 We're here at ITU Telecom World 2015 in Budapest, Hungary, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Anusha Raman Khan, who is Minister of State for the Government of Pakistan, the Ministry of Information and Technology in Islamabad. Minister, thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I wanted to find out what measures can government and industry do to encourage entrepreneurship and foster the growth of SMEs in the ICT sector, and in particular, of course, the government of Pakistan doing. Thank you very much for putting these points on for discussion. Yes, this morning we have been discussing these issues, and we're talking about not just SMEs alone, but also about startups and incubator programs and innovation. As you will appreciate, that innovation is now something that even youngsters, people who are still studying, small children who be considered as children, are coming up with the brightest of ideas. We have to look at when we're talking about innovation, when we're talking about growth, when we're talking about knowledge economies. We should be talking about, across the board segments, irrespective of the age, and focus also on the youth at the same time. This innovation has brought our generation to where we are today, and we have come to a stage where even the teenagers are questioning whether we are on the right direction looking at the future. Technologies, if we are adopting the right strategies, right policies, giving them the right framework and guidelines, which are going to have technology being adopted for as engine of growth. So SMEs remain at the heart of our policy framework in Pakistan. I would like to share with you that, at least from my experience, what we have done in Pakistan, we are working on incubation programs for picking up entrepreneurship, for encouraging entrepreneurship, and partnering with international companies to bring in the right kind of the human resource capital who have championed it in the developed countries, and also giving the confidence to the sector, that the public sector is aware of the very fact that the youth and the SMEs are looked at, are being focused at, investment is going on into their growth, and the outcomes of this entrepreneurship program is going to be either the venture capitalists are going to pick up their innovation, or the government itself creating the demand side of it by adopting e-governance and e-solutions is going to be now looking at their solutions that they are providing for permanent implementation. So these are all opportunities that are being created in my country. Talking about opportunities for the IT sector, I would like to just share with you that in Pakistan today, I have a database of 2,000 plus companies who are exporting software worth of over 2.8 billion US dollars. We are number four in the e-lancing, which means that we are just behind US, UK, and Ukraine, 75,000 e-lancers in the country who are exporting to the world. So you can imagine that the policies of the government and together with the freedom for entrepreneurship in our country is giving us the results, but this is not enough. We need to work more on providing opportunities. This incubation center, the Tech City project that we are floating now, is for targeting about 50 companies every six months on rotation looking at their projects, looking at their innovation, and looking at giving them the first opportunity for getting commercialized. There's something which we have been, for a number of years at ITU, focusing on very greatly is encouraging women and girls to get involved in ICTs. I know it's something that's obviously close to your heart as well. We're celebrating girls in ICT here at ITU Telecom World. From your own experience, what can be done to promote the involvement of girls and women in the industry? The first thing that we need to do is to accept the fact that girls and women need special attention when it comes to ICTs. This realization definitely exists at the ITU. This realization exists at my ministry definitely. We have started different projects for girls in ICT, but one of the projects that's worth sharing is by the name of program. We've already, from the funding which is available for the underserved and unserved, we have designed a project together with a virtual university, which is our partner to reach out to 5,000 girls every year in the most underserved area, the poor segments of the girls who otherwise cannot continue to continue their education for one reason or the other, and they opt for learning some technical skills. So if they are going to learn some technical skills, computer programming is what we are designing for them to be taught. Not only that we are going to teach them how to program, but we will be providing infrastructure in those institutions which are specifically designed for these girls, but we will also be on their graduation, providing them one laptop so that they could work as entrepreneurs from their homes. One of the operators has committed as part of their share to provide connectivity to these girls when they graduate from this program. So the idea is not to turn them into typists. The idea is to teach them innovation, to teach them how to program, to give them the certification, accreditation, giving them the hardware, and help them and mentor them throughout for them to stand on their own feet. So this is the age segment of between 14 to 18 that we are targeting. So this is particularly for girls, but I think going forward we need to not be within the gender, we will have to create the categories that how do we address the girls, how do we address the beyond teenager, and how do we even address our older segments because it's not just about turning them into economically vibrant and independent females. It's also about introducing them to technology to stay connected. And the more women are connected, you will have more mothers, more families, more people using the Internet, and it's about having the proliferation of the Internet usage over a period of time. So as more women use the Internet, you will have more usage of the Internet. And when you have more usage of the Internet, you have the more utility coming out of it. Now of course the key words of the moment are sustainable development goals. I wanted to ask you what must be done in your opinion to better link ICTs to sustainable development goals or SDGs at national and international level? There is a need to first of all work on a national agenda. The national agenda is going to be driven by the nation states together formulating some guidelines, formulating some KPIs, formulating some given targets. ICTs for sustainable development is goal number 17 of the UN that we have just adopted. There is a need to identify which agency is going to be the custodian of the SDGs in terms of the ICT Connect. Then we need to all sit down and define, I would not want the same to be repeated because MDGs was not sort of adopted or implemented with as much success as we expected of it. So for the SDGs we need a more serious, we need to take a more serious approach for the implementation side of it. I would say that many countries would be working on SDGs already, even before this formal adoption. For example, I can share with you my experience that we decided that the Universal Service Fund will be a model, will be modeled in a way that it will be a public-private partnership. Which means that the entire fund will be available to the private sector for deployment. So I will share with you one example just four weeks ago. I have finalized four contracts for development, for laying down of rural telephony, with the private sector, which means that the areas which are otherwise not making a commercial case for the mobile operators, which is essentially more than 35% of Pakistan. The government of Pakistan is giving subsidy, which is around between 90 to 95% to the mobile operators so that they can provide connectivity and roll out their networks in those areas. So we have done a subsidy of 14 billion rupees for these contracted areas in the last four months for the rollout to be complete within the next 18 months. But at the same time, we have also mapped the rest of the country, which is not otherwise on the business case of the mobile operators. And after mapping it out, we are gradually giving out the lots from the USF funding and whoever is going to ask for minimum subsidy, and that minimum is also around 95 to 96%, 90 to 95% to give out the subsidy to the telecom operators, who are the contributors to begin with, to complete the whole country and cover it with broadband, whether through mobile broadband or whether through optic fiber cable, this is a choice that they will come forward with. But we are giving them the flexibility to make their offer. So what I see is that within the next two years, we will have covered most of Pakistan with mobile broadband. People were joking with me the other day that we have done the 3G, 4G spectrum auction, and they were saying to me that by this program that you have recently introduced, this policy of the government will actually mean that the part of the countries who are not going to get 3G services even in the next 10 years are going to get the 3G services even within the next 18 months. But this is the agenda of my government. To reach out to the underserved and unserved, to go for ubiquitous development, uniform development, to use technology for the socioeconomic benefits, to reach out the poorest segments, the benefits of technology, it's not going to end on laying off the optic fiber cable or providing rural telephony. We are also making 500 telecenters in the underserved and unserved areas. It's around 18 billion rupees program. It's Pakistani rupees, which is a huge amount of funding for telecenters. But these are the kind of initiatives we are already taking in Pakistan for sustainable development. And these will be one of the few factors that we will demonstrate to the world that we can all, when making the national goals, looking at whatever resources we have got to achieve these goals. Because not many countries will have a huge funding from their finance ministries coming in for recognizing the ICT for SDGs. We will have to see what are the different pools of funding available with the IT and telecom ministries, which in this case is the USF funding, and how we can then allocate this funding in a uniform manner with KPIs to ensure that we achieve the SDGs even before the next 15 years. Because you know it more than I do, the technology moves faster than the policy. So we probably would be looking at connectivity much earlier than that. But I'm urging on these platforms for the ITU to clearly identify which agency of the United Nations is going to be the custodian of monitoring the implementation of the SDG. And for them to prepare a clear guideline for the national governments to adopt with the KPIs and for a yearly monitoring to ensure that we are getting to the target. And finally, in a nutshell, we've got a very wide-ranging audience here at ITU Telecom World and we're going out to an even wider one across the internet here. Just what is your overriding message here? What would you like to particularly say here at ITU Telecom World? I would like to say one thing from the bottom of my heart, that we are all working on common agenda. And the common agenda is internet for all. Internet of things is the future. The fine line between IT and telecom is already diffusing. We are working for the welfare of the people. At the end of the day, it's about the people of this world that we all feel the technology brings in the benefits and the socioeconomic sector development is one of the technologies, one of the major enablers in that segment. But there is a dark side to it as well. The abuse of the internet on different areas, for example, child pornography, for example, terrorism. We need to start talking about how we keep keeping the positivity of internet, how we handle the menace or the dark side of the internet at the same time. Because we will together, as we are the custodians of the IT and telecom, we together have drafted this wonderful framework which has given us this advancement in technology. But we are also responsible for the dark side of it and we all need to find out the minimum benchmarks that we all need to take into consideration to protect the small children, to protect the young girls and to protect all of us from the proliferation of terrorism and abuse of internet. This is an important debate. I'm not saying that we should be going towards internet governance. I'm not saying that. But what I'm saying is that we should be cognizant of the fact that these are also challenges and issues and we should not be conservative in talking about issues and finding solutions. Because if we don't do it today, it might become too late in time if we delay it for too long. Thank you very much for taking this today. Thank you.