 Welcome to the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference 2018 here in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Maria Manuella-Catrina who is the State Secretary for the Ministry of Communications and Information Society for Romania. Welcome to the studio. Thank you very much for the invitation and I'm very happy to be here in Dubai for the last week to participate at the conference. Now I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about a question that I have been asking guests that have been sitting in that chair. There's currently considerable attention being placed on harnessing the power of information and communication technologies as an enabler for good, for development, for the benefit of people, families, communities and nations and I wanted to ask you what's your personal perspective on this? I think we have a very powerful tool but we should remember that it's a tool. We are in a conference where the most of the participants are working in the field so sometimes we believe we are the wizards of the world but in a way we are just an enabler for transformation that will be happening, let's say the digital transformation but it's a powerful tool that we need to use in order to do good. We need to face the new questions of the future, be it EI, be it cybersecurity and so on like every tool it has two sides, every blade has two sides but in the other direction we need to use this tool in order to make the life of our citizens better all over the world. Let's talk a little bit about this play potential conference is the first one since the world agreed on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, perhaps you could provide a couple of examples of how ICTs are helping to drive sustainable development in your country. I think it's very good that we have this, we look upon under the Development Goals when we talk about ICT and this doesn't let us forget about poverty, about inclusion, about gender equality, about food energy and so on, providing for our people so what we try to do in Romania is to use ICT as an enabler of let's say social elevator to just flat the gaps between the divides between different types of old, young people, social disabled people or people that are maybe in a better social position in order to take care that the new technology doesn't provide wider gaps between the different type of population. That means that my 92-year-old grandmother has to learn how to use a phone, she has skipped over the computer but she is still able to use the phone and to use some social networks in order to talk with her grandchildren and grandchildren so we have to find the use for the technology and we also do a lot in order to educate the young people in to use these technologies, we have IT classes starting from the fifth grade to the twelfth grade, it's mandatory, we also have cyber security and cyber hygiene very early started in schools but we think that we should start it even earlier and we also try to foster the industry, I don't know if you know but we have 8% of the Romanian GDP is already delivered by ICT, that means we are close to the agriculture but we are going up, so this means that we have a big industry to foster and one of our concerns is to regulate in a limited amount in order to let this innovative capacities to drive the growth further. Fostering SMEs for example? Fostering SMEs yes, for example last year one of the biggest unicorns was the Romanian SME that works in artificial intelligence, it's called UiPath, so yes, fostering SMEs we have vivid clusters but also a lot of very young people that work in new technologies see I just met some very young and energetic group of people that have a blockchain company, the oldest one is 23, the youngest is 15, none of them had already finished their education but they already did a lot of things internationally in working on stock exchanges so it's a new generation that is coming, they are digital by the birth and have to keep up with them. Let's talk about a recent statistic saying about half the world's people are connected to the internet, the other half is not, what is Romanian doing to get everyone connected? I think we must have done something right because we have one of the most fastest internet in the world but also one of the cheapest internet in the world, that means beside expanding the broadband network we skipped a generation that means that we get from land already to mobile and here the legislators and the government did a good job in providing such opportunities for the people to use these tools, so having it available and cheap is important but it's also important to have the knowledge to use it and also the interest to use it, so we are working on that field for the future. For the old, all the way to the very young, and just finally you are here at the ITU play potentially conference, I am sure you have been getting your message across but I wanted to ask you perhaps you wanted to put it into a nutshell for our wider audience here. First of all I want to thank you everybody that votes for us for the council, for us it was a surprising result to convince so many people that we should be on the table of discussions. I personally believe strongly in involving more and more women in ICT, in Romania we do a very good job, we have around 30% women working already in ICT companies but if we look that each and every one of us have a deficit of talents in this area it must, we must not forget half of the population and bring it also on the digital table with us, so this would be my personal touch in this conference. One that's shared I'm sure by many. I'm sure, I'm very happy that we have already now a woman in the high level dignitaries of ITU so I'm sure she will also push forward for this subject. I'm sure she will. Well thank you very much indeed for joining us in the studio and we look forward to catching up with you again sometime in the future. Thank you very much. Thank you.