 We're here at ITU telecom world 2012 in Dubai, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Anthony Bloom who is senior education Technology specialist for the US Agency for international development Anthony. Thank you very much indeed for being with us today. It's my pleasure Thank you so much. I'd like to start off by asking you about your presence here at ITU telecom world Well, this is my first time at ITU telecom world and I'm absolutely thrilled to be here I can't tell you how much I've benefited from meeting the other exhibitors and getting a chance to meet the participants. I'm actually here because I was invited by ITU Bureau of BDT to on a letter of agreement between the launch of their new M powering for development initiative and The mobiles for educational alliance that USAD along with a variety of other Collaborating partners have been spearheading over the last two years So we had a signing ceremony. It was terrific a letter of intent was signed on Tuesday And it was a great opportunity to be able to let people know about the work that we're doing and that we hope to do with ITU moving forward So what is the M educational alliance about? Well, it's a convening platform principally to bring together private sector foundations development agencies Associations that are commonly interested in the use of mobile technologies and what I mean by mobiles is broadly defined It's not exclusively mobile phones. It's what technologies cost-effective scalable appropriate In education and the agency that I represent USAID a number of our other collaborating partners We're particularly interested in education in low resource settings So the purpose of the alliance was to avoid duplications of efforts to highlight good practices Ultimately to be able to fund research to evaluate promising initiatives And then see them brought to scale and a number of the organizations that are represented at meetings like this are going to be Indispensable partners for us being able to take those good practices to scale. I was going to ask you Who are the members of the alliance at present? We have a steering committee comprised of development organizations associations and foundations so all the way from World Bank UNICEF UNESCO British Council To organizations that represent the association or the telecommunication association GSMA We have the World Wide Web Foundation. We also have large international NGOs world vision is one of our partners as well So there's a number of agencies GIZ Also, and then the sled of agreement with ITU That at that steering committee level helped make decisions on behalf of the alliance Ultimately as an alliance it's intended that many organizations could be part of it So we have a website that we've launched. We've done international symposia But the intention is for organizations such as that are represented here if you're interested in mobile technologies in education The opportunities for us to learn from each other rather than what we call silos of excellence that we don't get a chance We duplicate each other's efforts as a convening platform the intention of the Malice for Education Alliance is really to say hey here's some interesting Opportunities that are going on You should meet each other for example and being an event like this is a great opportunity To have conversations that really make a difference. Yeah, I guess what we found is there's a lot of duplications of effort and in the The developing developing communities that we work the low resource settings It's really important that we make the smart decisions about the appropriate uses of technology to advance Learning outcomes and I think it's important to emphasize Can the technology investments improve learning outcomes? Because at the ultimately at the end of the day the decisions that we make on behalf of our clients ministries of education For example should be based on data So an area that we're really excited by is the use of technologies for promoting early-grade reading in fact early-grade reading is one of the Pillars of our us ad education strategy a common Area of interest of a number of the partners we're working with on an education alliance And we've done competitions that we've been able to provide seed funding and catalytic support for organizations that are using Technology to promote early-grade reading so we'll be really excited to follow those and to see how that can add value to the field So what would your ideal vision be for the future of technology and education? That's a great question. Well, I think one is to work with organizations such as represented here adding Collaborating with ITU and the empowering for development is going to be an ideal platform for us to be able to take projects to scale The challenge has been that a lot of initiatives are pilot or anecdotal and there's not rigorous evaluation So I think one of the main Contributing elements of the M. Education Alliance is we'd like to create a multi-stakeholder multi-stakeholder Fund to be able to independently evaluate Promising practices in the area of mobiles in education. I think once we prove the case then there's a variety of organizations private sector Organizations represented here that then can help scale those initiatives But first and foremost we have to be able to test that premise can technology add value to education and increase learning outcomes Well, let's hope so Anthony blue. Thank you very much indeed being with us today. I appreciate the opportunity. Thank you so much