 Welcome to the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference being held in Bucharest in Romania. We're here in the ITU studio and I've got the great pleasure of being joined in the studio today by Mr Amandip Singh, who is the United Nations Secretary General's envoy on technology. Amandip, welcome to the studio. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Let's talk about your experience and your meetings here that you've been having. I can see quite regularly you've been following some of your tweets and you seem to have been all over the conference here, meeting a lot of people. What's your experience been like here at the ITU Plenipotentiary Conference? The experience has been fantastic. Firstly, the hosts have been very generous with the preparations, meticulous preparations. So we are all very comfortable as delegations and that allows us to get on with our work in full comfort. So a big shout out to Romania as the hosts of this meeting. My experience of meeting with the heads of delegations from countries across different regions has been again excellent. I see a lot of enthusiasm for the important items on the agenda of the ITU connectivity, addressing the digital divide, building the infrastructure for the digital economy of tomorrow. Obviously, there's also a lot of interest in the elections. The ITU leadership gets to be turned over after this conference, so that raises the importance of this meeting and that has also come up in the conversations. Now, let's talk about the global digital compact or something which I know is near and dear to your heart. For those uninitiated, tell us what the global digital compact is. How ITU and its member states and its community can contribute to it? And also looking towards the future, looking to the new summit of the future, which is going to be held in September 2024. Right. So the Summit of the Future in 2024 is an opportunity for the International Committee to reboot multilateralism and prepare ourselves better for the challenges of tomorrow. And this has been decided by the Journal Assembly on the basis of a report that the Secretary General of the United Nations was asked to present. This report is called Our Common Agenda. And the global digital compact is one of the proposals in Our Common Agenda to be adopted at the Summit of the Future at the end of a process. This is the digital track, if you will, for the Summit of the Future. And let me just describe it very broadly because its details, its contours would be determined by the member states of the United Nations. So what we hope that the global digital compact would be is the highest level capturing of political will so far in terms of a comprehensive view of the digital world. All the challenges, the risks that digital technologies may pose to human rights, fundamental freedoms, human agency, the difficulties around data governance, artificial intelligence governance, but at the same time also the opportunity to drive progress on the sustainable development goals, to connect the unconnected and to bring technology to the masses so that they can lead better lives. So this is a 360 degree look at the digital world, all its implications, all the opportunities and how as an international community we can better organize ourselves to build a digital future that's open, that's free, that's secure and that's inclusive. And I should add that this is not just something that is for governments alone because the private sector is a huge player in the digital world. So is civil society, so are academic networks and so are citizens at large. So this has to be a truly multi-stakeholder effort. It can't only be an intergovernmental effort and we have to bring all these strands together in an innovative way so that these diverse voices from the ground are heard loudly and clearly in New York and the government representatives are better informed as they work towards the global digital compact. And what about ITU and how can it contribute as I say, its member states and the organization as a whole to this? So the ITU is a premier partner in the build-up of the global digital compact. My office already works very closely with the ITU on issues such as connectivity. So we are partners in this project, Giga Connect, which aims to connect every school on planet Earth to the Internet. The ITU is one of the oldest organizations in the UN system. It has tremendous experience in building standards, regulating the allocation of spectrum. This whole thing starts with the spectrum which is the ultimate source of value in the digital world and therefore we are very excited about the inputs that would come from the ITU into the global digital compact and not only the inputs but also the work that we'll be doing together with the ITU which in many cases the ITU will lead as we implement the global digital compact as we implement the will of the member states and other members of the multi-stakeholder community on our digital future. Now you're here having conversations here with ITU's community as well with its member states. I know that you're going to be inviting all the planetary participants here to a consultation of the global digital compact. What will be the objective for you there and what are your expectations and how will the outcome of that be used to build the compact? So we are at the start of a conversation, a very important conversation. Over the next one year we plan to do a number of consultations and this is a very important gathering. So on Saturday we'll spend an hour and a half getting some ministers, heads of delegations, experts into the room, present to them the overall vision of the global digital compact. Some of the seven to eight areas that have been mentioned already in New York as being important, connectivity addressing the digital divide, digital public infrastructure, digital public goods, data protection, data empowerment, the international cooperation around AI addressing misinformation, disinformation, protecting human rights online, etc. And we hope to have inputs and guidance from the ITU community on the areas that the ITU is currently focused on. So there is connectivity, there is internet governance, AI, other emerging technologies. There is the buildup of standards for some of the emerging technologies. So these are very valuable insights that we are looking forward to. No other gathering has that kind of deep expertise and multiple years of experience in terms of looking at the issues. So this is a must have stop on our calendar of consultations. Well, thank you very much indeed for your valuable insights here in the ITU studio. And we very much look forward to catching up with you again and being able to contribute to these wonderful initiatives. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful to spend some time with you. Thank you.