution we also do other services like content protection we protect their work from intellectual property theft and illegal distribution and the only way we can do this is when we have a close connection in their country to be able to copyright their content and give them that really strong service that is the reason why we only work with these 5 countries we are ready to take the world before the COVID-19, we are about to expand further parts of Africa especially in France speaking countries but with the COVID-19, we couldn't expand because it needed us to have physical travels but once the pandemic is over hopefully very soon we intend to expand to other parts of Africa especially France speaking Africa and maybe to other parts of the world like in India and the Philippines and other markets outside of Africa Thank you, thanks to you very much, and I think now we're moving on to our next person, but I'm not sure whether we need to go on to a new Zoom now or will we watch this one on here? You can keep going, we have created another Zoom for the next session. Okay, fantastic. So we're going to hear from Neela, I think from Bangladesh, about her project Women in Digital. In 2009, I worked at a software team, I remember, I received an email from my boss. They had given me a salary increment when I was expecting for a promotion. I asked my boss why I didn't get the promotion. He replied, it's a software company and we are not promoting women here. It's a 24x7 service company and women are not able to stay at night in office. I was shocked. I believe technology does not have any gender. Gender inequality is not just a problem in Bangladesh, it's a common situation in all over the world. I am actually a founder of women in digital and I wanted to solve this problem. I made an ecosystem where women teach, women run, women own and take social enterprise. Yes, I'm talking about women in digital run managed by 100% more. Our main motto is women empowerment for technology and we are ensuring their financial empowerment for technology. We are working in urban areas and at the same time we are working in rural areas. The last seven years, we have 10, almost 10,000 women and most of them have been contributing in our digital economy. We have arranged national health comfort women first time in Bangladesh even in South Asia. We have launched our initiative in Nepal and now we are planning to launch in other South Asian countries and all over the world. So support us in our mission to empower more women in technology and choose women in digital as the I2 challenge 2020 will be done. Thank you. Thanks, that was a really interesting video. Sylvia, would you like to ask the first question? You can further go into more detail how you feel that you want to empower more women. Is that to be clarified a bit more and how do you plan to, is it something that you already are working on? How many women have you already engaged with and how many you have been able to help? Thank you Sylvia for the questions. In 2013, I have taken this initiative in Bangladesh because I am myself a company engineer and I do the programming things. And when I join a multinational company in that time, I get one problem. So they are trying to dominate me always and they are this way to join the testing team or the design team. In that time, I feel why I will join the testing team or the design team because I am a programmer. So I want to do some coding over there and I want to make some software for them. So, but they are insisting me to join over different program because they suggest me actually women are not able to code. So now you are new, that's why you are interested to do some coding. But for the long run, you are not able to go a long way. So you should stop here and take your career on designing or testing teams. So I feel I am not able to take their decision because I love something coding. So I did not take, I take it very seriously and I promise I will complete my job cycle like I was joined as a junior software engineer and I completed the CTO. And then I take my initiative in Bangladesh and initially I start teaching some girls in my home and then I give them some outsourcing work. And I say one thing, so when I teach them and I believe one thing, so for coding, you who don't need to learn or complete the career engineering thing. So if I teach someone and they can learn it immediately within eight months, we can get a result and they can earn. So I believe we can do women empowerment when they are financially empowered. And I, as a media, I choose technology so I teach them and then they are start working in my team. So initially we launched a digital agency. In that time we are working for international market and in that time I face one common problem. Women are not interested to come in my agency because all our women and they feel afraid that they are able to do the coding things and all those things. So then I start, I launch a technical schools in one urban area and I start teaching the coding. And then they are, they learn from my schools and they are working in my team. And when they learn and in the same time they can earn, then they feel more interest to join in my team. And then I started in Dhaka in the capital of Bangladesh, then I started working in the rural area also. So we are going one area and we are in the workshop and we pick one or two community leads. And we teach them initially training for teachers. And after that the girls, they are collecting other girls from her community and they teach them. And that is the way we are teaching our own community and they are working in our team. So we are working in the international client and we connecting those who are graduates from our institute. They are immediately working in our team and those ones actually we are not able to afford everyone. So we promote them in different software companies. So that is the way we are actually running our business and we are working in the women in technology and we are bringing more women in tech. And we are trying, we are replicating this model in Nepal also now. So it's the first stage of our initiative in Nepal. Thank you. Any other questions? Yes, just one quick question. Hello and congrats on your initiative. How many girls have you trained so far and who pays for that? Thank you Sophia for the questions. We have trained almost 10,000 women in all over Bangladesh. So initially actually I am trying to use my own money but that is actually really difficult for me because it's a very big model and I cannot afford everyone. So we just start taking donation from some international organization like we have a complete one project with Bill Gates Foundation. We have a partnership with British Council. We have a partnership with Microsoft. So for the training purpose we take help from them. And for work purpose we are promoting them, the graduate students to the different multinational companies and local companies. So that is where we are working. And we are also sharing some part of our profit for the education, the women education. Great, thank you. OK, so now I think we will move to our final pitch of this session. And it's later from Amman with Smart City Ambassador. Thank you everyone. Thank you Ojiya. That is technology. There had to be one, didn't there? Yeah, we always have such cases. Yeah, sharing with yours. Yeah, maybe because you want to hear my voice first before my video. Yeah, probably. We'll see how they get on, hopefully they can rectify the issue. Otherwise I'm sure you know your pitch by heart. So you can go live. Sure, why not? Is that OK with you Layla or do you want me to? I'm trying to find the YouTube video. It's OK. I'm going to wait you and it's a little bit complicated. I can't go live. No words at all. All right. If you want to go live, you can go ahead. All right. Shall I go live? Yes, I think so Layla. That's OK with you. All right. OK. My name is Layla and I'm from Oman. And if you don't know Oman, I hope that you are going to open Google Maps where is my country. And the idea of Smart City Ambassador started, you know, and I'm always encouraging everyone that you have to go and check the Google Map where is the Oman and how it's located. We have a very long course from the north to the south. And when we started Smart City Ambassador, I was having a critical challenge. And the challenge was, will we be able to work in the awareness and the building capacity for smart cities around Oman because we were based in Oman, in Moscow, the capital of Oman. So it was really challenging. Even the human resource, there was a challenge in the human resource because mainly only four people not dedicated for the Smart City platform were having like working as a part-time job. So it was really challenging. So we said, how can we be able to reach everyone? Because everyone at the start is just Moscow, the Smart City, but about us. How can you reach us? And also the idea was also related to the pain that all of us as a country in 2016, most of the countries, it collapsed financially. And we used the regulatory transformation to provide a lot of training. It was a lecture evening training. And suddenly we stopped because there was no money. So should we stop because there's no money? So the idea is saying, why not empowering our own community to have our own ambassadors who can work with us and we can also work with them. And the best thing about it as a smart ecosystem, they are working with us as volunteers. Everyone will say, how will you get benefit from it? They get benefit from it because we are also marketing from them and we are also creating our own database as Smart City ambassadors and also what is based on this ecosystem. It can be applied in any organisation, in any country. All what you have to do is your own human resource in your organisation and social media is very important because one of the social media is also part of the chain management if you want to market for any community. So that is power of the community of practice in Smart City ambassadors that can be adapted in any country. And thanks all. Thank you. I've just got a quick question actually to start with. So could you just maybe give us a little bit more detail of what exactly the ambassadors would do if you recruited them? The ambassadors are going first to deliver awareness sessions in different emerging technologies and when we started that we started in different technologies but we decided to start for each technology in each one because when you speak about emerging technologies everyone they will get the term emerging technologies but then they will forget about it. So we focus in the first month it was about blockchain and we got only six ambassadors in three cities around Oman and we say that is a success for us because the beginning is always challenging. The next month we got ten ambassadors in more than five cities talking about big data. The next the third month it was about IoT and we get around 22 ambassadors in more than 12 cities around Oman and that was the biggest success for us and we have started to expand around Oman and now we are also expanding globally. We have now seven ambassadors who are joining us from different countries to this awareness to this platform of smart ambassadors and now some organization are getting back to us. For example, recently we have two projects in Oman. One is by the Ministry of Environment and one is by the Ministry of Housing. The Ministry of Environment came to us, we need your help can we get help of your ambassadors because sometimes you are also involving them in knowledge cafes so they can also work as consultants with organization, not just awareness session. So you can see how we expand it, it's not just a matter of delivering and knowledge but they can also deliver the consultancy free of cost. Thank you, that's really pointed a picture for me there. Who else has a question for Leila? Norman, thank you. My question is kind of the authority of the ambassadors, like why are they accepted either by the communities or by those who are doing decisions because that might be crucial in terms of either they are being particularly competent and they know things others don't know or because they are actually very good embedded in the ecosystem they are actually talking to be the community or be it the decision makers. What is your idea that these ambassadors are becoming real ambassadors? We have got in our database more than 700 people registering in our platform but the active ambassadors that we have empowered them because we are also having the social media so whenever there is one ambassador participating with us we market for him through our social media that has encouraged other ambassadors to work from their heart so they can be part and you know some of them they say we are also registered as ambassadors why our photos because if you can see what is my presentation that I have spoke about it two days ago we have the picture of our ambassadors who participated and some of them they say I cannot see my picture I told him because you haven't worked with us till now if you are going to work with us you can have your picture with other ambassadors so that is how we value ambassadors by also marketing for them through our social media and some of them they get also chances so they can represent us and speak in conferences or in different events I hope that they have answered your question Norma and Sophia do you have a question? Yes, many questions again now it's based on volunteer do you have a plan to transition to business or will you stay volunteer based? The best thing that we also you know when you speak about ecosystem you have also to get the support of the financial side and we have the financial sector you know sponsoring the smart city platforms sponsoring the technical which is our website our social media because our social media is run by SME in Oman that's how also we are empowering also the small companies in Oman and the companies we have three companies sponsoring us and it is the Oman Tel which is the first telecommunication company in Oman and we have also Amran it is based on the construction and tourism and the third one is Le Mans it's based on the smart marketing and electricity and so on so not only these, these are the main sponsors but we also have other sponsors when we started nobody come to us but when we started successfully with our ambassadors now everyone is coming to us they say can we collaborate with you so that's how we do it and with our ambassadors they are willing to do it free because they have seen the successful stores of their ambassadors some of them they were you know looking for jobs and when they started sharing their knowledge with us they said you have helped us now people organizations are asking for us to help them or deliver a knowledge session for them and so on so that's how we do it Sylvia I just wanted to because I think I was having a few questions she was answering what do the ambassadors get out of this and I think she's answered this a bit but how do you ensure what type of message the ambassadors and with the work they do is there some quality control that they do ensure that they're really putting out the message that you need and if you say you're even sending them sometimes on speaking engagements how do they fit into the organization for any ambassador we have first to ask from them to provide us with their CV and we have also to do a call interview with them so we can examine these ambassadors and through this and after their session we send a survey link to all the attendees and through that so we can make sure that they have provided a very well content to the stakeholders and that's how it's doing and I'm always saying you know in any country sometimes they are very good for example some of our ambassadors are academia and they never participated outside their academia environment and when they joined us in the smart symposium platform they said you gave us a chance for outside the community so we can provide our help to everyone so most of them they are academia some of them they have SMEs so they can have smart tools so they can market for it and so on so we do it by following up them with these tools that I have I hope that they have answered your question Sylvia Great Well thank you, thanks thanks Leila for writing to the occasion when your pitch in person due to the technical failure I just wanted to thank everybody who's pitched today you've all been amazing and to get to where you are today it's a fantastic achievement I hope you're already proud of yourselves and now we have to go away and have the unenforable task of selecting three of you to be announcers winners but I think truly you are all winners for getting this far in the competition so I'm sure all the other jury members would like to join me and just saying you know well done it's not an easy thing to do and I think you've all done it incredibly well so thank you and that's the end of this session now and obviously as I said at the start the winners will be announced in the awards session this afternoon so you haven't got too long to wait and I'll see you in the next session and I'll see you soon bye