 Good afternoon everyone. My name is Susan Shore and I'm the head of the Digital Inclusion Division within the ITU's Telecommunication Development Bureau. Your Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, members of the panel and the audience, it's my great pleasure to welcome you to this WTDC side event on digital skills for youth employment in the digital economy. In our session today we're going to explore the latest trends in digital skills for youth employment in the digital economy. We will hear from different stakeholders, their experiences in providing digital skills, training for employment to young people, and we'll hear more about the recently launched ITU ILO digital skills campaign as part of the global initiative on decent jobs for youth and how interest interested stakeholders can contribute to that campaign. Our session today offers an opportunity to share experiences and best practices on providing digital skills training for youth employment to young men and women around the world. We'll analyze challenges and opportunities in order to ensure that future generations are equipped with the skills needed to succeed in the digital economy. To get started I'd like to turn the floor over to the BDT deputy director Mr. Yushi Tori-Goe to share his welcoming remarks. Mr. Tori-Goe the floor is yours. Thank you, Susan. Excellencies, distinguished delegates and ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of our director BDT, Mr. Sanu, I'm very pleased to address at this WTDC event on digital skills for youth employment in digital economy. Our aim for the session is to share the best practices on digital skills for youth employment and issue a call for action to join the digital skill for decent job for youth campaign to train five million young people globally with job-ready digital skills by 2030. This digital skills for decent job for youth campaign was launched with the ITU and ILO, International Labour Organization, in June. In fact, I was the speaker at this ILO ITU event that was held in conjunction with the WISIS forum. And we are enjoying a quite good relation with other UN agencies in the world, including the ICT as a catalytic law for economic and social development. And ILO is a new organization with a partnership. We have been doing a quite good collaboration with the organization including UNESCO for education and eHealth World Health Organization. And we are very much expecting this new collaboration with ILO. The campaign is part of the ILO's Global Initiative on Decent Job for Youth, a multi-stakeholder partnership for the promotion of youth employment worldwide through which the 22 United Nations entities are joining hands in support of realization of 2030 development agenda. The goal of our campaign is to connect young women and men with the job opportunities offered by the digital economy, offer special training programs for young women and young entrepreneurs and train teachers so that educational programs better prepare young people for the digital economy. To succeed, we will strengthen collaboration between ICT, Labour and Education Ministers and work closely with national governments, private sector, training providers, academia, NGOs, as well as other members of UN family. Digital skills are key to address global youth employment crisis. The digital economy is creating job opportunities and salary advances for those with digital skills. Indeed, estimates show there will be at least 10 million unfilled jobs globally for people with advanced digital skills between now and 2030. So if you have skills, high qualified skills on ICT, you have a lot of opportunity. This because current not enough young people are being trained with advanced digital skills, leaving employers unable to find enough staff. The reward for those who master digital skills is growing number of career opportunities and higher pay. Moreover, training youth will benefit everybody because when youth have decent jobs, we will all prosper. We all have stake in preparing young people for a bright future. That's why ITU is delighted to see today's panel composed of stakeholders that are already taking concrete steps to train young men and women with digital skills in line with ITU ILO digital skills campaign. We are also very pleased to welcome ILO, our partner, this campaign. We look forward to hearing your ideas on how we can contribute to the global campaign on digital skills for digital decent jobs for youth and how we can incentivize more stakeholders to take action. I firmly believe that together with we will succeed to connect young people with unprecedented job opportunities in digital economy and thereby contribute to the implementation of sustainable development goals. Please join us. Thank you, Susan. Thank you very much, Mr. Tori Goi, and now I'd like to present our distinguished panelists who are going to share their experiences in digital skills training for youth employment. To my left is Mr. Daniel Spoyala, national expert for the European Commission. To my right, Dr. Shah Jahan Mahmood, the chairman of the Bangladesh Telecommunications Regulatory Commission. Then we have Mr. Christof Ernst, senior employment specialist at ILO, and next to Mr. Ernst, Ms. Fiorella Haim, who is the general manager of Planned Seaball in Uruguay. So let me give the floor to our first panelist, Mr. Daniel Spoyala from the European Commission. Mr. Spoyala, the European Commission is very active in ensuring young people in Europe are equipped with the necessary digital skills. For example, the EC developed a digital skills and jobs coalition which aims to train 1 million young unemployed people for vacant digital jobs through internships and apprenticeships and short-term training programs by 2020. Could you tell us more about your activities in this area? Thank you. Welcome everybody to the the panel. Thank you very much for the invitation. I will tell you, I'll give you information. I'll tell you a little bit about digital jobs and skills coalition. Actually my specialty I coordinate the European Union policy on digital for development. So later I will be speaking about what how do you think about digital skills when it looks at the policy of development because at the end of the day we are at the development conference. So when two years ago the European Commission put on the table the digital single market strategy. It's a policy dog that is one of the 10 priorities of the President Juncker of the European Commission and it looks into how we can really take the benefits of the digital economy in Europe, have one single set of rules across all 28 member states. And digital skills were among the issues that we are looking at because then and even now we are faced of course with youth unemployment in in Europe. And when my colleagues that are in charge of this job digital skills and job coalition looked at the data we realized that among the population 43 percent of Europeans do not have basic digital skills. Then when we look at the labour force so this was this approach as citizens and then labour force and looking at the labour force we realize that 37 percent of the people that are employed or self-employed in European Union does not have do not have digital skills. This is all coming in a in a in a digital let's say new revolution because this is a new industrial revolution that is disrupting traditional businesses where digital skills are becoming crucial. We cannot speak about economies of the future without having digital skills on the table actually. So then when we looked at the educational system we we realized that 20-25 percent of teachers in the European Union are not teaching using digital tools or they are not trained to use those tools. However when we look at European Union for those of you who understand a little bit how the European Union looks you'll realize that the European Union as an institution does not have legislative powers of the member states only educational field. Educational field is a right that is sovereign to the each member state in a in part. However we want to take steps at European level so we can have the opportunities take the opportunities of this and of course we are looking at how the for example the digital ecosystem has evolved in Europe because over the over the last three years Europe has grown a lot in terms of digital innovation in terms of startups. We have 1.5 million people working on digital economy right now in Europe. However by 2020 we realized that we have a shortfall of people of high coding skills of 750,000 while our youth is still we have youth unemployment issues. So my colleagues I realized that the best way to do this is in a multi stakeholder way because these digital skills are not something that is only of the interest of the governments it's of the interest of the of the private sector as well is the interest of the NGOs as well so how we can round up all this multi state all these these players in a multi stakeholder let's say platform where everybody pledges to do something and we have some targets so targets as you mentioned the big target is by 2020 we'll train a million youth in this. Then we were looking towards the educational systems and we have let's say have an agreement with the member states that the member states will develop digital skills strategies on each of the 28 member states meaning this will be focusing on how the education how the let's say the the digital coding and basic digital skills are mainstream across the educational systems. Then so we develop let's say a common concept so everybody can work from the common concept we are putting together examples of best practices in all 28 member states because a lot of things have been done so we have to learn from from each other and it's a you know it's a constant more stakeholders are gathering in this this initiative is gathering momentum unfortunately I cannot give you data right now I don't have the data to tell you how many people how many youth have been trained on digital skills but of course at the other side European Union has what we call the code week this is we are teaching we have one week event once a year where tens hundreds of thousands of youth are trained on digital encoding and this creates I think this is one of the most famous let's say initiative of the European Commission we just had an event last yesterday when I was living in Brussels it was an event in a big event in Brussels where we have startups coders that all joining forces and voluntary coming and teaching kids how to code and of course this is somehow there is initiative that is called code week Africa I don't know if this is the moment to talk about the external policy later no so this is I will end my intervention right now and thank you very much thank you very much and and for the the sake of the audience I believe that many of these materials that you talked about are freely available online on the European Commission's digital skills website so I believe you have a database of best practices and the guidelines that you were talking about about setting up national policies so that could be a useful tool for for many of you in the room now let's pivot to the Asia Pacific region we know there are a number of countries that are very active in ensuring that the population is equipped with digital skills that's necessary for today's digitized world and this includes Bangladesh so we would very much like to to hear from you we understand Bangladesh is very active in providing young men and women with job-ready digital and entrepreneurship skills to ensure they're fully equipped to succeed in the digital economy could you tell us more about these activities please thank you thank you miss more writer thank you that you said it is very active and if I give you some statistics then you'll realize that you have rightly chosen the world very active as you know Bangladesh is a country of 160 more than 160 million people and it is the most densely populated country in the world most densely means you know population per square mile or per square kilometer it's the highest highest in the world at some point in time this population was considered to be a liability but now we consider this thing as a strength of our economy thank god that we have that many population yeah speaking of youth you know the definition of youth varies from country to country and also from agency to agency united nations define youth as a person between 15 to 24 commonwealth countries commonwealth they define the youth as 15 to 29 year old and in our country we define a youth to be a person between 18 to 35 years old and that consists of one third of the total population are youth by the definition so that means nearly 55 million youth we have so that tells you how big the problem is for us to tackle this problem the youth in a systematic way we had a youth policy that was implemented in 2003 so obviously that's not backdated so new youth policy has been in place that considers the digital skills or digitalization has been taken into consideration in the new youth policy in this new youth policy ict education has been mandated has been made mandatory in all schools primary and secondary schools using and we generally produce about 350,000 it graduates from almost 118 universities in the country the unemployment as far as the unemployment rate goes is somewhere in between we rank 133rd in 2016 the average unemployment rate in the world is 18.68 percent and Bangladesh has an unemployment rate of 10.39 percent the highest unemployment rate if i may mention not to attack any or not to criticize any country just for the sake of the statistics in Bosnia Bosnia and Harjugabena that's 67.61 percent and lowest in Cambodia about 0.44 percent speaking of that that's so much of the statistics so in our country under the effective leadership of the ict advisor to the honorable prime minister who happens to be the son of our honorable prime minister our digitalization program is going at a full speed in full throttle and then the means the main motivation of this ict education is the something called vision 2021 when this government came into power in 2008 they took up a program called vision 2021 that demands that was in the election manifesto that says that digitalization has to be completed by 2021 and in by 2021 using this digitalization and other technology Bangladesh has to be catapulted into a strong medium income country so that is the that is the whole purpose of creating all the education policy um that and also the education policy also was in confirmation with the sdg number eight which says decent work for all so with two vision with these two visions uh with with with two purpose in our i mean with the two uh goal in our mind that vision 2021 sdg eight so the education policy was formulated for the uh so and two so first we look into the market analysis we try to analyze which way the market is heading to because this digital market is very very fast changing today whatever is there today tomorrow it may not be there so we carefully monitor the market and we develop the market driven policy so our market where is our market for the digital youth this is mostly it is outsourcing the two now outsourcing and um we we have become the top 25 global service outsourcing market in the world and then there are freelancing about 60 000 to 80 000 youth have registered with the government who does the who do the freelancing and we are expecting that this because of outsourcing and freelancing our revenue will be about five billion dollar by 2025 so depending on the market and on the um basic i mean uh background on on which we have developed the education policy we have divided the education into two types one is the long term another is short term long term means you know that in schools where you can impose or where you can teach the students ict so that's a long term there because that's a systematic process systematic way of training the kids in the schools and another is a short term for the schools education what we believe that not ict education rather ict in education that means ict is an we consider ict as an enabler for a good education or marketable education these days so based on these models we have developed learner centric participatory environment for the education and we have found that multimedia is a very effective way of teaching younger generation ict technologies so far we have installed about 23 000 multimedia classes in secondary schools and about 15 000 in primary schools and we have so far trained 180 000 teachers uh for teaching in this environment 27 000 education institutions are under monitoring you know we also have installed dashboard the central places so that we can monitor what is happening in the ict classes so about we have installed about 27 000 dashboards so this much is for the long term education in institutions for the short term we are expecting we we try to train some people some ict you know personal in three to four months some of the projects are something called earning and learning that we will train them in three months to get into the market but not a formally educated you know guy but in three months they can hands-on experience they can work on the market so they will they mostly work as a freelancer and so far we have trained about 55 000 workers in under this category so another project is called skill development for mobile games and application program as you know this this is the age of mobile apps so this is a very very big market any app you develop it solds immediately so we train these guys not in the schools or colleges but in three to four months how to develop various kinds of apps so far we have developed about about 1000 apps that is available in the google play store and then another project in this area is called she-powered project for sustainable development for women through ict so the purpose of this project is to reach the rural areas the distant part distant areas to train particularly the women in the ict area so this is the my first round contribution in this area so hopefully i'll be talking for the second time another one so my last point is that we talk too much on educating the or developing skills in the youth but we don't talk much on the developing the market for them so i think you know along with this education or along with the skills development technique we should also emphasize on developing the markets where the youths will be employed thank you thank you very much mr. Ramud again it's very impressive what you've accomplished and one of the numbers that stood out for me was training 180 000 teachers and indeed it seems that we might continue to have this digital skills shortfall and until such time as we change the education system so i know that plan seaball in uruguay is working in this direction i know you've been a leader in terms of one laptop per child initiative many years ago and i know that you're now active in researching the most effective ways to use icts in education and in particular about introducing computational thinking in the national policy so could i ask you miss iim to share what you're doing in uruguay right now in that regard sure thank you good afternoon well we are only three million in uruguay so it's kind of hard talking after you you know because my numbers are will look very small so i will i will talk in percentages okay so plan seaball started in 2007 and it's as an equity plan delivering laptops to every child in public schools and giving them access to internet wireless connectivity so 85 percent of children in uruguay go to public school so almost all of children from ages six to 15 have their own device laptop or tablet now and internet connectivity at their schools are in several places in this way in three years by 2009 2010 we closed it the access digital divide and since then we were working well we continue deploying devices and internet connectivity but in top of that we are providing contents and tools such as for example our math adaptive platform that has over 100 000 exercises we have an english teaching system through video conference that reaches 80 000 children every week and they are learning english we are covering it's like 90 percent of children from fourth to sixth grade that are learning english in this way using technology we also have all the textbooks and leisure books available in a digital library we have different apps for the science for language for different subjects available for children and well we also are working in a global network called npdl new pedagogies for deep learning led by Michael Fulan in Canada and we are trying to develop other skills in students such as collaboration communication skills critical thinking creativity and we are trying to do that through technology using technology as a as a way to promote all these things through multidisciplinary projects and project-based learning the challenge we are facing now is inclusion of computational thinking in the curriculum we are working in in three different educational levels we are working at primary schools we started a pilot in september we're working with 40 schools where they are full-time schools you know you have eight hours of schools in these schools and children are having classes of computational thinking through video conference and what's computational thinking for us well it's a way to solve complex problems it's not necessarily related to computer problems or not necessarily coding would be the the solution it's very related because it's the way computer science it's a thing but it's the way to solve these complex problems by taking them into smaller parts trying to find patterns trying to develop abstraction and trying to to design algorithms to solve them most of them obviously end up being a coding project but not not necessarily we are working with children from 10 to 12 years old and teachers are very motivated because they are relating all the curricular content they have to to see in the year with these problems so it's I think it's the same thing they are trying to do in Bangladesh that ICT is not an issue in itself but a way to to have better results in all the other subjects then in high schools what we are doing middle schools from ages from 12 to 15 we are trying to to transform the computer labs into digital labs and some of them into maker spaces inspiring the fab learns labs in stanford with 3d printers robotic kits audiovisual kits sensors so in this way we we can promote also collaboration teamwork trying to solve these problems and problems related with with the interests of students so they are more engaged and they don't drop off a school which is a huge problem in Uruguay the the third line we are working on maybe I will talk a little bit later but it's related to young people from 17 to 26 years old that finished the the ninth grade and we we have a nine month program to teach them how to go code this is a program that's coordinated with the IT companies we work together with them teachers are in fact workers at IT companies they are programmers that are teaching through videoconference and after the nine month program these young people go to the IT companies to have an internship so well that's about what we are doing thank you very much it's it's very impressive as always to hear from plancibal and what you're doing now as the BDT deputy director mentioned at the beginning of our session ITU and ILO have recently launched the digital skills for decent jobs for youth campaign aimed at training five million young people with job-ready digital skills and so we're really happy that we have our ILO representative Mr. Ernst with us could you tell us more about this initiative and how interested stakeholders could contribute thank you first of all about the global initiative on decent jobs for youth right okay the youth is facing a lot of challenges on the labor markets now we go back to big figures including Uruguay and Bangladesh so we have 71 million young people are worldwide unemployed we have more than 150 million youth who work but live in poverty so you have a lot of young people also in informal employment and especially young women worldwide face higher unemployment rates than younger men they're more in indecent types of jobs so there are a lot of challenges we face that's why the global initiative on decent jobs for youth was launched by the director channel of the ILO in 2016 as the overarching global initiative to scale up action and impact on youth employment in support of the 2030 agenda for sustainable development our vision is a world in which young men women and men have greater access to decent jobs everywhere we don't want to create a lost generation the youth is also a future a bit of history and who are the partners in this global initiative the global initiative is the first ever comprehensive United Nations system wide effort for the promotion of youth employment worldwide under ILO lead 22 UN entities also ITU have committed to strengthening youth employment action at country and at regional levels they are calling for other strategic stakeholders to join and have already elicit political interest and support from governments social partners the private sector youth and civil society organizations the media regional multilateral organizations foundations parliamentarians and academia what are the strategic elements of this initiative they are four interconnected pillars alliance action knowledge and resources the global initiative is based on an alliance of committed partners taking action across eight thematic priorities sharing the knowledge and leveraging resources in order to scale up action normally they are not smaller scale but to blow them up maximize the impact and create real changes for young people so one of the eight thematic priority areas are digital skills for youth therefore the campaign I will explain in later on but there are others you may be interested for example quality apprenticeship it's also linked green jobs for youth youth in the rural economy and all this kind of technology digital skills also help for that if you talk about the sensors big data etc transition transition to the formal economy youth entrepreneurship and self-employment youth in fragile situation also fragile states the youth from 15 to 17 here in Argentina we call this protected youth in hazardous occupations as well I will stop here for this question and let's move on thank you great thank you very much we have such a short amount of time for this session and it's it is a bit frustrating because I'd very much like to bring the audience in but I know the panel has a very rich experience but I'd like to go to to the audience if I could now we're also really fortunate to have with us today Mr Tanmay Bakshi who's going to be one of the keynote speakers at the ministerial roundtable right after this session and he's a 13-year-old digital genius if you don't mind me calling him that you might want to stand up so people can see you so so Tanmay in view of the current youth unemployment crisis why do you think and you can sit down to make your remarks if you want because you'll be closer to the microphone that way why do you think it's important for governments to support digital skills development oh thank you perfect uh so I think this is important because if you think about it right now first of all of course we've got this youth employment crisis but if you think about it on the on one hand we've got another crisis which is that in general we've got this huge skills shortage for people working in the technology industry people you know programming in general and I believe that governments can really I guess you could say kill two birds with one stone with this one and not just solve that technology crisis there are not enough people working with technology but also take a look at this youth employment crisis and solve that as well because really the government now could say you know we've got all these resources can't we channel this into the youth and say all right we're introducing them in schools to you know math science language can we not also introduce them to these digital skills provide them the digital skills provide them this knowledge about all this sort of technology and then from there not only get them ready for their future and give them employment but at the same time allow the technology industry to have so much more manpower and really nullify that shortage as well and provide more people there as well because again in the future with all these new technologies that are coming out like AI our need for technology is going to grow exponentially and even right now if we've got this shortage you can only expect that to get much bigger and so we can again really solve that youth employment crisis because every job in the future will be linked and at least some way two digital skills and again that's the proof here is I mean I mean as you mentioned in Uruguay and in Bangladesh we're starting to implement computational thinking in schools and bring computational thinking to the youth and so yeah I think it's very important for the government to take these resources channel into the youth implement digital skills digital skills development into these curricula and allow the youth to learn from it and in fact I even actually have a goal to reach out to at least a hundred thousand aspiring beginners along their you know first steps of learning to program and I'm already around 5000 people there and I do this through tons of different media like I've made of course my youtube channel books and blogs and keynotes etc but again it's really important that if we want to make the bigger change our entire country will have to start implementing this and I believe we are you know taking our first steps there and in the future this has to keep growing so we're able to meet this demand thank you yeah you spoke so well on other things but what about yourself what area you're genius or digital genius why you are called digital sure thanks I mean really apart from just programming I really love artificial intelligence and I love developing with deep learning algorithms especially seeing how like for example artificial intelligence and neural networks can be applied in fields like healthcare in fact and one project of mine is actually called the cognitive story and with it we're trying to give artificial communication ability to quadriplegic girl that actually cannot communicate naturally and my role in the project is actually using deep learning algorithms to understand her EEG brainwaves and to convert those to natural language so it's really interesting I love working with deep learning and not just again in fields like healthcare where I believe it's making the most impact but also entertainment education business and generally you know actually talking about also the next level of the digital economy itself apart from that though I will be talking a lot more about that at my keynote at my keynote in a few hours as well during the ministerial roundtable so when you say Artificial Intelligence neural network etc yes mainly neural networks the architectures behind them and how they can be used with all sorts of data no matter you know no matter no matter how it's collected working towards sort of challenges with AI like privacy and misuse and in general I think it's really really interesting how AI is impacting so many fields around the world will you come to Bangladesh for work I'd absolutely love to these are exactly the kinds of exchanges that we we hoped to to spark in this session today is there anybody else in the in the audience that would like to ask a question here in the front row please hello my name is Hind I'm from Sudan I would like to comment on Mr. Mahmood's final words where he spoke about creating the market for the digital skills and I believe that if digital skills are not combined with entrepreneurship skills those skills won't be employed because rather than creating the markets why not teaching those youth how to understand the market to create their own their own employment and their own jobs coming from a country where even if digital skills are are educated the markets are not ready yet so they're focused and the and the solutions I believe in startups and in entrepreneurship and I liked when Mr. Ernest said that it's one of their initiatives the entrepreneurship skills so I believe that if those two are not combined together digital skills and entrepreneurship skills the decent job creation won't be complimented so that's that's a comment now I also I understand that Mr. Mahmood needs may need to leave for another obligation and I also understand that Tanmay may need to leave so I hope everyone will excuse us if we if some of we lose some of our panelists but I also understand that Ben Petrazini had a question so please the floor is yours thank you Susan my name is Ben Petrazini I work for IDRC the International Development Research Center of Canada Canada is engaged in this issue of decent jobs and youth and skills we are approaching the issue from a perspective of digitization in the future of work we're trying to understand how digitization is affecting the creation and the attrition of jobs and there is a comment and a question here and it's the fact that the digital technologies will be dramatically changing the labor landscape and although it's very important to train youth to get decent jobs there is for the jobs that will be created which are largely as Mr. Mahmood commented largely outsourcing jobs we're working in Haiti for example to get jobs for girls that can work in foreign French markets so that offers a number of opportunities but it also offers a huge number of risks and changes in labor laws and conditions for local markets they have to do with health protection number of hours of employment etc etc etc so we're working in the creation of a global network of researchers we're actually collaborating with the research department at the ILO the question is how much work are countries doing in parallel to training these youth to so that they they have decent conditions of work because we run the risk of a race to the bottom competing for very low rates on digital online service jobs and so on so there's a huge area there that of uncertainty and black box and well Canada is engaged in this issue and we would like to exchange views and collaborate with any country that might be working on this matters thank you thank you Ben anybody on the panel like to respond to that Christoph I completely agree and I was already working on that I think we shouldn't forget the opportunities due to to the digital economy but there are also risks for example to this that's a platform economy and as a researcher maybe in India you can get hired in in South Africa but if they don't pay you who is defending your your your rights so we are working on that I'm just met a colleague just an hour ago from Geneva who's working on that at the global level and we are starting to work here also on on the national level but we have to get our experience it's it's very new and we also have to understand what are the gaps what are the needs of the people and how to join it's it's a question maybe talking about the future of work it's also a future of the institutions the regulatory framework but also trade unions have to define themselves differently and then brokers and employers organizations as well so this is I think a very important area that this is just not just an opportunity for jobs but also for decent jobs and for better jobs so we shouldn't forget that just to run oh there are new jobs yeah but we have to ensure that these are also good jobs so it's a very important point we shouldn't forget thank you thank you very much Christoph and we are rapidly running out of time unfortunately Christoph I just wanted to give you the floor one more chance if you wanted to to talk more about the digital skills campaign because here again this is an area where our research is showing that there are actually 10 million jobs that will go unfilled so it's true we have to be concerned about decent jobs but we also have an opportunity to to fill that gap and help young people find decent jobs that that actually exist so I'll give you the floor again thank you very much for giving me the floor but I think it's good to explain it a little bit because many of you can also join this this campaign let me explain a little bit the campaign in mid-tune ITU and ILO launched the digital skills for decent jobs for youth campaign which is part of this youth initiative I explained before to advance work under the thematic priority of digital skills we talked about the eight areas and one is on the digital skills the goal of the campaign is to prepare young women and men for the job opportunities offered by the digital economy by delivering job ready transferable digital skills to five million young people around the world by 2030 and if you look at the skills mismatch which already exists for example there's a lack of ICT talent at least 10 million ICT jobs may remain vacant between now and 2030 as our young gentlemen also mentioned you know that there is a need so it's it's not unrealistic also that goal of five million young people encouraging the creation of new job opportunities in order to integrate more young men and women in the labor market and promoting an enabling an enabling environment where youth can seize the self-employment and entrepreneurship opportunities as mentioned offered by the current digital economy and also I think what is important as Sachin also mentioned it's not just entrepreneurship it's also creating the market for that you know you we also have to ensure that there's not just the supply side it's working but also the market but we have seen there is already a gap and a need for for these people a number of organizations public and private have already made commitments to a digital skills under the global initiative further commitments are encouraged and may include for example organizing digital skills development programs for youth e.g. for example coding booth camps or mobile apps development trainings we have seen that there are already initiatives running special basic or advanced digital skills development programs for young women specifically training young entrepreneurs on the use of ICT to grow their businesses and and learn the businesses including digital skills in apprenticeship and education professional development programs across sectors revises school curricula and providing financial support to existing digital skills development programs and the creation of new ones so we invite here also all the organizations to join this campaign regional national stakeholders who share our vision and we are creating an alliance of multiple partners each contributing differently towards the same goal partners could bring in their expertise and knowledge like IDIC for example or utilize their convening power to advocate for synergies and expand actions sometimes we also need this kind of political power to support it or put resources on the table financial or non-financial human resources or other type of resources to become a partner organizations submit commitments that connect to the global initiatives strategic elements and thematic priorities while demonstrating how they will advance the sustainable development goals all commitments are registered in our engagement platform which will be launched end of October so in in upcoming days you can see this on on the website in a label on the website you can see on the top it's a decent drops for use dot or g so here you have the contact information you can also get in touch with me so we are trying also to to expand to have more impact that other organizations can all contribute to this new campaign thank you very much thank you very much again i'm aware we're running out of time i know there's one more question from the front row and then i'm going to give our other two panelists an opportunity to provide any closing remarks that they would like to provide so please go ahead okay thank you very much for giving me this opportunity and i'm sorry for playing pivot my name is toric hamza i'm the presidency of an operator the mobile operator in africa our hq in sudan and work in west africa and dubai in the least i have two questions for mr daniel i think the european commission what are the clearest strategies for such kind of transformation you guys are now you did talk about a lot of initiatives at the european union but i would like to know the exact strategy that you guys are going to hold to to to complete a kind of transformation which is what it means a lot of risk related to such kind of transformation but the one of the biggest risk is the cyber attack which is the more digital work more digitally jobs i don't know about security what kind of precautions or what kind of strategy that you guys are following because the more people you train the jobs you create for digital arena don't forget that every 40 seconds there is a cyber attack put companies down put your schools down put universities on thank you very much thank you very much for the question i will take this opportunity to have my last intervention as well because it's somehow connected you know i i'm participating in itu meetings for a while now actually itu was my first job when i was working in the Romanian government before moving to european commission so i know that this is a debate that is going on for a long time so i will try to make the parallel about what you are doing we are doing the european union you know what is that actually is the same issue that we are seeing all over the world is that we have to start talking more to our colleagues because digital skills is not for example a responsibility that is of my own department is the employment colleagues so what we did we went in and cooperated with our colleagues that are doing employment and we are moving with them a lot so you know we are at the dsm level we are investing money in accelerators in a in a lot of coding initiatives so we have a number of projects that you know this is the transformation that we are doing it's a large number of projects of training projects investing in innovation centers investing in coding giving opportunity increasing the value of say the amount of venture capital available on the european markets of the startups have money to succeed but when we speak outside and we are looking at at everything so like you'll hear my boss in a few hour in two hours actually speaking more about this but we realize that we are investing only the european union is invested 32 billion euros in developing countries every five years together with the member states we have 82 billion euros on develop this is 52 percent of the global money available for development yeah but when we looked at on what which you know which is direction of those money that you see that you use investing traditionally in roads hospitals food security and the traditional one the basic needs and we said and when we look at okay how much do we invested in digitalization in developing countries in the last 10 years 500 million euros that is not so much compared to well it's a it's a big sum as well but it's not so much the capacity european union but digital is cross cutting so how we can get involved more so we want to speak with our agriculture colleagues and presented them what digitalization can do for agriculture you know it worked because they realize even if they they have a smartphone and a laptop they don't know how what satellite can do for for agriculture increasing four times the production we want to speak with our educational employment people and they realize how much digital can do for education then so in may the european union launches first strategy on this is called digital for development and is focused on four main priorities so we are engaging on affordable broadband connectivity because we can we can speak for ages about the impact of digitalization where without connectivity nothing is there our second priority is digital skills and we see how we can mainstream digitalization in what we are really doing we have the rascals plus a lot that we are doing a lot with the rascals plus around the world we have a number of projects helping developing countries to modernize their educational systems how we can embed digitalization in that third one is digital entrepreneurship and this is connected to digital skills how we can support accelerators and incubators and this is very much your intervention because we are looking at and it's our let's say objective to to create these spaces where people can go and learn and they have access to finance as well have access to venture capital and the last one is how we can mainstream digitalization now as an enabler so here we are looking at boosting e-government a lot e-agriculture e-education e-health besides the research project so we have a number of research projects that we are financing developing countries but we want to go there and really help countries deploy this type of systems now we'll have the you have our focus right now the first time will be africa so we have the uafrica business forum digitalization will be on the agenda uh the uh sorry the uafrica summit then on the 27th we are organizing an abidjani uafrica business forum that will be on digitalization we are financing hundreds let's say maximum of 100 startups have half european and african to come there and show to the political factor that this the digitalization is creating an impact so we are trying to create awareness so we are putting our resources in this uh we'll have a round table of on digital on digital economy is it's time for africa to discuss about the digital single market this is important to have the same rules on the african continent can we connect it with the dsm and we're going to launch what we call the external investment plan we hope to leverage 44 billion euros in investments in africa with this so we're gonna guarantee investments across across the african continent so we have very concrete things to put on the table thank you very much thank you very much daniel and i'm going to give the last word to to fiorilla hain and then i think we have to wrap things up okay i will go very fast just saying that we are contributing with 5000 programmers to your campaign uh in three years we started this year with 1000 and they are learning how to code and we we think regarding the the jobs and the quality of the jobs these are young people that either they don't work or they like they work at a supermarket very low quality jobs so they will go up in the quality of the jobs and we we have a software industry in your way that needs coders and that's the way that other people that maybe are engineers that are coding can do other stuff our tasks more complex and then we can have the entrepreneurs but it's a different field and we need them both we need entrepreneurs but we also need coders that they just do the the work and i'm i'm an engineer so i i'm not very familiar with all the regulations all the legal and jobs regulations but in uruguay we have a very strong tradition of protecting jobs so i think we we are safe there and thank you thank you very much and thank you very much for making a um a commitment to join our digital skills campaign and anybody else that's interested in joining the campaign please feel free to approach either crista for myself or or both of us so i just wanted to give a big round of applause to the panel i think we had a great session and thank you so much hope you enjoy the rest of the wtc thank you