 Welcome to the ITU Plenty Potentiary Conference 2018 in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. I'm very pleased to be joining the studio this morning by Belinda Rexelby, who is head of international relations for GSMA. Belinda, welcome to the studio. Morning, Max. Thank you for having me. Good to see you. I just wanted to start off by asking you a little bit about the fact that there's considerable attention being placed on harnessing the power of ICTs of information and communication technologies as an enabler for good, for development, benefit of the people, families, communities, even nations. What's your personal perspective on this? Well, I think you only have to look around to see the power of ICTs on our lives today in all parts of the world. It's just astonishing how much transformation they've brought about. In particular, I think there are two things that are so particularly impressive. One is the ability of ICTs to transform and bring life-enhancing services to other sectors. So, for example, the financial services sector, healthcare, education, and that's really having a transformative effect. And the second is just the power of ICTs to really reach out to people who are in areas, rural areas perhaps, where they might not have access to a lot of these services and really bring about transformation in their lives. And I think the mobile industry in particular has been very good at both of these facets. And although we still talk a lot about the connectivity gap and it's very important that we close that, if you look at pure mobile services, not just internet, 93% of the global population now have access to a mobile phone, which is more than some people have access to basic services such as electricity or sanitation or water. So, I think it's revealing how far the ICTs have come in such a short space of time. Now, this plenipotentiary conference is the first one since the world agreed on the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. I wanted to ask you perhaps a little bit about ICTs and how ICTs are helping to drive sustainable development, how GSMA sees that. Yes, well actually every year the GSMA has published a report since 2015 on the impact that the mobile industry is having on achievement of the SDGs because we're trying to measure specifically what mobile can do. And we launched the last one in September and it found that mobile is having an impact on every single one of the SDGs and that the impact has increased since the previous year. And surprisingly, the four SDGs where it has the most impact are SDG 4 on quality education, SDG 9 on industry innovation and infrastructure, SDG 11 on smart sustainable cities and SDG 13 on climate action. And one example of the latter climate action, you might think that it's not necessarily a goal that would be affected particularly by mobile technology, but this year we've seen 1.6 million households being connected to solar home systems which enable them to have access through mobile enabled pay-as-you-go mechanisms to clean energy, electricity rather than either dangerous or polluting sources that they were using previously. And that's in what countries? Mainly in Africa. In fact, I think we covered something along those lines, ready pay a project that was going on in Kenya, I believe. Exactly, exactly, yeah. And in terms of talking about getting people connected, about half the world's people are currently connected to the internet, the other half is not. I wanted to ask, how does GSMA think it would be the best way to get everyone connected? Well, it's core to our mission at GSMA. Our mobile industry agreed purpose is to connect everyone and everything to a better future. So everything that we do is done through that lens and we're trying very hard to help address the challenges to the connectivity gap. What we do is we work closely with our member operators to promote innovative new services, business models and capacity building. And we also work with governments to advocate for a policy and work that will help to overcome some of the barriers to adoption of internet, such as digital literacy, digital skills, the lack of locally relevant content and, of course, affordability issue. And finally, I just wanted to give you the opportunity. I'm sure you've been having a lot of discussions here at the Plain Potential Conference, but I wanted to give you the opportunity perhaps to spread your message further as well to our wider audience here. Well, what I would just like to conclude on and I think something that's very important in order to close the connectivity gap is we all need to work together. It won't happen on its own, it won't close on its own and there is a role for governments and for the member states of ITU. There is also an important role for the private sector, so the sector members of the ITU and academia. And I would really like to make a plea to ITU and member states to work genuinely with the private sector so that we can all come together and overcome this challenge. Next week, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much.