 Welcome to PP18, the Plenipotentiary Conference of ITU at Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by the Honourable Ursula Ousso-Kufl, who is the Minister of Communications for Ghana. Minister, welcome to the studio. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be with you at the PP18 in Dubai. Now as we know there's considerable attention being placed on harnessing the power of information and communication technologies, or ICTs, as an enabler for good for development of the benefit for the benefit of people, families, communities and nations. I wanted to find out what's your personal perspective on this? I think ICTs are indispensable for social economic development in every sector and having seen the transformations that it is occasioning around the world. It will be foolhardy to opt out and so we're seeing it enhancing education, health, e-commerce. It is making life easier for our peasant farmers around the country. Small businesses are being enabled and facilitated by ICTs. I really don't know how we managed without it in the past, but it has only been a few short years ago within that time that we've seen this phenomenal enhancement of technology in all sectors of our economy and so it can only get better and I'm looking forward to even greater uptake of technology in everything that we do and introducing our young people to it at an even earlier age in the kindergartens so that they get used to it and becomes more hands-on for them. We've seen how they've transformed lives around the countryside and it can only get better. Now this plenipotentiary conference is the first since the world agreed on the sustainable development goals. I wanted to ask you perhaps you could provide a few examples of how ICTs is driving sustainable development in Ghana. Our president is a co-chair of the UN SDGs Advocacy Group and so he's very very keen that we utilize the technology to enable us to get the SDGs implemented within or attain those goals within the time set for it by 2030 and so we're seeing in our national identification program we're utilizing ICTs. We've set up a digital property address system to formalize our economy and it is to enable us to digitize our economy within the fastest possible time and it is also through ICTs to enable us attain those goals within that time. We're also utilizing it in education in health. We're assisting our physically challenged to also have a better standard of living using ICTs in the way they educate themselves and in e-governance we're bringing governance closer to the people by utilizing ICTs. For us it is not a question of whether we need it or not but how much of it can we utilize and within what period and so that's actively what we're trying to do and we see that without it all other sectors would suffer and so if we aim to develop in any sector at all we can do so faster by utilizing ICTs. So it is a sine qua non for social economic development and to create an even playing field for everybody we need it. And something that we've been very much aware of over the last few years has been very much the digital divide apparently now about half the world's population are connected to the internet the other half is not. What is Ghana doing to get everyone connected? That's a key priority of the Kufuadu government in Ghana and we've focused actively on it within the last two years and so we're utilizing our universal service funds in collaboration with a private sector to deepen connectivity around the countryside and this year alone we've managed to connect up to two million people who were otherwise unconnected. We worked with an equipment manufacturer and an IT company and a mobile network operator to develop a unique system which they call the rural star which has enabled us to deepen penetration in our rural areas phenomenally we're quite proud of it they call me the mother of rural star and it encourages me because when you see what being connected has done to our rural populations around the countryside young people being able to learn and do research on the internet peasant farmers able to sell their produce online the uptake of digital financial services and mobile money around the country which has transformed lives it's something that we are determined to to continue and hopefully within the next two three years every part of the country will be connected with voice telephony and high-speed affordable data services to enable us all leapfrog into development. Now we saw you get up on the stage today and very eloquently put some points across with regards to digital development in Ghana and your aspirations I just wanted to ask you perhaps in a nutshell if you could just really give a small message to both the participants here again and and to the wider audience I was just discussing with someone what a wonderful opportunity the ITU provides for all of us to share experiences to learn from one another to kind of copy what others are doing and be encouraged when we realize that we are really on the right track and are doing things that have worked in other places or when others can also learn something from our experiences so it's wonderful to be part of this community and we want to continue to work within the council to also deepen the impact that we're having on lives around the world and yes today everybody realizes that without the work that we do deepening access to voice and data connectivity around the globe the entire world economy will grind to a halt so in my opinion we're the most important industry in the whole world because we make every other industry work well your presence here is very important and thank you very much for joining us in the studio and wish you the very best in the future thank you thank you too it's always a pleasure to be with you that's great thank you