 To all you amazing students of Vaughan College, New York City, thank you so much for being part of today's online session on digital entrepreneurship. I'm Doreen Bogdan-Martin, the director of telecommunications development at the International Telecommunications Union. ITU is one of the UN specialized agencies based in Geneva, Switzerland, and my job is to work with partners around the world to help bring meaningful and affordable digital connectivity to all the world's people. I guess most of you probably didn't even think that the UN was involved in the digital world. Yet we actually play a vital role, working to create agreed global technical standards that help to ensure the world's networks and platforms can interconnect. We broker global consensus on radio spectrums so that wireless devices like mobiles, tablets, and new innovations like driverless vehicles work anywhere and everywhere. And we also work to help bring the amazing power of digital connectivity to the 3.6 billion worldwide who still have no internet connection. I think we've all been personally touched by the COVID pandemic that has ravaged our communities and our economies. I know that you've suffered more than most, with New York City sadly becoming one of the global epicenters of the outbreak. My own mom lives not too far away from you in New Jersey, which is where I grew up. I share the distress that many of you must be feeling in the wake of the pandemic, and of course the subsequent wave of street protests around race issues that have swept throughout the city, across the U.S. and beyond, including here in Geneva too. The world around us seems to be in so much turmoil, and it's tough to be a young person trying to think about the future in such uncertain times. And yet despite all the upheaval and all the disruption, I'm certain that there will still be plenty of opportunities for you, as young people, and especially in my own field of digital technology. While so many economic sectors have taken a beating because of COVID, the digital sector has largely been immune to the economic fallout, with market segments like video conferencing products, online shopping platforms, and digital health and learning platforms even getting a boost, as virtually the whole world has locked down and moved online. Market analysts say that the pandemic is actually accelerating digital disruption and already transforming many business sectors. Some say that what has happened on the digital front in four months would have taken 10 years during normal times. And the tech sector itself has never been in such robust shape, with the combined market value of the major tech companies hitting an all-time record last month, with an addition of $1.7 trillion to their combined market capitalization since March. So why does this matter to you, as young students at Vaughn College? It matters because your generation is best placed in history to ride this wave and to harness the exponential growth in digital devices and platforms. You understand technology and what it can do better than any one of my own generation. I have four kids of my own that are about your age, and I'm constantly astounded by their intuitive grasp of the power of digital and its potential applications. And this gives me real hope, because I've guessed you noticed that today's world really needs some fresh new ideas. Let me be clear, I'm not saying that it's up to you to fix the planet or solve the problems that were created by previous generations, but as the first true cohort of digital natives, your youthful perspectives, combined with skills that you can bring as young digital entrepreneurs, offer us a real chance to finally break through all barriers to reflect lasting transformational change. In this most extraordinary of years, the COVID crisis has left the international community in no doubt whatsoever about the vital importance of being connected. We now understand better than we ever did before that digital technologies lie at the very heart of our efforts to forge a better world and to reach the UN 17 sustainable development goals. When the UN said its first global goals back in the year 2000, probably at the time that some of you were born, they were called the MDGs, the Millennium Development Goals. And at that time, only 12% of the global population actually had a mobile phone, and only 6% of the world was accessing the internet. Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok didn't exist, and smartphones and tablets had not been invented. And as we fast forward to the year 2020, and just imagine what a difference we could make in a world where mobile phones are almost ubiquitous, where more than half the world is online, and where we stand on the brink of next generation breakthroughs in areas like machine learning, robotics, and neural networks. But the tech industry is currently suffering from a chronic lack of young professionals. And in encouraging all of you to consider a career built around harnessing the power of digital technologies, I especially would like to shout out to the women and girls in the audience and from other marginalized communities. I know the cliche around tech entrepreneurs is that they're young, they're male, and they're largely white. Maybe just occasionally they're also Asian, but rarely are they female or black or Hispanic. This is the image of the tech sector that we all see around us. And right now, sadly, it's not entirely untrue. The tech industry may be the world's youngest industrial sector, but it has inherited some very old problems. And we can change that. Oddly for a sector that is so dynamic in terms of innovation, tech is lagging behind other more traditionally conventional sectors in dealing with its diversity problem. If the technology we all increasingly rely on is going to properly reflect the diversity of our needs as humans, it needs first to benefit from the diversity of our human experience. Studies from McKinsey to UBS all make the case for diversity as a major driver of innovation and corporate success. For example, research overwhelmingly shows that gender balanced board rooms and diversity in teams delivers better results. So in an increasingly competitive marketplace, there are extremely good reasons to place diversity squarely on the boardroom table as a strategic priority. From our side to tackle the tech and gender issue, we have a number of exciting programs and initiatives. Every year we organize our annual Girls and ICT Day, where we reach out to school-age girls through hands-on tech workshops and also talks by female role models. And we're trying to inspire them to consider including digital skills in their career plans. This Girls and ICT Day celebration has happened in over 170 countries. We also run Girls Can Code initiatives, which include coding camps and mentoring for girls throughout Africa and Latin America, and we're working to roll out this program in other regions. But our efforts don't stop there. The gender digital divide is a complicated one, and it's the result of barriers around access. This can be linked to affordability and even cultural issues. It's also due to the lack of digital skills. If you don't know how to use it, you're less inclined to try, and you might also have concerns around safety and security. And it's also due to the lack of women and girls in the sector actually creating the content, which then results in the content not being interesting or as interesting as it could be. To tackle these barriers and help affect broader change across the whole tech industry and beyond, we also launched the Equals Global Partnership for Digital Gender Equality. We did this together with UN Women, the International Trade Center, the United Nations University, and the Mobile Industry Body, GSMA. This global multi-stakeholder initiative is dedicated to bridging the gender digital divide, and it focuses on three core areas, access, skills, and leadership. On tech leadership and entrepreneurship, we're working closely with ITC, the International Trade Center, and we're working to increase the number of women tech entrepreneurs, starting with a number of pilot economies. We're also working to deliver evidence-based case studies, providing examples of an increase in new businesses in the digital sector through women's involvement. And we're working to develop recommendations to address regulatory and policy barriers that are actually limiting women's ability to access and monetize opportunities in the tech sector. And of course, we're working to connect women entrepreneurs to funding and to building professional networks of women through joint events. Of course, there's many examples out there, but I just wanted to highlight a few. And before I wrap up, I wanted to leave you with an inspirational story that I hope might encourage more of you to start thinking about digital entrepreneurship as a future career path. About this time last year during our AI for Good summit, I was lucky enough to have an informal fireside chat with Anusha Ansari in front of an audience at Geneva's Graduate Institute. Anusha's story is well told in her 2017 TED Talk entitled, Only As Much As We Dream, Can We Be? Remember that. In her talk, she describes her life growing up in Iran. Her night spent gazing at the night sky and her life's ambition to become an astronaut. In 1979, when her family fled the Iranian Revolution, she found herself in the US where she went to study mechanical engineering and became a very successful tech entrepreneur. Anusha told me that when she was a girl, she was a huge fan of Star Trek. And growing up in Iran, she actually believed that the Starfleet Academy was a real tertiary institution. And when she got to America, she tried to find out how to apply. Of course, she was soon faced with a disappointingly earthbound reality, but she didn't give up. She never lost sight of her dream. And through persistence and hard work, she managed to get herself a space on the Suyuz astronaut training program for the International Space Station. And she made history by becoming the first female private astronaut and the first Muslim woman in space. These days, Anusha devotes her time to the X Prize Foundation that develops incentive competitions that are aimed at finding digital solutions to humanity's biggest challenges from education to environment and currently COVID-19. So why did I share her story? She has a dream and she has made it possible. Anusha told me that choosing to train as a tech professional had given her the tools that she needed to unleash the power of her entrepreneurial spirit. And in my role as director of telecommunications development, it was a message that truly inspired me. I do dream of how we can realize the promise of connectivity for all the world's people. And to do that, we have to manage the negative aspects as well. Bringing technology to people everywhere and particularly to the poorest parts of the world where digital could play a truly transformational role would be a huge achievement. Perhaps it might even be too ambitious, but with tech now recognized as crucial to meeting the 17 sustainable development goals, we're just going to have to keep on trying. We must keep on trying. And to get there, we're going to need you. We're going to need your young voices. We're going to need your entrepreneurial enthusiasm. We're going to need your fresh perspectives on old problems. And most of all, your intuitive grasp of digital skills. To drive this vision forward, next year my organization will be organizing a global youth summit around the power of digital to change the world. This will take place in Addis Ababa in November 2021. We'll be counting on the participation of committed young people from all corners of the planet, either physically or virtually. And if we're going to remain relevant and deliver meaningful connectivity to all the world's people, we need to engage better. We need to listen and we need to learn from students like yourselves. I invite you to join that conversation. And as young digital entrepreneurs, we can work alongside you and together create a better, fairer, more inclusive world of opportunity for all. I thank you.