 Welcome to the ITU's plenipotentiary conference here in Busan, South Korea. I'm delighted to be with my colleague, Mr. Cosmos Zava-Zava, who's Chief of the Department for Projects and Knowledge Management with the ITU's Development Bureau. Within that department, we have a division dealing with emergency communications and as such, Cosmos has been designated by the ITU's Secretary-General to be the ITU focal point to support the international community's response to the Ebola crisis. Cosmos, you're very welcome. Thank you, Paul, for having me here. Now, here at the plenipotentiary conference, the Secretary-General took the initiative to call a special meeting, a brainstorming and consultative meeting with the membership to see how we can better leverage ICTs to support the international response to the Ebola crisis. Can you tell us a little bit, please, about the outcomes from this meeting? You know, we are in a period of mourning. We have lost many lives. Around 5,000 people have died after transmissions. It took an effect in many countries. This is, in fact, the first time that so many countries have been affected by the Ebola disease. And we have over 10,000 people who have been confirmed to have been affected by the same disease. And the international community is in a period of mourning because this disease respects no borders. And the only thing that we can congratulate ourselves is that we have very high penetration of telecommunications resources, mobile cellular, and also internet in most of those countries that were affected. Traditionally, most of them are listed developed countries and normally the penetration level was very low. So access was a big issue. But the international community is, of course, leveraging the availability of telecommunications resources at the moment. So it's important for us to make sure that we keep strengthening that element in order for us to assist humanitarian actors to do their job. And from the brainstorming meeting that happened, what were the sort of ideas that were coming? What were the sort of commitments that were delivered as an outcome of this meeting? We were overwhelmed. We called the meeting, it should be noticed, but the room had so many high-level government officials, from ministers, director-general, and to other delegations and ambassadors present. And they were very active. We had scheduled the meeting to take only one hour, but it ended up coming to almost two hours. And the views expressed by the membership were mostly humbling. We were really very happy to see the commitment that countries have across. And in fact, this is another evidence that this disease is a global threat. And everybody from the Americas to Asia Pacific to Africa to Europe expressed their commitment to work with the rest of the international community to strengthen efforts for eradicating and also mitigating the impact of this disease. So during the brainstorming session, we got a lot of commitment from countries, regulators being critical because they are the ones who put in place an appropriate regulatory framework to allow the usage or easy usage of telecommunications resources and infrastructure on the ground, private sector, because that is very critical. And we were actually very pleased that people like the internet community, as well as GSMA, most of the operators, also are members of GSMA, committed to work with us and forge some kind of partnership and make sure that humanitarian actors, victims of the disaster, relatives of those affected, government agencies were all ready to intervene and assist wherever possible and with whatever means. I know that one of the issues, which has arisen in the last number of weeks, has been calls to ITU to help facilitate access to call data records. Call data records, of course, can help medical researchers and responders to track and contain and better respond to the fight against the Ebola crisis. But what concretely can ITU do to help facilitate access to call data records? The answer is simple, Paul. A lot. ITU is a member-driven organization. We have 193 member states of which the regulatory authorities are part of. And then we also have over 770 private sector members, many of whom are operators. So every year we meet with our membership with regards to regulators. This year we met in Bahrain and next year we'll meet in Gabon to discuss burning issues that arise. And one of the key issues is big data. What you are talking about is the release of data. When we release such data related to individuals or users who should have their privacy protected, we should be very careful and also we have to strike a balance between compromising people's personal information and releasing the data for public protection. What we can tell you is that we got a lot of commitment from the ambassadors, the ministers, the director general of regulatory authorities and the other delegates. During the time when we met, I recall that one of the delegates actually said, please don't say that we are refused the data because you never asked for it. In those countries where data was asked for, it was provided. And we know national authorities are also very careful about the issue of privacy. And what they are doing basically is that they are releasing chunks of data just to show the mobility of people, where are the people, where are they going, where are the help senders without ascribing the names to the numbers. So we are using that and we are encouraging countries to do that. And the secretary general was encouraging governments to take any action that they deemed appropriate to make sure that the health workers can have the information they need. As you know, the tricky part is that it takes about 21 days as an incubation period for the disease to emerge. So it's important to know which people traveled where. For example, when you are flying from one country to the other, you sit next to a passenger. It is important to know where the person was sitting and with whom they were sitting, on what flight and to what destination. And that alone, the government officials who are privy to that kind of data can process and be able to track and inform individuals without publicizing the names of the person's consent. But you know when antennas or a mass for cellular mobile record the presence of an individual who looks in when they are roaming or traveling, we get a lot of data out of that. And it is important to capture that data and to use it but use it responsibly because we have a duty to protect the individual privacy. And finally, Cosmos, may I ask, I know that ITU has been active since the beginning of the crisis and has responded already to requests from affected countries in West Africa. Can you summarize for us the types of activities and support that ITU is already providing? ITU has been working for many years, in fact now over a century, to preserve and protect human life. Our constitution is very clear. Article 42 says we should use telecommunications resources to protect life on land, at sea and in the air. This is why we have covered many countries in all the regions to try and prepare people better for natural disasters and other forms of disasters to set up early warning systems and to respond effectively to disasters when they eventually strike. This is but one of such cases. ITU immediately after the outbreak of the epidemic engaged its membership. We have been discussing and fortunate for us, telecommunication penetration levels are very high now and there is almost close to universal access in many of the countries. Cellular networks, as you know, we have in terms of cellular subscribers over 7 billion people we have access. And what we try to use is to leverage that technology and use it. So people have been using it. Many of the humanitarian actors on the ground are using what ITU has managed with this industry to produce. So I can say that was our first intervention. The second one is that we engage those countries that were affected and are affected. And what we did was we deployed some telecommunications resources, satellite terminals, which they can use, some for data and for voice as well. So we have been engaging with them. And we are also looking at mobilizing resources, an appeal to raise money so that we can help those regions where there is no connectivity to have connectivity. And when we have that kind of connectivity, we can then use it to alert people or to prepare people information dissemination for alerting and also for better preparedness and then for them to respond to humanitarian actors to communicate between themselves so that they can coordinate their operation for food distribution, for shelter, for medicines, and for whatever means they need to. So ITU is right in the middle of it. And we have also been working on producing some applications that are easy. Some of them are high-tech for smartphones and others are low-tech for the ordinary mobile unit that people or individuals in developing countries can use. Cosmos, thank you very much for joining us. And we look forward to following up on this very grave challenge that everybody's facing and fantastic to hear about all the partnerships that are developing and the focus that's there to really support the crisis, the response to the crisis in West Africa. Thank you very much. Thank you for inviting me.