 Welcome to the Global Symposium for Regulators, GSR23, which is being held in Shamal Shake in Egypt. I've got the great pleasure of being joined in the studio this morning by engineer Hossam El-Gamal, who is the chair of this year's conference. Mr El-Gamal, thank you very much indeed for being with us today. Thank you so much. Pleasure is mine. I really welcome you again to the GSR in Egypt. Well, it's a pleasure to be here. Now, Egypt's involvement with the ITU has been long-standing and influential. Perhaps you could provide us with a few insights on how this partnership originated. Ah, OK. This is, let's say, a long history. Maybe you can go back 5,000 years before, maybe 3,000 PC. And really, my friend, I want you to make some research on one lady called Sishet. Sishet is one of the old pharaons. She was handling the administrative issue for the whole kingdom, for the king. She was in Luxor and she was the first to try to record the data as a data center. So that's why you can see it's a woman and handling the data collection. I think from this point, we start thinking about databases, data centers. Then almost 150 years back, Egypt joined the ITU as a member. We are in the council since 1973, so almost 50 years. Hosting a lot of major events like WRC 19, Fiji 19, GSR 2016, and now we are 2023. So the last thing also, we have something called EGATRIC, which is an academy which got accredited by ITU recently. So I think it's a very long way from the cooperation. Absolutely. And going back to Egypt's hosting ITU events, as you mentioned, GSR 23 this year in Shamar Sheikh. Egypt's, of course, as you mentioned, hosted the GSR 16. It's almost seven years since then, how time flies. How do you see the changes in the landscape in the telecom regulatory framework, particularly in Egypt? Well, first of all, I like number seven. Always number seven has some mystery. So that's why you can see in the opening speech, I focused on seven. You know, during these seven years, it will be a remarkable era in the mind of the humankind. To be honest with you, for these seven years, I will just mention COVID-19. This changed the whole norms. And this norm, it's not only about user, it was about family. Because you can imagine all this family stay at home, but still kids want to play, entertain, educate. Parents still want to work, earn money. So I always believe regulators must have flexibility to absorb the changes, even to predict the changes. So that's why by that time, I believe all regulators start to rethink about the regulations, about how to issue new frameworks to absorb such kind of changes. So that's why all minds start to move to accessibility, adoption, use. And for these people who are connected, they start to think how to make them productive, valuable connectivity. So I think that was the biggest and major change during this time. Let's go back to the regulators. I wanted to ask you, in your opinion, what are the key qualities and characteristics that effective regulators should possess in today's fast pace and complex telecommunications environments? You said they need to be predicting the future pretty much. Exactly. I will tell you something. This time in the GSR23, it was really more practical. Because when you check the guidelines which is issued and adopted by this GSR23, you can see three pillars. One is the adoption, use and accessibility. One is the collaborative regulatory. The last one is the meaningful connectivity, which I call it productivity. So when I see the ITU start to put guidelines like these three pillars, it means really Z-touch the real problems for the regulators all over the world. So I think regulators must have flexibility, adoption and prediction. So this is the main characteristics we must have to focus on. And looking ahead, what is your key message to GSR23 regulators, policy makers and industry stakeholders? Let's adopt the guidelines. And also, let's measure the impact of these guidelines on our communities. And let's report and show the cases in the coming GSR to see how much did we contribute to shorten the digital gap between connected and unconnected communities. And also reflect these guidelines on productivity. Productivity, my friend. This will be always in our minds. Couldn't agree with you more. Engineer Hosame El-Khamal, thank you very much indeed for joining us in the studio this morning. Thank you for hosting so generously this event here in Shamar Sheikh in Egypt. And I'm sure we will get together at some stage in the very near future. Sure. It was our honor and pleasure to welcome you all here. And looking forward to see you again and again. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. And do check out all our other interviews here at GSR23 on our ITU YouTube channel, as well as podcasts on our podcast channels. And for further information, visit www.itu.int. Thank you very much.