 All right, I guess if my video has been highlighted, it must be time to begin. I'm David Kirkpatrick. I'm a journalist based in New York with a company called Techonomy. And I'm very pleased to be your moderator for today's session on the road to Addis, a one of a series of sessions we've been having for some months leading up to the World Telecommunication Development Conference in Addis Ababa, which has now been postponed until June 6th through 15th, 2022 because of COVID. Sadly, the world continues to be altered by this pandemic, but we are continuing ahead with great ideas and energy about how to connect the world as you will see today. This session is called Innovate to Connect, mainstreaming entrepreneurship driven innovation to accelerate digital transformation. All these sessions are focused on how to connect the world and how to accelerate digital transformation in one way or another. So today we're focusing on innovation. Let me just give you a little bit of the housekeeping stuff here to get started. This session is entirely remote, webcasted, live streamed and recorded. As a participant, you're free to use the chat during the session for any comments you wanna make, questions that are addressed to speakers should be inserted in the Q&A function, which is at the bottom of your Zoom interface on the right. And if time allows, we will address some of those questions and I hope we will. I think we will have time for that. So please ask questions. You can also upvote a question by clicking the thumbs up icon next to a question and Zoom will then automatically sort them by the number of upvotes so they become more relevant. Also during the session, we are going to provide captioning services so that you can, which you can activate by clicking on the closed caption in the bottom bar of the Zoom interface, which I don't see in mind, but I hope you see in yours. We do have it as I understand it. So let me introduce our fantastic speakers today. We really have a great group. And I will start by introducing Ms. Doreen Bogdan-Martin who is really our host here, the director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau, hi Doreen. We also then have Mr. Eric Ekidan who's the CTO of Erickson, who I believe is here by not on video, but of course with Erickson, you know the phone's always gonna work. And then we have Ms. Dianne Keita who's the UN Assistant Secretary General and Deputy Executive Director of UNFPA. Welcome Dianne. Next we have his Excellency, Mr. Bosjan Koritnik who's the Minister of Public Administration of Slovenia. Welcome. Then we have our special guest, Ms. Janati Nakamura who's the co-founder and CEO of Solar Net Metering Uganda. She is also a Generation Connect young leader with the ITU and of course an entrepreneur. And we're gonna highlight some of her work and some of our other speakers will react to that because she is an entrepreneur who's just the kind of person we're all here to try to support and encourage. Then we also have his Excellency, Mr. Faustin Nduglile who's the Minister of Communication and Information Technology of Tanzania. Welcome Faustin. And finally, Ms. Alexa Roscoe who is the Disruptive Technologies Lead at the International Finance Corporation. But there's one other person I also want to introduce you to and that is Jim Rogers who is our graphic designer and illustrator for the Road to Addis events. I don't see him on screen but oh, there he is. Okay, there is his image. Okay, what he's gonna do is draw a picture of what we discussed today. He's extraordinary. We will come back to him at the end. He's already gotten a little start there up in the upper left-hand corner. But at the end of the session, we'll go back and you will see that whiteboard has filled with incredible images and words representing what we've discussed today. So I do wanna just remind you all that because of COVID-19, WTDC has been postponed until June 2022 when it is taking place between the sixth and the 15th in Addis Ababa. Now let me introduce Danola Oladapo who is ITU's Generation Connect Engagement Manager and she'll tell you what she's gonna be doing here. She's basically helping me moderate. So welcome, Danola. Danola, I'm happy to be working with you again. Hello, David. Hello, everyone. As David said, if anyone has any questions or any comments, please feel free to use the Q and A box or the comments. But of course, for the Generation Connect community, if you want a tweet as well, feel free to do so using hashtags, wrote to Addis and ITU WTDC. And of course, hashtag Generation Connect. I'll be looking through some of the tweets and hopefully we'll have an opportunity in the event to read out some of these tweets and some of these questions for the speakers. So looking forward to that. Over to you, David. Thank you, Danola. And I'll just, we've had a number of these and each one has a slightly different format. Today's session is going to be very discussion rich. We'll have two rounds of questions for our panelists and also a segment of interactive discussion with the audience. So get ready for that. Like I said, prepare your questions and upvote them, et cetera, et cetera. Now it's my great pleasure to turn the floor over to my friend Doreen Bogdan-Martin of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau. So take it away, Doreen. Thank you so much, David. And good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Warm welcome to innovate, to connect our next stop on the road to Addis. David, I think we have all corners of the globe represented here. It's great to see in the chat where people are joining from. So as David mentioned, and as the title suggests, today we're gonna dive into a key enabler or maybe better said, a critical enabler of meaningful connectivity and that is innovation. Perhaps this sounds a little obvious. I think we all know that big tech names invest in and of course, employee, large R&D teams that are of course, pushing the envelope of what digital can do in cutting edge fields from AI to robotics, augmented reality. But that's not what we're gonna focus on today. Instead, we're going to focus on the local grassroots, entrepreneur-driven innovation that, I would say in its own way, can dramatically re-energize progress towards the 17 sustainable development goals and of course, ultimately change the lives of billions that are cut off from the power of the digital world because it's in the world's developing countries and emerging economies that innovation can play its most powerful role. Its most powerful role as a driver of digitally led developments. The populations of the world's poorest nations often lack access to opportunities, even formal education, but they do not, they do not lack ingenuity, talent or entrepreneurial drive and it's quite the contrary. And of course, challenging circumstances tend to breed natural engineers who instinctively learn sophisticated problem solving skills to manage day-to-day life. And I think if we pair this huge store of entrepreneurial energy with the power and the reach of digital, this can be the transformational force that we need to advance global development by leaps and bounds. But right now, I think we're somewhat failing to harness this energy and this creativity. So in today's session, we're gonna explore digital innovation and we will do that through the eyes of a young entrepreneur and with the help of our special guests, we will try to pin down the elements needed to build a successful and sustainable local ecosystem and create a sort of virtuous circle where entrepreneurship drives innovation to accelerate digital transformation. Let's not forget that our success really lies in keeping our focus firmly on people. We need to work collaboratively with grassroots entrepreneurs and communities recognizing that they can teach us at least as much as we can teach them. We do need to empower people in communities with the means to innovate for themselves. And perhaps most importantly, we need to harness the energy and the enthusiasm of youth. So let's open our discussion, David, and let's dive deep into what makes a sustainable innovation-friendly digital ecosystem that will empower budding young geniuses to develop solutions to some of our most stubborn development issues. Thank you, David. I'm gonna hand back to you and let's get into the discussion over. Thank you. Thank you, Doreen. I appreciate that, of course. I think some of the geniuses might not even be young. Someone who started a company when I was in my late fifties, I would say. And in fact, in the United States, the stats show a very high percentage of startups are started by older people. So we need innovation from everybody, just mentioning. Now, to set the scene for these discussions, we're going to start with a video clip on something called the ITU Innovation Challenges. This is an open competition platform where all the stakeholders of the innovation ecosystem can present their ideas and projects and get empowered to transform their communities into thriving digital societies. This is the third edition of the ITU Innovation Challenges and the competition is open now and will be open until the 31st of July, so you still have time another week or so through the support and mentoring received in this process, past winners have gone on to create remarkable digital solutions that unleash their community potential. So please, let's roll the video now. Every day we discover local African talent and we give them a platform to do what they love doing the most. While we handle the business of transforming that creativity into work for them. I want to provide refugee youth with the tools to build and dream their own futures. Came up with a platform to save the chicken. That is my idea. And by so doing, I told you, we are making a world where everybody can have better food. So this is what motivated me to finally build bullied Indonesia. The online platform and able to help you if there are victim of online abuse or domestic violence. I want my innovation to reach every child without education and digital literacy until there is no child left behind. Wow, that is a great way to start. Some of those make me really eager to hear more about those companies. So I eager to find out more. Now let's get started talking to our participants and start with Janati who I mentioned before. Janati Nakamura co-founder and CEO of SolarNet metering Uganda and our sort of central entrepreneur of the day. Very happy to have you here Janati. So you are a young Ugandan entrepreneur and you launched and co-founded a company called SolarNet Metering which seeks to address the issue of access to electricity in your country. But according to the World Bank only 26.7% of the people in Uganda have access to electricity, which is just unacceptable. And we all know electricity is a huge enabler for connectivity and not having it is a huge barrier to participating in the economy. So as a young entrepreneur working on that extremely important problem what are some key challenges you faced in your work? Thank you David, greetings everyone. Many thanks for inviting me to participate in this discussion. Well, it's true that the lack of electricity access in my country is a major barrier to growth and development. And more than 70% of the population is currently off the national grid. The government of Uganda has a mandate to provide reliable power of high quality to meet the needs of the population for social and economic development and in an environmentally sustainable manner. And to do this the private sector partners have to come in and give a hand. And this is where I come in. So when I co-founded solar and net metering Uganda Limited my major goal was to help the government in expanding electricity access in the region. And by so doing I install solar systems on the different households and then also design net metering building systems to enable the producers of that solar energy to sell the excess energy that they don't use back to the grid for distribution to another client. And on my journey to achieving my goal I have met a lot of challenges. So I'll briefly talk about the key challenges I've encountered. The first one is that in Uganda currently we do not have a policy on net metering on integrating net metering to Uganda's grid. So this was a huge challenge at the very start I was actually stuck for one year. I didn't really do much work for the first year because the adoption of the policy on net metering is not yet in place. Our framework is being developed but the work is not yet complete. So that was a challenge for me. I had to sit down with my team and re-strategize and we decided to start with off grid electrification in the meantime and design prototypes for net meters as we wait for the policy to be fully in place. The second challenge I met is that when I started out some of my team members were best in a neighboring country that's Rwanda and I'm best in Kampala, Uganda. So it was hard for us to convene and have meetings and I had to find a way and some of them were students, they were still studying. So there was a lot going on for them. So I had to decide to get a fresh team to ensure that we would build the company and we move forward. The third challenge I met is that I didn't have fans to start. We all know that in the initial stages it's very hard to convince an investor to invest in a business that hasn't, you just have an idea. You've known test-ed, you've not proven anything to anyone. The business is still very risky at that stage. So having to get heavy funding at that stage was not possible for me. So I tried. I tried to get a few investors to talk to them but it wasn't easy for me to get funding. So I ended up resorting to using some of my personal savings to do some groundwork and that helped me to start. The other challenge I faced is that you see the energy business today is still overwhelmingly male dominated and there are very few female mentors in this business. So in times like this, strong presence of the females is very important. So that was a huge challenge for me. I didn't have people in business who are females running this to look up to. Nonetheless, I looked at that as a stepping stone for me to strive to accomplish my goals. And I hope that one day someone will look at my journey and be inspired by it. Yes, I have met a lot of challenges but I do still think that every challenge has presented an opportunity for me to grow and to take up space in the world of entrepreneurship. I have been able to grow as a leader and I've also been able to build my confidence as I go along, thank you. Terrific and we'll come back to you for some more thoughts in just a minute. That's really a great bunch of points and the gender point in particular is one that we all need to be thinking about more and I think we'll discuss as we go forward with your other speakers here, your co-speakers. And what we're gonna do now then and thank you again, Janati for setting the stage is we're gonna go through and hear from a number of our experts from around the world who will talk about various aspects of this challenge of supporting the innovation ecosystem and people like Janati and each one of them represents a different part of the ecosystem. So let's start with minister Duglile of Tanzania. So minister Faustin, if I can call you that, I hope that's all right. That's all right. Thank good. The role of government is so important for creating these ecosystems where innovation and entrepreneurship can thrive. And in many countries, we do see an active role in fostering innovation both locally and nationally from the government. So what is the government of Tanzania doing in regulation and good practices to accelerate entrepreneurship and help make the digital transformation happen more rapidly? Thank you very much, David. The journey of Janati is similar to many journeys of many young people in Africa, Tanzania included. We have a very youth population and who are currently engaged in a number of digital innovations and a digital entrepreneurship. My ministry is relatively very news about seven months old and our role is to make sure that we oversee the digital transformation and that there are a number of things that we have done as a government. One, we have been working on the policies, regulation and legal framework to ensure that we create an enabling ecosystem for the young people and I've met the young people, the startups have had some meetings and to just understand what is going on in the ecosystem. Because this concept of startups, digital entrepreneurship is a relatively new concept to many people in the government services. So as the minister responsible, we wanted to sit down with them to try to understand what their needs, what are their challenges and how we can help organize them around. So on the issues of policy regulatory and the legal framework, we started on working on that. But as a government to also embarking on ensuring that we build the connectivity across the country, the government is investing heavily on building fiber optic cables. We are currently doing around 8,913 kilometers and we want to cover all the districts in Tanzania and have to attain a level about 80% by 2025. But all these are meaningless if young people cannot afford devices. So in the budgets that we have currently passed, we've removed all taxes on laptops, smartphones, modems and tablets, hoping that that was going to drive down the prices of devices in Tanzania. But for young entrepreneurs, we as a government of start doing the coordinations of innovation hubs. This is where the young people with their ideas can come at the government centers, then getting the ideas measured. And the ones that the concept is mature enough, that they enter into incubators. And once that is mature, then you move on to software centers and integrate that with the private sectors. But we've also started working on and identifying who are the key players. So what we've done is to make sure we have started the process of registering, identification, registering, supporting the young entrepreneurs, but also having continued professional development when it's the digital skills. So there's quite a number of things that we've started working on. And we recently had a big project that's going to come, the World Bank Project is called Digital Tanzania. We are going to build some more software centers, but also engage in high-speed research and the beauty capacity of digital interests among young people in Tanzania. Wow. Well, the whole idea of just having a program called Digital Tanzania is inspiring in itself. I'm sure that makes a difference. And I love the idea of getting rid of taxes. Just quickly, is this issue of taxes on devices a problem in a lot of countries? Is that in itself an impediment? We actually don't encounter that quite in that way in the United States. So just quickly talk about why that was necessary. No, it's been, it's a problem in a number of countries. And we saw this is in Tanzania because yes, we have young people, good ideas, but access to smartphones, access to computers and laptops and moderns has been a huge challenge. So as a government, a deliberate move to increase digital penetration and internet usage, because currently, for example, in Tanzania, we have more than 66% internet coverage in the country, but the utilization is less than 30%. So we want to bridge this gap. And we thought that by removing taxes, it's going to stimulate user devices through low-cost devices in Tanzania. Great, well, thank you. We'll be back with you in a little minute. Minister Karidnik, I want to turn to you. You know, Slovenia is currently in the presidency of the EU. So congratulations on that. And in the course of that, your country has placed digitization at the top of its agenda for that presidency. And you've recently presented your position on this and have introduced a number of initiatives oriented toward the digitalization of villages and cities and the use of AI for digital transformation in Slovenia. You've also welcomed the commitment of the Digital Compact 2030 in which the EU as a body will dedicate significant funds to digital transformation. So talk a little bit about the role of entrepreneurship and innovation in accelerating digital transformation from your perspective. Thank you. First allow me to thank you also for having me here today and to congratulate you on organizing such an event. The Slovenian EU presidency takes place in a very challenging time of the COVID-19 pandemic. And therefore our main priorities will be the union's resilience to crisis, EU strategic autonomy and the recovery of the European economy based on the digital and green transition. Digital transformation is on the top of our presidency agenda. This includes improving connectivity, developing secure, efficient digital infrastructure including 5G, safe and open web and cyberspace, resilience to cyber and hybrid threats, improving digital skills, not to forget that, accessible digital public services and creating a favorable environment for the development, testing and use of new technologies. As for innovation, I firmly believe that innovation is a creator of opportunity. Entrepreneurs and small and medium enterprises are an important source of economic growth, job creation and innovation in particular when it comes to the technologies like big data, 5G, cloud computing, the internet of things and artificial intelligence. According to the objectives of the digital compass by 2030, three out of four companies should use cloud computing services, big data and artificial intelligence. More than 90% of SMEs should reach at least basic level of digital intensity and the number of EU unicorns should double. Therefore, the European Commission invests significant amount of funds in the digital transformation of businesses. All relevant EU platforms such as European Digital Innovation Hub Network, European Cluster Collaboration Platform, European Enterprise Network and Startup Europe should support SMEs in their ecosystems in adopting data-driven business models and innovative solutions. It is our goal to raise competitiveness and innovative potential of SMEs. Therefore, we will support closer collaboration of large companies with SMEs and startups. We will enhance partnerships, collaboration, inclusion of SMEs into industrial platforms and clusters on EU level, strengthen their role in this industrial alliances and strengthen their capacity, technological, operational, knowledge-based through the process of innovation and transition towards new technologies. I'm really impressed that you're putting such a high priority on digitization. I think it's the right focus. I have a company called Techonomy, which I started 10 years ago to try to highlight this issue of the importance of technology for progress. It's really been a passion of mine and I'm really impressed that governments of the world and even now as the President of the EU, Sylvania is just taking such a positive and proactive attitude on this key issue. So thank you for that. We'll come back to you in a minute. I want to go to Deana now. So Deana, UNFPA is a leading agency that embraces innovation. It works with technology entrepreneurs and helps develop the ecosystem needed to maintain, to accelerate delivery of the SDGs, which are so important relevant to its mandate. So the SDGs we always have to keep at the top of our thinking on all these things. Tell us about your organizational strategy and how you're thinking about all of this issue of supporting innovation. Thank you very much, David. Dear Doreen, thank you for hosting and David for facilitating this important session. Natalia, my executive director who is traveling would have loved to be here with us. She is the innovator in chief of UNFPA. Warm greetings to all panelists, honorable Karitnik and honorable Ndugun Gili. And all protocol observed, warm greetings to everyone listening to this panel today. At UNFPA, we believe that innovation is a major, major game changer to accelerate progress for the agenda 2030. It's very important. Arising the power of innovation is a key part of our new strategic plan, 2225, to maximize the impact of our intervention and accelerate the progress for women and girls everywhere. On the road to Addis is really a timely action. It's good that this next year will be better prepared. We must be cognizant of the gender divide and the youth power force. We have just listened to some of them here. Just recently as well at the Generation Equality Forum in Paris, UNFPA made a commitment to apply frontier technologies and people's centers innovative solutions to accelerate the realization of our mandate within the brothers to enable development goals which is the agenda 2030. We are very, very lucky to have an innovation oriented executive director because it makes a difference. We have set up a groundbreaking strategy where we engage not only with like-minded organization but mainly we think different organization. This allow us to move towards thinking as co-creator. As co-creator with different organization and build up joint successes with partners and leverage innovative financing for sustainable development goals. Because David, something is true is you need to be win-win. Your co-creator and partner need to have something to gain in it. Moreover, the engagement with female and young technology entrepreneur is a focus on our pathway towards women and girls empowerment. For example, the I Accelerator Initiative launch in Eastern and Southern Africa catalyzes the connection with external innovation ecosystem and support social entrepreneurs. Frontier technologies enable our programs to deliver results in a much more cost efficient way. In Mozambique for instance, the use of artificial intelligence in the digital platform has revolutionized the interaction between health worker and their patient through a communication protocol on mobile devices connecting over 400,000 pregnant women to critical healthcare. Together with our partners we develop life saving apps to help survivor of gender-based violence to receive protection and services like in Armenia, Georgia and Turkey. Bar code reading project in the Philippines ensure that tracking and monitoring system for health commodities. Virtual reality system and SMS based training ensure training of the midwives in remote area in East Timor and other country where physical access is very limited. Digital platform like iCivil enables reliable and quick civil registration of birth in Burkina Faso. In Botswana, in Benin, drones deliver blood and reproductive health commodities to support maternal health program and reduce maternal mortality. And these are just some of the example that make difference in the life of people. The success really is grounded in partnership and in co-creating with the public and private sectors, philanthropies, social entrepreneurs and self-cooperation and very, very importantly through mobilizing domestic resources and building local capacity to transition from funding to financing. So I'm so happy to have two honorable ministers on this call. Thank you, David. I'll stop there for now. Thank you, Dina. And I wanna just quickly ask you something as a senior executive in a UN agency. This issue of innovation and digital transformation seems to have taken such a major positive turn within the entire UN ecosystem in the last few years and particularly under the leadership of this Secretary General. Could you just quickly talk about your perception of that and do you agree with it? Absolutely. Thank you for that question. Absolutely. You know, innovation is really, truly under the leadership of the Secretary General of the UN himself. Because to accelerate, we are in what we call now the UN, the decade of action. This is the time to work, to implement and COVID as slow all processes. So the SG himself has taken under his own leadership innovation as a package. So all agencies are meant to innovate in the work and the job they do every, every single day. And for us, our work is about population, is about people everywhere and the furthest behind, the one who nobody can reach and COVID has really slowed that process. So innovating for us is really using digital technology, using every way in our possibility to make sure that people get the level of development they need in the most rapid way. And maybe what innovation is bringing to the United Nations more is really creating with different kind of partners now. We need the private sector, the foundation, the public sector, everyone together. Because why? Because this world is 50% composed by young people everywhere. And this is the time for digital technology and we should avoid, of course, the divide. That's why all the UN, behind our secretary general and the DSG, the deputy secretary general, we work together hand in hand and I'm so pleased to be here with ITU on this call to make sure that we work more than ever because ITU is essential to innovative way of doing business today to reach the furthest behind. I stop there, David. Thank you, Gina. And obviously, if we don't have connectivity, we can't do any of that stuff. And that's really one of the most central themes we have throughout this entire series that if we've got to connect the world, there's still billions of people left out. That's just unacceptable. I'm sure everyone here will agree with that. And we bring our other speakers on in between each speaker just to reiterate that this is a conversation and anybody could jump in at any time but I'm gonna go to Eric on the phone. Eric, you're CTO of Ericsson, which is one of the world's leading technology companies, a huge facilitator of connectivity, a great leader in 5G, in particular, you yourself are one of the great leaders of 5G I happen to know. And Ericsson has been a great technological leader but one of the challenges that the world faces in facilitating innovation and entrepreneurship is that the solutions for specific communities can be very different depending on the context. So how can a company like Ericsson collaborate with entrepreneurs to ensure that technology solves the problems of the specific communities where the entrepreneurs are operating? Well, thank you for the question, David. And well, there are many ways I think that we can help in terms of both local innovation and also global innovation and having been at the forefront of this technology development and constantly innovating ourselves and pushing the technology envelope. I think there's a few things that we could also share and help the bigger community to innovate on top of mobile infrastructure. I think it's great to hear from Yanati and the other panelists here, fantastic examples given. I mean, that's a drone delivery services that was mentioned. Some of the innovation on top of 3G, 4G and now 5G, they really make use of the network at the same time as, say, of course, pioneering completely new services, even changing business models. So I think this is really a great opportunity in front of us. But let me hit on a few items to start with and of course, starting with the network then. You mentioned 5G, David. And although 5G will take some time before we reach full population around the world, 3.5 billion 5G subscription by end of 2026. Already at the end of this year, 2021, we will have half a billion. So it's happening quite fast actually. But that doesn't mean that we cannot innovate on top of 4G or for that matter, 2G, 3G as well. But then a little bit more than about why 5G is so important for this innovation, whether it's local or global. And it really comes back to the fact that it's an infrastructure that's built in an open fashion that means that you can innovate with new high quality services, which hasn't really been the case in the past. So one of the concepts that we are introducing is what we call network slicing. And this is really about lowering the cost of experimentation or innovation. In fact, it really starts with connectivity everywhere. But then when you have that, you want to ensure that you have high performance connectivity underneath. I think the pandemic has underlined that more than ever before. That you wanna make sure that you have access to a good network service, even if you're an innovator, building your app, building your new service on top of the infrastructure. And that's really where some of these innovative technologies comes in. You have your, basically your private network or your virtual network on top of the infrastructure that's built out by operators. And this of course means that you can start to generate revenues. You can start to create services that have higher performance. And it also allows you then to work with other ecosystem partners in a more broader and shared innovation space, where some of these functionality weren't available before and now they are available. So you can actually start to pioneer some of those most advanced services. But again, it comes back to the fact that networks need to be built out. And when it comes to 5G, by 2026, we estimate that some 60% of the world population will actually have 5G coverage. But that's simply not enough. We think that we should promote further acceleration of this through updating national broadband agendas. And there is ways to really do that. So I think this is one of the tools that comes to mind. And then of course just having connectivity in the first place is really what helps to spearhead some of this local innovation. One such item where we are working together with ITUD and UNICEF is on education because while we of course want to promote commercial services, work with startups, work with small, medium enterprises around the world to get access to 4G and 5G, education is one of those key things where the infrastructure really can make a big difference. And that's really one of the things that we hope now through the Giga project to be able to accelerate even further. And basically ensuring that every child can have broadband network connectivity and access to the world's knowledge and information through 3G, 4G and now 5G. So I think that will also help with spurring innovation for generations to come. Just a few thoughts, David. Thank you, Eric, and we'll be back to you in a minute. Thank you for that. And just a quick note, just to keep in mind, I'm gonna ask you later in the next segment to talk about 5G and climate. Because if we wanna talk about an area where innovation is needed and entrepreneurship is needed, and my own enthusiasm is great for the ability of a much more digitized connected world where everything is measured as 5G enables. And so just, I'm just setting the stage for a second half here. I'm very passionate about that myself. Alexa, I wanna go to you. At the International Finance Corporation, you lead a team that advises the private sector on disruptive technologies and how they open new tech opportunities around the world. And you've worked a lot on initiatives that use technology to close gender gaps in emerging markets. So talk about diversity and inclusion when we're trying to build innovation and entrepreneurship and how critically connected they are. Thank you, David. And I wanna pick up on Diane's points earlier about really connecting innovation, which is really at its hardest means coming up with new effective solutions with underserved populations, including women and other groups that really aren't participating in the digital economy as much as they could be. One of the best ways to drive innovation is just making sure that the needs or ideas of underserved groups are brought to the foreground. And over and over again at IFC, we find that addressing these underserved groups, both drives business and development impact. And certainly that's the case for disruptive technologies as well. So just a few examples from our work. So for instance, just last month, we launched some work with Jumiya and Lazada, so two leading e-commerce platforms in Africa and Southeast Asia respectively, that found that the e-commerce models was bringing when more women into the digital economy, but there were still really substantial gender gaps in terms of how many women were selling online and how much they were selling. And if we close those gaps, we could add over $300 billion to the value of those two regional e-commerce markets. And so that's absolutely the penultimate example of finding a way that brings closest gender gaps, but also grows businesses. And we can do that in a number of ways that can include bringing women on for more social commerce models. So for instance, women might be more inclined to sell via Facebook message rather than an official platform and helping them make that jump can make their businesses much more effective. We can do that through better training and support by better fintech models to make sure that the types of access to finance gaps that we've already heard about can be addressed through incoming models and really just getting women into industries that where they're underrepresented but are often the most profitable. And so kind of leveraging platforms like the world of e-commerce is a great way to make that happen. But again, this is really just one example. We've found this over and over again that it's not just about the business models but also about of course the teams that are making that innovation happen. So for instance, we did a research piece on private equity and venture capital that found that when the investment teams are gender mixed, so not just all men, but a combination of the two, they have better investment outcomes and their return on investments are 10 to 20% higher than just an all-male or an all-female team. And so this is super important because of course, for women to be the leaders and entrepreneurs of the future, they need to get the financing to make that happen, particularly in the tech sector. So that really, we need to look at this innovation from a very rounded perspective, from all the way from financing to kind of business model development onwards. Thank you. I wanna just ask you one quick follow-up. I'm somebody who's been covering the tech industry for decades and we know that the teams that produce the technology that the world is essentially operating on have historically overwhelmingly, as you point out, been a bunch of young guys, typically macho young guys who are not terribly sensitive, don't have a lot of emotional intelligence, don't really have much experience of communities aside from their own. I mean, there's an amazing book called Brotopia that my friend Emily Chang at Bloomberg wrote, which really underscores just how macho really, the Silicon Valley communities. So do you think that you see any signs that we are breaking through that block log jam, which really, I think has inhibited the rest of the world from using technology the way they could? Yeah, Brotopia is a great book. I would 100% recommend it to anyone who's looking for a good read. And I think, of course, it's not just a gender divide, it's a regional divide. It's a regional divide. It's around being in underserved communities of all types. I do see a little bit of a silver lining in a switch to more remote global ways of working because it's so much easier to have those type of conversations that don't rely on a single community now. And honestly, there's just absolutely no excuse not to be having them. So I do think there, a little bit of an optimist in this and that I think innovation in the emerging markets, in particularly with disruptive technology can leapfrog a lot of what's happening in just the very narrow world of Silicon Valley. And I think a lot of the most interesting ideas with that will continue to come from those global markets. Yeah, great. Well, it's interesting the idea that maybe the pandemic with all of its terrible consequences because it's caused us to learn to work remotely better may actually be helping with this key issue. So thank you for noting that. Okay, now we're gonna go to a quick video, another video, so let's just play it and comment on it afterwards. There is a commonly held belief that behind every great idea, every great product and every great service ever created, there's always a story of success. Well, the truth is that innovation cannot exist without failure. Every entrepreneur must be prepared to face multiple steps in the creation of their venture and also be prepared to cross what some have called the valley of death. All new products and services must pass through this strenuous stage before they reach the market. Many come out of the valley of death successfully, but others never make it. The valley of death is especially risky for innovators. Numerous obstacles might scare off investors and threaten the viability of a great idea as well as the resiliency of entrepreneurs. But out of that process, there are always important lessons to be learned. Falling into the valley of death is an important experience for entrepreneurs. It teaches them essential lessons on failure, resourcefulness, and on innovation itself. To get through the valley of death, entrepreneurs need collaboration, venture capital, incubators, and accelerators, support services, skills training, and public procurement, and a wider net of stakeholders and support. Are you currently stuck in the valley of death? What lessons have you learned? What are you doing to help entrepreneurs get across successfully? That's a great video. I have to say when I was looking at it and I saw that guy holding up the tablet because they just talk about the failure, inevitability of failure, I thought he was gonna drop the tablet, so because that kind of stuff happens too. Well, look, it's true that people in many parts of the world, all over the world, often underestimate the challenge of entrepreneurship. So let's go back to Jannadi for a second here. I'm not gonna call it the valley of death, that's just too scary, but tell us a little bit about some of the failures that you've experienced and I hope triumphed over in your work with Solanette metering Uganda. And just give us your perspective on this issue of failure and how you dealt with it. Thank you, David. Well, honestly speaking, when I had first started out, I didn't know how to run a company. I had never co-founded a company before, so it was my very first. I had to do a lot of research to really understand what works and what doesn't work. And as Alia mentioned, the issue of not having a policy in place to support the effective integration of net metering on Uganda's grid was a huge barrier. So for the first one year, after I registered the company in 2019, I didn't do anything in 2019. I really didn't know how to proceed. I was stuck for some time and then I had to consult with the various stakeholders on how to proceed. I had to meet my team over and over again to restrategize. And then you see in Uganda, we do have support groups. We do have setup communities. We do have government agencies in place to support initiatives like my own. The challenge that we have is that these support organizations are not well coordinated. So I kept on moving from one end to the other end, to the other end, trying to figure out how these different bodies interact to make the ecosystem work. And I think this is something you have to do on your own as an entrepreneur. You have to figure out how the different bodies interact and who's going to help you achieve this. So when I figured that out, I was able to make some progress. And the other thing that I think works is as an entrepreneur, it's important for you to test your products, to continuously test your products and to be willing to accept feedback. Keep testing your products until you come up with a minimum viable product to put on the markets. If you're designing, for example, if your innovation is targeted towards improving the lives of the people in the village, have them on board, have the local area leaders on board to help you with the design. Because you might design something for them and then they'll reject it. So you need to have the different stakeholders on board to help you in this. Another thing that worked for me is being a part of a professional network. Networks such as the IEEE, the ITU Generation Connects, these organizations that are committed to advancing the youth strategy. And they gave me a platform to interact with the different key players to know that I'm not the only one out here. There are several people like me and other people have been able to go through the same things and overcome those challenges. So I also be able to overcome the challenges. And I do think that the government agencies as well as other support groups should be well coordinated. Everyone should be listening to everyone else. They should be able to design and implement digital innovation policies that incorporate things like access to digital literacy training like Foster mentioned. Things like designing internet enabled devices that meets the needs of the users, quality technical support devices and so on. Finally, as an entrepreneur, I think it's important for you to have the courage to look at the bigger picture in every situation. You might not get it the first time but it doesn't mean that you failed. So be willing to continue as you try. You keep trying until you make it. Thank you. Really good. Thank you so much, Janati. And let's go straight to Faustine from the Tanzania since you're really working on those very issues that she just described. This idea of the entrepreneur figuring out what the ecosystems are, for example, that's something I know as even even starting a media company in New York that was challenging for me when I did that which I can't say happened to successfully. It was okay. But talk about the collaboration and support mechanisms that you're trying to put in place or you have put in place in Tanzania. Thank you very much, David. What we are doing in Tanzania is one, the ministry that I'm currently heading is a very new ministry. It's about seven months old. It's called the Minister of Communication and Information Technology. And our role is make sure that we coordinate the sector and to also coordinate the other ministry and also the private sector because when you're talking about digital innovations and digital ecosystem, this needs to be properly coordinated, having proper policies in place, the regulatory mechanism in place but including the legal framework. So we are working on making sure that we have digital innovation policies in places but also making sure that the legal framework is available for the young startups and the entrepreneurs to be able to thrive and prosper. But again, the other area that we are currently waiting on is the laboratory sandboxes because these young entrepreneurs, they have their products, they would want to test them into the systems but the system is very rigid in terms of accepting new ideas. So we are trying to work on creating regular sandboxes to ensure that these young people with their technology and the innovations are able to prosper. I also mentioned the issues of some innovation hubs, accelerates and the soft centers that we currently working on to ensure that we properly coordinate, properly funded and making sure that they are properly utilizes. But the other area that we are seeing and for me, which is a challenge that I'm seeing is a challenge to the issue of funding. It's a very difficult part and I think Janat mentioned that in an earlier presentation because these young people, they have other ideas, they have, they don't have the money. So getting people to believe in them, to invest in them has been a very challenge because currently in the current set of the banks would not support those kinds of ideas. So we are grappling and trying to think within the government. Uh-oh, I think got a little issue there. Oops, Doreen, can you hear him? No, I cannot. No, I think we lost him momentarily. Bosteen, we seem to have lost you there for a second. You were coming through so beautifully too and I love what you were saying. But let's go to Bosjan. On a similar point, I'd like you to just talk about it maybe at the level of the EU, right? It's the same issue of creating communities, ecosystems, supporting collaboration with entrepreneurs at the governmental level and creating a conducive environment. Talk about some media, talk about the EU. How do you look at it? Thank you for your question. I'm sorry, my colleague couldn't finish, but if he connects again, I will be glad to give a gap for him to tell the rest of his answer. Well, one of the Slovenian's main priorities during the EU presidency will be the recovery of the European economy based on the digital and green transition, as I already emphasized. Recovery and resilience plans are one of the most important instruments for accelerating digital transition of our economies, including through investment. The Slovenian presidency will strive for their implementation as soon as possible, of course. And the framework of the national recovery plans, the following highlights are crucial for the field of digitalization. Reforms of the digital transition, so for the digital transition, administrative simplifications for companies with a single registration and identity of companies and cross-border multi-country European projects. The objectives of the reform for the digital transformation of companies is to increase innovation, productivity, and added value to the economy. It will be based on the internet of things, machine learning, including automatization, robotics, virtual reality, 3D printing, and additive manufacturing. The second is artificial intelligence, and the third is a blockchain technology. Also, the platforms from connecting advanced technologies and implementing digital twins are important, and of course, not to forget, promoting the development of digital competences. Well, those are great things. I'm so glad that you're so immersed in this language. It's really exciting. And I think that we now have Faustin back. We lost you for a second there. Just finish the thought. I'm not sure exactly where you were when we lost you, but just back, can you rewind like 30 seconds or so? Oh, now you're muted. Sorry. You're muted. Okay. Faustin, you're muted now. Sorry. But we got you clear. Go ahead. So what I was trying to say before the code dropped was that we are trying to put everything in place, but one of the challenges that we are currently seeing is the financing of these digital entrepreneurs and the startups. And this is something that we want to understand as a government, and trying to put a place mechanism to make sure that these young people who are coming with a very bright, brilliant ideas and a very innovative ideas, how can we support them? How can we finance their ideas, understanding some of these ideas and not going to survive amongst startups, usually some fail and some succeed? But how do we support them? How do we put a mechanism in place to make sure that these brilliant ideas are supported until the end? So this is what I wanted to say before the code dropped. Great. Well, thank you. And I think it's very exciting that your ministry exists and you seem like the right guy to lead it. And I also would say, if you look at the Q and A, there's a guy named John from Uganda who I think wishes that you were the minister there. But anyway, so Dine, I love your smile, by the way, let's go to you. So you're working closely with the ITU on a project in Benin to develop and nurture sustainable digital innovation ecosystems with a heavy emphasis on gender inclusion. So based on that experience in this weird COVID and we hope post COVID context, what are some lessons you're learning? Thank you. Thank you very much, David. And please allow me before reply to your specific question, I really would like to go back on something you said that was so important in saying that we are learning through the pandemic and allow me to quote for all of us here, Nelson Mandela. He says, I never lose. I either win or learn. And that's exactly what COVID is giving, providing us with and that's we're using and perfectly true for innovation. And also, I think this is the time, as you mentioned, to get to G5 everywhere is important that we use extensively the blue and the green energy because those are the major stepping stone today everywhere. Now, thank you very much for acknowledging our success, successful partnership with ITU in Benin, where really we've joined a force based on co-creation and robust design. We are enabling young people to leverage digital solution to advance the progress for women and girls. And you rightly said the pandemic has been one of the biggest challenges of our recent time, but these have also accelerated the development of national innovation ecosystems. And Honorable Fostin just mentioned some of those. He exists now. And it has emphasized the need to learn and adopt technology in program delivery to foster the leaving no behind strategy. That's so important. I think Axora mentioned it as well. We also learned that we need to really keep the space for solution inclusive enabling co-creation with all stakeholder and beneficiary. I really put an emphasis on the co-creation part. It's a win-win situation. Whether responding to gender based violence from mobile technology or delivering sexual and reproductive health services through telemedicine or health commodities by drone, these would not be possible to be achieved in isolation. That's why our partnership with ITU is so important in Benin. And we hope to expand it since it's reached out the neighboring country up to Nigeria and Ghana. As we mark more than a year after the COVID-19, we have used digital technology to reach and serve young women and girls with information services and to gather data and information in lockdown context. So investing in supporting local ecosystem and will on collective brain power for young people is really a smart investment. And this investment, of course, also opens doors to a new generation led by example of their peers in addressing social problem. And as you say in the chat, but there is so much information there. That help us generate income as they are often the entrepreneur of for tech solution. And I think the new African Trade Agreement everywhere linked to smart Africa, for instance, would be a good vehicle for all young people on this call coming from Africa. Building together, working closely with the ecosystem, ensuring sustainability and accelerating opportunities for scale up as well as provide a support system for innovator is crucial. That's why we need partnership. That's why we need financing for development. That's why we need domestic resources to help young people everywhere. And this is true for any time, but become more critical now during this crisis and toward really implementing our sustainable development goal. So there are endless opportunities to create it by digital technology through innovation. And with ITU, if really we harness this well everywhere with co-creation and strong partnership, I think we really will be able to catalyze achievement of the development goals with significant impact on health and gender equality. And this will help us to work on the gender divide. Thank you. I'll stop there. Thanks, Dina. And while listening to you, I really just hope that all the panelists here keep working together. There's some really amazing energy on this session with great, great ideas. And I love your Mandela quote too. Let's go back to Eric. Eric, we've heard a lot about ecosystems and helping entrepreneurs and startups innovate by connecting through an understanding the complexity of the system in which they work. And of course, companies like Ericsson have a huge advantage because they're so long established and so deeply intertwined with the global ecosystems of tech. But how do we leverage those resources for entrepreneurs? And if you can weave in the question I asked you before, I'm really interested in 5G as a tool for climate. So I'm just eager to hear anything you might want to say about that as well. Absolutely. Well, I think these things and first of all, great discussion among the panelists here. I think you're absolutely right, David, that there is a shared understanding of what needs to be done and it can be accelerated. And that's also what we see by looking around the world in terms of building this next wave of innovation, including sustainability on strong digital infrastructure, strong networks, strong 4G and 5G networks because that's really the backbone of all the innovation that we've seen over the last 10, 15 years in digital. But I think if we look at that across the world, there's so much more to be done than what we've tapped into so far. So upgrading from 2G to 3G, 3G to 4G, 4G to 5G is really the most cost efficient way to do that. And that also connects back to what I said about how this needs to be stakeholders working together across policy, technology and markets because it is the only way to really accelerate it. I mentioned the upgrades of broadband plans and really leveraging the latest technology than 5G. Sandboxes were also mentioned as a great example. We are very much for that, working both locally and globally with testing out new ideas in sandboxes because that actually helps us to find both the technology as well as the business models that will then carry us over into the next wave when 5G is really becoming this open innovation platform. But maybe on your questions of sustainability because it's so clearly connected to digital infrastructure, our estimates is that as much as one third of the emissions reductions that we're planning for the world by 2030. So the halving of emissions by 2030, one third of that is actually possible to reduce only with digital and 5G is a big part of that. And in many cases, a power in itself by renewable energy. So the newest technology will actually allow us to break the energy curve as we say. So we will, despite having more traffic in the networks, we will actually, by using the latest technology not consume more energy in absolute terms, which is a fantastic thing. Today, ICT is about 1.4% of global emissions and we will work hard to limit that as much as possible. But what we see is when we apply this technology, 4G and 5G into other sectors, transportation, logistics, all the things that we see now with reduced traveling and working digital, but it's so much more about efficiency and smart manufacturing and all the other things, you can easily get the 10-time improvement. So that is really the fantastic change agent that we see. And maybe also back to what some mentioned about learning and education. I mentioned the Giga project, which we think is a great project connect all the schools, having broadband connections with 5G and 4G all of those. But that is also really a democratizing way for empowering basically everyone to take part in this new economy and not the least empowering girls and women in this transition. So I'm actually very optimistic, very positive now that we will take this opportunity to further accelerate the build out of digital infrastructure and the learnings that we've had over the last 15, 18 months that clearly indicate that this is something we have to do. Really good. And I think anybody who isn't worried about the climate now and doesn't focus on that as part of their work in some way is making a major mistake and letting us all down. It's terrifying how urgent it has become. Okay, I want to bring Denola in. Denola, there you are. I see you on the top. Bring you into the, there you are. So tell us, what have you got from your community or questions that you would ask yourself? I have a few questions from the audience but we want to continue this dialogue with you helping us out. Thank you so much, David. It was such a fascinating conversation and there are a couple of questions on Twitter that I'll go through and hopefully we'll have some time to also go through some of the others from the audience. But first of all, I have to shout out Emanuella from our Generation Connect Africa group because she's been super active in the chat as well as on Twitter as well. So thank you so much Emanuella for that. So one of the interesting questions I'm seeing on Twitter, this is under the Generation Connect hashtag. So if you still want to get your question in, you can just tweet right now and use the hashtag generation connect is basically asking what role do you think, and it's not direct to any panellists in particular. So if you want to answer it, please feel free. But what role do you think education can play in fostering digital innovation, especially among youth? What are good practices in this area? And then another question that kind of stood out to me as well was how can digital innovation help ensure a better future for younger generations? What does the best case scenario look like? So essentially the key themes coming through are around, how do we interweave this with the experiences of young people today and making sure the experiences are going to kind of improve. But in terms of standout quotes, someone quoted the quote from the minister, Hortnick saying innovation is a creative opportunity that will definitely stand out moment. And someone also quoted Dien as well, when she said, we must be cognizant of the gender divide and the youth power force in digital innovation. So it's such a great discussion happening. And then the final tweet I wanted to raise is this one saying connected, coordinated and collaborative communities around the world are so important for innovation. How can governments, community stakeholders and community stakeholders work together towards a coordinated digital innovation effort? So I think two main things will be great to comment on really about how young people can really be empowered with digital technology today and then also the collaboration piece. So we have the government, we have the private sector, we have community actors. How can the coordination efforts kind of be stronger? And it's great because I think on the panel, we have representatives from all of these groups say it'll be great to hear views on that from the generation community. I have a suggestion, Bosjan, why don't you touch on this education point and talk about especially educating people to become entrepreneurs and help them get over the fears like in Europe, it's often been said, you know, there's a fear of failure that's in the past at least slowed down entrepreneurship. Just talk about how you think of the challenge for education in Europe and globally and don't forget to unmute. Great, thank you very much. Also for the unmuting signal. Well, me myself, I always say that I have a smartphone which has probably 1,000 functions. I use 20, my daughter, which is 14, uses 100, the last is unused. So there's a large gap even in my knowledge and what we can see that the gap in knowledge, the digital gap actually kind of collaborates with the social gap. So I think educating, empowering with digital tools is something that is a intra-generation issue which is the most important issue. We can build all the infrastructure if we cannot use it, if we're not able to use it or don't know how to use it, it's useless. So this is something that we really want to address. We also have a special project forming that will enable also non-governmental organizations in Slovenia to approach different social groups, elderly, socially, let's say endangered and try to help them get the knowledge rid of the fear and get digitally included. Also the motto of the European Union regarding that issue is nobody has to be left behind. So we have to include them all. What I also want to say always, I came from the startup community and what you mentioned, David is true. In the US, they say you fail nine times, you succeed for the first time in Europe. If you fail once or twice, banks don't give you any money for the next startup. So it's really a different mindset that we have to change because gain is always on the edge, not where the comfort zone is. You cannot gain profit in the comfort zone or it's seldomly successful. So that's my view. Thank you. Really good point. Thank you. And you said that very nicely. I like that. Danila, I think any of our other panelists could touch on this youth issue, but who would you like to hear from in particular? Why don't you just tell, why don't you get all the rest of them to talk about that? I think it would be really great if Dien spoke about it because I think she was touching on something around this earlier when she said, we need to think about the youth component as well as the gender component. So perhaps you could elaborate more on that point. Thank you. Thank you very much for the privilege. And on behalf of all my co-panelists, I'll go on to that. Yes, I think we need and we need to remain cognizant of the gender divide and the youth power force. If I take only Africa, the median age in Africa is 19 year old, 19. 19. So when I see senior people like a senior in terms of function, like Honorable Faustin, but I'm sure he's a very young man and Honorable Baustian who's been very young as well. Well, it's important that we co-create together. We sit together. That's why I'm very grateful to ITU and to you, to you, Debbie, to put us together. I'm so happy to be here because we need to be cognizant of the youth force will change the world. And they're not the leader of tomorrow. I don't believe into that. They're the leader of today. Exactly what you said about creating several time and you succeed the nine time or the 10 time, well, they need to start early. So that's why any failure is a winning possibility for any of them. And we need to help them. But everything should be winning. Nobody enter in a partnership if they don't have something to win in it. We know it. We all know it. You want something from your mom or your dad, studied good in class, do something that, you know, they let you go on Saturday night. It's exactly the same thing for innovation. We have to make sure that first, as adults, or a little bit more senior, we listen to them because they know better. Honorable Bocian say it so well. I know only five function of my telephone. My son, well, he knows little bit, let's say at least 60% of it. Okay, so we need to learn from them. Otherwise, we will not. Something, and Honorable first seen and Bocian please listen to your young people. Have this kind of panel, you know, and co-think with them because they will give you the solution for the FDAC, the African Trade Agreement. Maybe you'll have in your country more agreement from those young people. Alexia was mentioning all these disabled people. There's so many people who needs to make a difference today. So, you know what I would say is continue to create. We have, we need to take advantage of the route to be on route to Addis with ITU and every agency really. And under the leadership of the secretary general to work with each and single of you. We have a great innovation team in our work. I work for them. You know, anytime they said, you did well, I'm very proud of myself because David says something that is important for all of us. Is the climate change? Whether you are from the Sahel, you know, you have too much, so not enough water. Whether you are from a big forest from in Amazonia or in Congo DRC, or if you're lucky to have everything, you need to manage it. We need to manage it, not for the generations tomorrow, for the generations of today, because we're already late. So if that will be the word I would like to say, your climate should be at really, is the stepping stone for what we do. And of course, connectivity everywhere. I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you so much, Diane. That's really powerful. And I think I'm going to come to Jeanette next, since she's represented our Generation Connect community. So building on the question that we got from Twitter around young people, I kind of want to build on it a bit to what you were saying about your experience in 2019, when you just set up your business and you had this year, where you're trying to figure things out. So if you could just reflect a bit into that moment, what do you wish was present in terms of digital technology or availability of support that you think would have really made that year just a bit better to have supported you as a young female entrepreneur starting out? Thank you, Danola. Well, I think there are quite a number of factors that could have enabled me to really pick up from the very beginning. But I do think that I needed support as regards encouraging me to move on, because there are so many people who told me, this can't work. This can't work. There's no policies. There's nothing going to do about it. Just, so that support that I needed was in terms of, you need to move on. You need to get this going. It will work, restrategize. I needed funds. I needed somebody to believe in that idea from the very first point. And that is something that I needed a lot. I think I also needed a team that was dedicated because the team I had initially had, like I said, had a lot going on. Some were students, some were not. Different country. I was best in Kampala. It was not easy for us to convene. And eventually I sorted that out. And I also needed to have somebody to help me understand how the different players in the industry interact to make the ecosystem work. I had to figure that out on my own. And I think it's the same case for a lot of young entrepreneurs in Uganda. You really, you get into something. I don't know a lot about it. And you have to get someone else to give you the insights. And I also needed mentors. I needed mentors from all angles. People who give me that insight on the difficulties on my face. And I think I also needed coaching on how to run a company, some bit of training. Because I had the training theoretically, but I didn't have the training practically. Maybe that comes with experience. Yes, it does. But I think I also needed that. And I also needed a mentor like myself, a female leader in the business to help me, like to help me believe in myself much more to know that I can actually do it too. And yeah, I think that's it. Thank you. Thank you so much, Janaki. I'll hand over to David now. Yeah, that's really helpful. I love what you just said, Janaki. You're very honest. And I think really the kind of thing that a lot of people on this call can learn from. So thank you so much. We're going to move to the next phase of our session here, the Word Cloud Exercise. One of our favorites, and any of you who've been to these past sessions know it's a key feature of the Road to Addis. So I'm going to ask each panelist to tell me, in just one word, what they would most like to see coming out of the WTDC conference next June in Addis Ababa, which is all about building connectivity and building digital transformation for the world through connectivity. So I'm going to call their name, and then they're going to say their word. So let's start with Doreen. Thank you, David. I'm going to say impact. Good word. Janaki. Thank you. My one word is hope. Beautiful. Faustin. Hope you got on mute. Collaborations. Good. Faustin. Innovation. Great. Dine. Hope creation. Eric. Inclusion. Good. Alexa. Change. Change. Good. OK. Danola, your word, and then give us the word for your community. My word is transformation. But this week, we asked the Generation Connect Arab States group to share their word. And the most popular word was innovation. Great. All right. Well, our great colleague, Anna, will assemble that word cloud. And we'll see it in a second. And now let me turn the floor over to Doreen for some closing remarks about what I think has been a really remarkably interesting session. Thank you, David. And thank you, everyone. It's been a terrific discussion. Fascinating. I think we've all learned lots. I think, David, for me, what maybe came across very clearly and Danola, you picked up on this, that every challenge can be an opportunity. We heard that innovation is the game changer, as Diana noted, or the creator of opportunity, as is excellency from Slovenia noted. And what we heard today is really how we can make it work, how to stay out of Death Valley, how do we keep trying until we make it? And what are the key issues for success? And just to share quickly, David, some of the key takeaways for me, we heard the need to look at innovation holistically. We heard that from Alexa, the importance of the policy issues. That's always something, no matter what we talk about, that's critical. Those digital innovation policies, the opportunities for sandboxing, experimentation. Of course, Diana, as you mentioned, we can win or we can continue learning. So I think that's also a key issue there when we think about experimentation. The importance of infrastructure. We always remember there's 3.6 billion people not connected, so infrastructure, as Eric was noted, had noted, is absolutely key. And with that sustainability, we heard from many of you the importance of gender, women needing to be involved. We need women leaders who can also be mentors and role models and inspire the next generation of groundbreaking innovators. We heard about the importance of support systems, about coaching. We have, David, a great project that we run with the Enhanced Integrated Framework, where we're working with women farmers to help them create businesses and bring their agricultural products to business. And I think that's a great example of support systems, as well as coaching and mentoring. We also heard about the challenges around access to capital, particularly for women. That can be a big issue. We need to do more there. And also the importance of accessibility and affordability. We heard about the great examples in Tanzania, taking the tax off of devices. I think that's a commendable step, and hopefully others will follow. The importance of design, and David, we saw a lot of comments on accessibility issues and what were we doing for persons with disabilities. And I think that design component and having the right stakeholders there when design discussions begin is absolutely critical. We also heard about the need to strengthen digital competencies. That's something where we've tried to step up and help countries in digital literacy training, new business models being needed. And of course, I think Eric had a good point when he spoke about democratizing technology so everyone can take part of it. And of course, I think our GIGA initiative with Erickson, with UNICEF, and others is a great example of an innovative groundbreaking partnership. And of course, that piece about co-creation, and Diana, you mentioned that a few times, that's so critical. And the need to work across all stakeholder groups, especially young people, I can also attest, I probably use five functions on my iPhone. My kids certainly use more. And finally, I think the sort of underscoring message, the importance of innovation as a critical enabler to achieve the 2030 agenda. And the need for all of us to really harness the power of innovation. This is the decade of action as we've heard. And by innovating with digital technologies, I think it's our only hope to be able to leapfrog, leapfrog the opportunities and actually achieve the 2030 agenda. So thanks again. It's been great. And I really appreciate all of the terrific interaction. Back to you, David. Well, thank you, Doreen, to you and to your amazing team for putting this session together. I mean, these sessions have all been really great. And this one in particular is resonating with me. Let's go to Jim Rogers and see how it has resonated with him in his graphical language. Jim, are you there? Hi, David, yeah. This session was so great. There's been so many ideas out of it. I'm still rushing to catch up with everything. There's been so much good stuff through it. But yeah, it's really coming together. Hopefully you can see it there. It's been so really good. Can we get rid of me for a second so we can just see Jim's graphic really a little bit bigger just for a second so we can really see the drawing. Oh, beautiful. Okay, good. Yeah, I'm getting through every idea slowly but surely. But yeah, it's been a really inspiring session. And what did I say? The people really look like themselves. I'm very impressed with you for that actually doing that in real time. Okay, and this is gonna be available to everybody after the fact, we can refer to it. It'll help inspire us, print it out, whatever you wanna do. And Danola, I'd like to come back to you, bring you back in again for a second just to get any final reactions that you have to this conversation or that you summarize from your community. What do you think we'd like to do? Thank you so much, David. I think this conversation is so insightful for me. The reflection I have at this point is just remembering that there is no monopoly on innovation. Young people everywhere are so innovative. They have so many ideas and oftentimes the difference between what's a success or what people get to find out about is basically just the enabling environment and just how important it is for young people to have this enabling environment and people to support them. As Jeanette was saying, not just with the skills and so on but actually with belief in the ideas as well and for them to feel supported. And this is what we need to do to solve the pressing challenges of today such as climate change and so on. And I just wanna invite everyone who might be interested in the work that we're doing with young people to support amazing inspiring young people all over the world that really wanna have a voice in the digital development dialogue at Generation Connect. Please connect with us to find out more because we would love to collaborate with anyone that wants to kind of work on this with us. So thank you all so much. And again, this was such an interesting conversation. I'll be watching it back for more inspiration. Thank you, David. Thank you, Nala. And I look forward to you as you go forward in your career helping make this happen at more and more interesting parts of the UN. I can see that coming down the road. Thank you. Let's go to our word cloud and see what we came up with with everybody's great words for what's gonna come out of WTDC. Anna did it again. Okay. Inclusion, innovation really did, innovation is our theme but it really is something we all have to keep at the front of our minds, co-creation, impact, transformation, hope change. And this word cloud is gonna grow with the other words from the other sessions. So I think maybe in our final session of this part of the road to Addis which won't be the last of it, by the way, in September, we maybe we'll see all the words together. I hope that's what we're gonna do. I don't wanna embarrass Anna by asking her that right now. But so what an amazing session. Now, our next session will be on August 12th focusing on youth. Oh, great. We're seeing all our panelists again get them on screen. I hope you'll all be with us August 12th. And if you have four minutes please complete the survey on this session to help improve the quality of these sessions. You can find the link to the survey in the chat right now and just click on it and fill it out after the fact. So here's our whole series of road to Addis sessions we've had thus far and we're continuing. We started in November, we've done partnerships, inclusion, financing, leadership. Today we did innovation, August 12th we do youth, then we wrap up on in September but I think there's more to come Doreen, right? After that, good. Now that we've got a little more time to prep for WTDC we've got some other cool ideas to bring you and continuing this series. So Doreen, any final thoughts that I have forgot to mention? I think you've covered it all, David. Just a big thanks to you and thanks again to our amazing panelists. Well, thank you panelists. Really, you were all really great and I really do seriously hope you'll all continue talking with each other because there's a lot of great ideas and energy here and this issue is so central as you've all said. So thank you, keep innovating, have a great evening afternoon or in my case morning or if you're in North America like me, wherever you are, thank you for being here and we're so happy all 230 of you who are still here. That's really exciting that you were all able to join us. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.