 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. I think we have a quorum, so we're going to begin. We have one panelist that is coming here in a few minutes and he'll join us when he arrives. So my name is Eric White. I am the project lead for the Internet for All Project at the World Economic Forum. And it is my distinct pleasure today to host a panel of such distinguished guests. We have to my left, we have Minister Oscar Aguad of the Ministry of Communications of Argentina. Then we have Mr. Matt Gramrid, the Director General of the GSMA. And we have Ms. Yu Yun Park, who is the Founder and Chief Citizenship Officer of the DQ Institute in Singapore, who's going to be launching an initiative in Argentina with the Internet for All Project, and she'll tell you about that. And then we have the Minister Andres Ibarra of the Ministry of Modernization of Argentina. So it's a great panel. So here's how the panel is going to unfold. We're going to ask each panelist to speak for three minutes, and I ask you to do hold your remarks to three minutes, please. And then we'll open the floor to questions. So when we open the floor to questions, do we have a microphone for the questions? Okay. So I ask that you take the microphone, that you state your name and your organization, please. And as a sort of point of clarification at the beginning, we will only accept questions that are relevant to the topic at hand. So please keep your questions on topic. And then at the end, I'll give a five-minute warning, and we will end right on time at 1400. So before we begin, I just want to make a remark about the Internet for All Project, the World Economic Forum. This is a program to create hundreds of millions of new Internet users around the world by leveraging the power of multi-stakeholder platforms. By ensuring that public, private, nonprofit, academic, and international stakeholders can share a structured place for interaction, the full ecosystem of players can collectively address problems that are too big for any one organization to resolve on their own. This means, among other things, addressing all of the major barriers to Internet inclusion, infrastructure, affordability, skills, and content in a coherent and a coordinated way. Internet for All is a global platform. We're improving coordination among the global organizations working to improve Internet access and adoption around the world, but we are also working at the country level. Our first country project focuses on East Africa, and there we're creating 25 million new Internet users in the region by 2019. We're here today to launch the second country program for Internet for All in Argentina, and this will be done in partnership with the government and with the Inter-American Development Bank and the Global Connect Initiative. Internet for All is governed globally by a committee of stewards of which Matt's GramRid of GSMA is one. So in that sense, he's sort of my boss. So I'd like to ask Matt to take the floor first to make a remark. Yeah, thank you, Eric. It is a true pleasure to be here with WEF and to launch the Internet for All initiative here in Argentina. I think we are all keenly focused to understand how mobile can promote Internet access across the regions. How mobile can make sure that we are becoming more inclusive in our approach. Today, globally, there is an estimated four billion people that are not connected to the Internet, and that cannot be right. That is something we need to focus on, and as you can see, I wear this pin here. The SDGs, the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and one of the key promises there is to leave no one behind. So we need to address the four billion people, that's for sure. Now we have done good progress. Ten years ago in the development world, there was less than 10% that were accessing Internet. And today, there is more than 40%. So there is good progress, but still we have ways to go. If we look at Argentina, which is doing better than average in Latin America, the mobile subscriber penetration base here is 90% of the population, which is a good number. And we also know that there is some 73% of the population that is accessing Internet through a mobile device. But still, there are 27% that is not accessing Internet. Now why is that? Well we know that 20% lives beneath a coverage of 3G or 4G, 3G or 4G. So they should be able to access, that's 20%. They might not do that for various reasons. 7% does not live beneath a coverage of 3G or 4G, and they cannot. So there is certainly a gap of network that needs to be built out, that's the 7%. But the 20% is basically based on three things. One is that digital skills is not up to mark. I do not know how to use my mobile device to access Internet. Or it could be an affordability issue. I know how to use it, but I don't have enough money. Or it could be the third, which we believe is the biggest. I know how to use it. I have enough money, but there is nothing there for me. There is no local content that is relevant to me. If we can address that, we will be able to increase the mobile Internet penetration up to the 90, 95% mark. Fairly easy. Again then, so the digital agenda for Argentina. I think to promote investments going forward, there is a couple of things that we would like to argue. One is a predictable and stable directions on regulatory activities. We need to, as the mobile industry, we will invest almost 80 billion US dollars or 76 billion dollars up to 2020. We need to be able to understand how we would get a return on that investment. So a predictability when it comes to that investment, to that regulatory activity is really needed. The second thing is taxation. That we have a taxation that makes sense and is reasonable. And the third is, of course, ample amount of spectrum. If we can have those things in order, the economy of Argentina will blossom, we are pretty convinced about. I would also like to say that collaboration is important. Wednesday, we signed between ENACOM and GSMA, together with ENACOM, we will now provide the provincial police forces with a tool to track and control the traffic of stolen devices. And I think that's a small step in order to make sure that we become a better industry as a whole. And for us as GSMA, we believe strongly in Argentina and to Buenos Aires. To the extent that on Tuesday, we opened our office for Latin America here in Buenos Aires. We believe the skill level of the Argentinian people are on a very high level, and we are prepared to invest as well from a GSMA perspective. So with those words, I think I will stop. Thank you. Thank you very much, Metz. So with those comments, I'd like to ask Minister Aguad to make some remarks and particularly speak about the internet for all project in Argentina. And I think he will deliver his remarks in Spanish, so I'm going to put on my headset. Bueno, gracias. Thank you very much. I would like to thank the World Economic Forum. I'd like to thank GSMA, the Inter-American Development Bank. I'd like to thank GSMA, who are about to open an office in Argentina. You know, we share this challenge. We all face this challenge, because this is the objective and the strategic vision of Macri, I mean, Argentina's president, when he decided to create a communications ministry, you know, we are lagging behind the field of technology. And the future comes hand in hand with this great fourth industrial digital technological revolution. It was the root cause, the reason why we have been created. So you see, this is the foundation, the cornerstone of the strategic value that connectivity communications have for us, for this government. We have in the pipeline several projects. Argentina has great internet penetration. Around 70%, 71% of the population are somehow or other connected to the internet. And the big challenge is to connect another 8 million people to the internet. But to, I mean, high speed internet. So we want to have a width which covers more people today. On average, speed is 2%, 3%. And we want to reach by 2019, 10% on average speed. I mean, obviously, big cities, big urban centers. Well, find it easier. Of course, ARSAT, this company, is deploying a program for fiber optics around Argentina. We will reach 33,000 billion kilometers connected to main networks and small towns under 80,000 people. So they will be connected, or the main connection will be located outside these towns. And we want to get soft credit line from Banconacion so that small companies, cooperatives, can extend internet in small localities so they can have a fiber optic program for households, for small households. Penetration is 2%, 3% in this case for households, I mean. And we have to reach Latin American average, which is 20%. That's by 2019, connected to the optic fiber network. We have another concern. We want to widen mobile access to internet. So now we're in the middle of working on a program so that people, the least disadvantaged, have access to smartphones. We have increased by 1 million. That's 20% of the population. They did not have access to mobile internet. So we have decided to purchase, I mean, to sell smartphones with plan, with installments. We have implemented an exchange program. So we give them these good phones, smartphone for their old phones. So we are obsessed, I would say. We are obsessed with convergence, with connectivity. In a few days, Argentina will be announcing a fourth mobile telephony operator. And this will be a disruption in the market because our market is divided into three operators. It's like 33% of the market share for each. And the fourth operator will completely disrupt the market by creating open competition. Now we don't have that. And now, in the future, we will provide twice the spectrum of the telephony sector. We used to have around 70, 80, 100 for the spectrum. We will reach 200 mega for each telephony operator in the near, I mean, coming days. I'm not speaking about the future, just a few days. In these one and a half years, we have done lots of hard work. Now we are drafting the new rules. And with this is a bill that will be submitted to Congress. It's a convergence law. I mean, and finally, I would like to tell you that now we are connecting every single school around the country, mainly rural schools. And we do it through a satellite, R2 satellite, which is in orbit. It belongs to the state. It's a state satellite. We will connect 2,000 rural schools in the north of the country. And now, with the launch through the Patagonia program, we will cover another 800 rural schools in Patagonia in the south. Also, we are in the middle of hiring a team of experts, led by Raul Kat from Columbia University, to design a digitalization program to digitalize the economy of the country in collaboration, in close collaboration with the modernization ministry. Because we split the task. Mr. Ibarra has to modernize and digitalize the public sector. And we have to help them digitalize the private sector in order to improve the country's productivity. Guad, and that is a perfect segue to Minister Ibarra, who can speak about the role of the modernization ministry in this program. And he was our guest at our high-level meeting this morning, where we spoke about the importance of interministerial collaboration in advancing this agenda. So I think this is a very apt topic. Minister Ibarra. OK. Thank you. Gracias. Buenos días. Thank you very much. Good morning. Well, this morning on the panel, we had an opportunity to share with different companies as well, and we discussed about this topic. I would like you to give you the general framework. First of all, we are together, I mean, working with colleagues, Minister Aguad, with the entire government, with all the ministers, and led by the president, of course, we have embarked on a very important transformation project. We want to change the rules of the game, values, institutions. And within this framework, we have big, big challenges ahead. We have to attain a sustainable country. We have to mitigate poverty significantly. All of this is based on trust. We have to generate trust. And in order to generate trust, all of these elements, I mean, all these factors contributing to worldwide integration, we have to see what other countries are doing. We have to understand different pathways, different alternatives, because we need good interaction with businesses, with organizations. Because in short, we want to take full advantage of the technological leap ahead of what technology is giving us. Of course, transforming the state is key, because in short, the state is in our way. It's in the middle of our life when you have to go to a hospital, if you need safety, security, education. So when companies do business, if they want to import, export, manufacture, create to found the company. So the state is always involved. You know, we have inherited a state fitted with 19th century tools in a terrible situation many times. We have some tools, some solution from the 20th centuries. But we all have needs in the 21st century. We live in the 21st century, and this is the gap we have to close. So in this sense, my ministry has a cross cutting role to play in our society. And what we want to do is to transform the state. We want to generate an agile state, a simple state, a state which is close to people, an inclusive state. And so that's why the reason the president signed an executive order last year to modernize the state. This involves working on giving more importance to the civil service. And in government, modernizing the administration, public administration, digital work, digital government, digital platforms, open governments, transparency, and infrastructure. The technology is necessary for this state to have at its disposal the tools necessary to provide services to the people, to citizens. That's a state providing service to citizens. So we have done lots of things, lots of developments. I'm short of time. I cannot describe them, all of them, ranging from e-files in ministries over 1,100 cases dealt with electronically. We have become paperless in the state, I mean, in many cases. And we are walking towards distance work with single platforms, e-windows for imports, for digital work. We will launch another initiative dealing with this paperless work. And together with the production ministry and other offices and departments, we want to simplify simpler businesses so that it's easier to fund or create companies. But nothing would be possible, and especially in the field of dealing or what we have to deal with provinces, with local jurisdictions. We have another project, a digital country, to provide cities, towns, everything which is modern. I mean, websites, customer care, dashboards, electronic dashboards, different tools so that municipalities, cities, bars are close to people and they provide services. In this case, we have digital centers providing training, trying to include people. I said that e-government and all these developments are possible. That is not possible without digital inclusion and without overall connectivity. And what Mr. Awad said, we have to generalize the use of internet as a key tool for inclusion, for training, for job creation. So when we speak about these digital centers or hubs, we open the way to developments in the area of job creation, new employment, industrial design, so on and so forth. And all of this is done remotely as well, or things that people have to do in state agencies. That is not possible without the internet. So the internet or IFA, this challenge, this development, is absolutely, I mean, indispensable, absolutely necessary, fundamental. Let's imagine that the country has 2,200 municipalities. So around 1,500 have less than 10,000 people. And their situation, well, is just a situation of lack. I mean, no connectivity, no tools to provide services to citizens. So the use of the internet is a key need that we have to meet. So I can also tell you, and this is great news, in the next days the president will be announcing a commitment, a federal commitment for the modernization of the state. This means that governments and different organizations will agree and sign a public agreement. They will come to a commitment so that we can all together work to modernize the state, which in short means a state which is close to people providing services to citizens. Thank you. Some very exciting announcements and developments. So for our last presenter, before we open the floor to questions, I'd like to ask Ms. Yu Yun Park of the DQ Institute to talk about the project that she's going to launch in Argentina. She is part of our community of stakeholders that took part in a two-day meeting on the fourth and the fifth to identify concrete activities that can be implemented under the internet for all umbrella. And this is one of the ones that we're really excited to talk to you about. I'd like to shift the gear, and I want to talk about the children. Our children are the first generation who are born and raised in this hyper-connected internet world. And they're in an unprecedented predicament. They're born in the digital world, and they need a digital skills. Your headset? Sorry, that's OK. Yes, they need a digital skills, but the digital world is not necessarily very safe. Children have internet connection. Currently, 40% of children have a cyber-bullying issue. Around 10% of children have addiction to technology, especially the game. And there's so much issue about the online theft, identity theft, privacy issue, and online grooming and radicalization. Fake news, a lot of things. Internet space has not been ideal place for our children, but our children are exposed to these dangers without much of protection. I am very happy to be part of this initiative, Internet For All, because we believe the internet connection is basic human right these days. All children need to have access to the internet. No children should not be left behind. But at the same time, no children should not be left behind in educating an empowerment of DQ, digital intelligence, which means that they need to know how to live online. So DQ Every Child is a global education initiative to empower children to give the core digital life skills so that they can minimize a cyber risk and maximize the potential of digital technology and media. So our initiative identified the core competencies that all children must have in order for them to become an independent, discerned thinker in the digital world and become a good digital citizen. We are very happy to support the Australian government, especially the Ministry of Education, to provide the tools and curriculum and assessment to understand the exposure of children's activity and exposure to the cyber dangers online, at the same time assess the digital skills. So our goal is to raise Argentina children's DQ by 10%. That means more than 30% reduction in cyber risk and enhancement of future readiness skills, creativity, digital literacy, and the trust in the digital world. We aim to dedicate, build, not just about the infrastructure, but also the soft skill and hard skills to maximize the potential of digital technology. Thank you. OK, thank you very much. So we've had a framing of the Internet for All project from a global level and talking about some of the challenges in Argentina. We've had two very interesting presentations by ministers talking about the way ahead. And we've had a presentation by a social entrepreneur that's part of the Internet for All community talking about some specific concrete things that we're going to be aiming to do through this program over the next few years. So with that, I want to open up the floor to questions. So again, the ground rules for the questions, please. Stand up. Use the microphone. State your name and organization and keep the questions on topic. So the microphone is Emilio Nazar. I'm from the Diario Pregom. I represent a newspaper, Pregom newspaper. I would like to know your uptake on homeschooling, what technological breakthroughs are available to implement homeschooling, and how we can attain an alternative, safe Internet for Children. I'm sorry. Actually, I put on the headset a little bit late. So if you can rephrase the question to me, they'll be really great. So I think that he was asking for more clarification about how you keep children safe at home on the Internet. Homeschooling. Homeschooling. Homeschooling. Homeschooling. And security in Internet for the children. So I mean, how do you maintain safety regarding homeschooling? What's your uptake on homeschooling? And who do you keep the Internet safe for children? That's a summary made by the interpreter. You're welcome. Last one. Internet safety start from home. And it is so crucial that parents have to understand the danger of the media exposures, and also a lot of security measures. So DQ is an eight dimension of competency that we want to make sure that children must have. So it is not just about the digital literacy. They need to understand how to cope with cybersecurity. So starting from building that strong password, avoiding the scam and phishing, all this practical issue has to be learned. But at the same time, it is important for children to learn how to keep themselves safe from the older bullying, hate speech, bigotry, and racist remark in the Internet. So in order to do that, they need wisdom to overcome this issue, not just about not using Internet, but also how to wisely protect themselves and how to build empathetic communication online. So it is not just negative don't do. It is also empowerment of right values and right skill sets to the children. And in order to do that, our program is for children for children to learn all these skills by themselves, by self-learning online platform. And we are giving assessment for children to say, you're weak in this dimension. You don't understand about the privacy very well, so you better want to understand the privacy because a lot of time so far, a lot of curriculum looking at the just one dimension, just security or bullying. But actually these whole things are interconnected. So we want children to learn in a holistic way. So our platform enabled for children to understand their weakness and strengths and have them to learn in a holistic way. At the same time, we want to empower parents because parents are the first people who can actually monitor children's activity and then protect them from a lot of cyber dangers. A lot of times parents feel empowered, let it help us because they think that they don't know about technology well. But it is not about the knowing technology is really about being a parent and build the honest and open communication with their kids and protect them by building the trust within the household about their digital usage. Hope that answered your question. I would like to say something that I didn't say before that is related to this. It is important and we've said it here that in addition to connectivity for us to generate digital content and digital education and the government has a significant challenge here to distribute this, to disseminate this. There are many initiatives. We have a digital inclusion plan in the government and among other things and among other tools through these digital hubs that are going to be, we're generating throughout the country. There are contents and there is digital education that is focused on older adults' populations and younger populations. And this also has a purpose of social inclusion because thanks to this many people instead of thank us because they're children instead of being on the street facing several risks they take advantage of some supplementary time to get training, get education to and the same thing happens with the older adults and the parents. So this program was supplemented 20 days ago. We launched the Radar program which is network of digital teachers or educators. It's 120 students from more than 30 universities and we're using these students to create this inclusion and social or digital education mechanism. And so in this regard, I agree with our colleague from Singapore because in our country we have a problem. Many times the children are a little bit advanced and this happens to us in education and daily living and parents are not and so for us to be able to provide digital education with the internet provide education about how to navigate how to overcome risks also for the parents this provides a tool to minimize the factors the risk factors that we all know about. More question, unfortunately, so. Patricia Valley from a newspaper, The Aeroperfield regarding the entry of a fourth operator in the market in the coming days. I would like to ask you, Minister Aguada what do you expect? How disruptive can this be? Speaking of tariffs or rates, considering that the market is concentrated and up to now we had significant access to the internet but at very high costs. It's a good question because the idea is that this entry is disruptive and for that to have a consequence in improving the prices and the market conditions. Argentina has internet prices that are very high particularly in areas that are far from the capital city and the signal quality, the telephone signal quality in the interior in the provinces of Argentina is very low quality. So the new operator is going to have to deploy infrastructure and technology in white areas where there is no connectivity in cities of less than 5,000 people and this is going to derive into benefits such as competition, quality and price. Much we are out of time. That concludes the press conference. I'd like to thank Minister Aguada, Mr. Graham, Ms. Park and Minister Ibarra and thank all of you for your attentiveness and your questions.