 Mr. Chaysab Lee, TSP director, the heads of delegation, distinguished ladies and gentlemen. It is indeed an honour to be called upon to deliver the keynote address for this session. And let me commend the standardisation sector of the ITU for bringing us together despite the pandemic to share our experiences on a range of topics around the subject of digital transformation and the role of international standards in realising its full potential. The need to unlock the full potential of digital transformation towards the attainment of the sustainable development goals is a matter of interest and concern to everyone here. And I'm sure we all realise that it's been made even more evident as we strive to recover from the ravages of the pandemic. Since we witnessed how pivotal digital tools have become in the new world that is unfolding before our eyes, and it is clear that without digital technology, none of the sustainable development goals can be attained effectively. Differences in economic growth, sociocultural beliefs and developmental philosophies have played a key role in the way countries and regions of the world have mapped out strategies to achieve their digital transformation. However, in an interconnected world, we have to develop all these initiatives in an interoperable manner and that is why this meeting is so crucial. Uncoordinated or deliberately skewed development of any kind can have dire consequences for whole regions of the world and by extension humanity generally. And one example which comes to mind and one that some in this room may be familiar with is the famous story of the stubbornness of technical barriers, the railway gauge fiasco. For decades, inherited colonial standards and systems have prevented coordinated investment to drive railway interconnectivity across Africa to the point where only 16% of total African trade is amongst African neighbouring countries compared to over 60% within the European Union and over 50% in Asia. The trans-African highway would still not be on the drawing board and logistical connectivity across the continent would not be the most expensive in the world, had railway connectivity not been hampered by different standards across different countries depending on who their colonial masters were or what Manu Karuka calls, and I quote, railroad colonialism. Have any lessons been learned from this and many other examples of hazard development of infrastructure, applications and systems, be it physical or digital around the less developed parts of our connected world. The ITU undoubtedly has and that is why we're having this conversation today. I'll touch briefly on some transformation that has been done digitally towards the SDGs, strides made, challenges and lessons learned. For Ghana, we're intensifying our digital transformation drive with the ultimate goal of improving lives pursuant to the sustainable development goals and we can only do this by ensuring that the required frameworks are in place. The government through the Ministry of Communications and Digitalization is playing a pivotal role in the development of a robust framework to support the digitalization of the economy in a manner that benefits every citizen. But we're mindful of the fact that we cannot go it alone and have to build systems that are capable of being linked to those developed by our neighbours and so we're building fibre to our borders and our active international and continental initiatives such as the Smart Africa Alliance. We're also determined to make the African Continental Free Trade Area work. Clear in our minds, the digital technology holds the key to uniting our fragmented and uncoordinated trade infrastructure and systems on the continent. I keep referring to the pandemic and for good reason too. It helped focus our minds and created the opportunity to rapidly introduce digital responses to critical issues. One such initiative was the Trusted Travel Initiative powered by the Panabia system which was developed by the Africa CDC to digitally certify COVID tests and vaccines to enable us to travel and safely reopen our economies. We didn't wait for an imported solution but developed our own for the entire continent but which was also designed to be compatible and intruberable with analogous systems developed for other parts of the world. It's notoriously difficult to roll out continent-wide systems but this was done in record time and I'll come back to this later in my presentation but we have a few more digital initiatives up our sleeves. Africa and other less developed parts of the world cannot be treated as bystanders. Every effort has to be made to break the standardization gaps between the rich and poor parts of our world but it must be done in a manner that does not stifle creativity or innovation and provides access to appropriate technologies and funding to ensure the holistic development of our world. In this fourth industrial revolution marked by developments in the areas of artificial intelligence, smart cities and IoT, cloud computing, digital financial services, digital identities, machine learning and big data to mention a few. A lot of collaboration is required of digital product manufacturers, technology solutions providers, telecommunications operators, standards development organizations and governments to guarantee maximum protection for consumers as we encourage the use and adoption of digital technologies. It is imperative that all standards development organizations work together in this area of digital transformation to ensure that the railroad colonialism of the past does not happen again and I'm glad that it is already happening as the first session made abundantly clear that collaboration between the IEC, ISO and ITU is ongoing. We in Africa and certainly in Ghana are concerned about the level of inputs those of us in the global south make in the standards that enable the emergence of massive global digital networks as a result of interoperability. Interoperability is at the core and expansionist concept but making all things talk to all things. By making all things talk to all things interoperability standards lead to the flourishing of the big and the powerful. This can be great for consumers due to the price lowering effects of economies of scale but it can also snuff out local creativity and peculiar innovations that are most suitable for our level of development. We have seen local regulators in Africa have running battles with certain forms of social media and cryptocurrency tools and systems because the underlying technical standards that they write on to go global do not provide any serious means for local risk management. In some parts of the world the false neutrality of standards is leading to pushback against global digital interoperability with some serious results such as the balkanization of the internet and attempts to ring fence global digital platforms with some kind of local shields. This is clear evidence of standards vacuums triggering ad hoc reactions and so as we rush headlong into the AI era such confusing and breakages in the global digital interoperability systems will intensify standards around algorithmic transparency and non-discrimination will if the current cause we maintained emerge with very limited input from the global south leading to negative fallout for many of our societies as deep fakes another AI enabled systems posted far away from us run amok. The transformation of global capitalism is however not driven solely by the globalization of systems and networks powered by standards enabled interoperability another major force is the emerging ESG revolution the embedding of environmental social and governance standards into the fiber of business models. In many ways then the sustainable development narrative in the digital economy will manifest at one key intersection that of digital interoperability to create global platforms for harmonized production and consumption on one hand and the harmonization of the values to guide production and consumption. Already most ESG measures in the supply chain designed to stop such universally detested practices such as child labor human trafficking and deforestation rely on traceability which in 10 entirely depends on the digitization of traceability according to global interoperable standards such as GS1. In Ghana we've decided not to be naive about the political economy of all these powerful shifts what while we acknowledge the powerful of digitally enabled ESG standards to create a fairer more prosperous world we also know that in the past we have as a country and a continent been marginalized in the creation of similar systems such as the internet but we believe that our best bet is to partner with our continental neighbors to establish our own digital ESG platforms and networks we are building systems that speak to our unique reality in the quest to build a fairer more prosperous continent. Ghana is a pioneer in the adoption of the African continental free trade area caravan platform and its supply chain digitization derivative known as PROPA the proof of origin and product electronic registries we're also championing the rollout of the digital green corridor to unlock climate finance resources to green supply chains in the region these initiatives just like panabias are fully endorsed by the African Union and we're determined to make them work caravan and its proper derivative are powerful instruments for harmonizing the standards regime in the various after member states with a very clear view to boosting trade cultural interchange cooperation collaborative ventures and policy integration through the caravan platform Ghana seeks to foster regional alliances in the creation of value chains where production activities can observe the highest ESG standards within frameworks that respond to our unique challenges for many years countries like us have complained about unfair fight to sanitary standards that have shut many of our competitive products out of world markets we've expressed deep concern over the fact that when ESG standards such as the living income differential emerge to serve our interest transnational networks attempt to undermine them we've complained about the role that western and eastern intermediaries play in the siphoning of way of vast wealth from our continent through clever manipulation of standards but the time for complaining is over we've not taken it upon ourselves as a continent to develop our own mega platforms to track the enforcement of standards across multiple interconnecting supply chains in our continent through the enhanced viability and vigilance provided by the likes of caravan and others we hope that the situation when 90% of fish harvested in the Gulf of Guinea far above sustainability limits are practically stolen by foreign trawlers will seize whether it is maritime marine resources of the coast of Ghana or rare earth metal concessions in the Congo standards are critical to ensuring their sustainable fair and equitable use to benefit the population to the extent that tracking enforcement and monitoring of standards has proven so difficult in highly constrained institutional environments digitalization and digital transformation is vital to ensuring that new capacity is made available in a decentralized manner across Africa to turn things around but we cannot approach the digitalization opportunity without a clear understanding of the political economy context our deployment of digital technology in tracking and forcing and monitoring ESG standards in vital supply chains like marine agricultural mining and telecommunications shall thus be guided by a clear eyed pragmatism and a deep sense of cultural awareness it shall be based on a strong decolonization agenda and we invite all like-minded partners to come partner us to create a new world empowering digital-enabled standards giving that digitalization affects all facets of the economy and society and requires governments to reach across traditional policy silos and across different levels and industry verticals an all-inclusive approach to policy making is indispensable to unlocking the full potential of digital transformation the ITU has and continues to play a pivotal role in standardization efforts towards the achievement of the SDGs for example within the immediate past study period quite a good number of recommendations and related technical outputs have been produced and published by the ITU to address a host of emerging issues on cyber security digital finance 5g machine learning artificial intelligence IoT to mention a few imagine work in the area of digital COVID-19 certificates as was agreed at the last TSAG meeting is revolutionary and we look forward to its output and learnings in return government would also continue to make available the necessary wherewithal to support the standardization work of the ITU and its allied bodies in conclusion as technology continues to advance at a faster pace than policy and regulation and giving that 2030 accomplishment timeline for the SDGs is almost upon us it is clear that the standards development community does not have the luxury of time the ITU, IAC, ISO may be doing their best however the timely production of standards to meet evolving needs of policymakers regulators and the ICT markets is one area that has been a bit elusive it is therefore suggested that the standards development roadmap specifically for the SDGs be outlined by your consortium of SDOs and timelines clearly set in response to anticipated growth of policy and technology may I kindly request as I bring my address to a close that we accord the moderator and his team of experienced panelists the wrapped attention deserving of an intense and interactive program of this nature and I wish us all a productive session thank you