 Again, good morning everyone and welcome to this event on emerging technology for connectivity accelerating digital transformation in LDCs, LLDCs and SIDs. My name is Aminata Garba, I will be moderating this session this morning. And the program of the day, today we have a theme which is on trends in emerging technology for connectivity and digital transformation. On the different sessions we will have today, we will try to set the scene for the next few days. So we will start with this spotlight session, breaking the break chance, the rise of slow internet, and then we have a session right after on scalable e-government solutions. Then we will have an opening ceremony at 2 p.m. We have a session on trends in emerging technology and then we will have some key notes on emerging technology at 5.30, especially focusing on the American region. So let's go straight to this session, which is a spotlight session, breaking the break chance, the rise of the slow internet. And in this session, by highlighting the assumptions behind two transformative technologies, the internet and Bitcoin protocols, Pindawong will illustrate how surfacing and breaking break chance can accelerate digital transformation in non-obvious ways. Will the internet continue to rot, or will new IP or protocol renew it in time, or is the internet itself a brain chain? This is what we will explore in this talk. Our speaker today is Mr. Pindawong, who is the chairman of VEGIFI, a Hong Kong-based internet financial infrastructure consultancy company. He is an internet pioneer who co-founded the first licensed internet service provider in Hong Kong and leads the Belt and God Block Gen consortium. So previously, Pindawong also served under the Hong Kong government committee on innovation, technology and industrialization, and he has held many, many other leadership positions. So I will just stop here and then give the floor to Pindawong, who will tell us today about the brain chain. Pindawong, the floor is yours. Thank you so much, Yamanata, for this kind introduction, and thank you and apologies for being a few minutes late. As mentioned, we have a very big task of us today, which is to set the scene, in some sense, for a very eventful week ahead. And why do we just get stuck in? So what I'm going to do is just talk through, and if I could have the staff advance the slide to the next slide. By next, that would be great. Next slide, please. So with this spotlight keynote, I would like to thank, sorry, Hulan Zhao, the Secretary General, obviously the staff and wonderful translators that we have for the week ahead, which would be extremely interesting. Could we have the previous slide went up before that? Yeah. And so what I thought we would do is, in the spotlight, is to set the, to think bigger thoughts in some sense, to dream bigger dreams, if only to just help set the tone for what will be the themes for not only today, but for the rest of the week. Next slide, please. Now what I originally wanted to do was to talk about sort of the great big debate over the last three, four years with what technical discussions within the ITU about the new internet protocol as being promulgated via the ITU. And also the quick protocol is, in some sense, the internet engineering task force vision as originally proposed by Google, in fact. And as was mentioned in the keynote, it's not clear to me that this giant tussle is actually symptomatic of the internet itself being disrupted. As you know, a lot of techniques and industries are now moving on to the internet. And the internet itself was the big disruptor over the last 20 years. But there's some very interesting developments in, for example, the Bitcoin or blockchain protocols, which have a fundamentally different architecture. And it's not clear to me that the future is just a selection between these two protocols, new internet IP or the quick protocol. In last month's keynote that I gave at the AFS Star, the African Internet Summit, there was a comment that actually disturbed me, which was this whole notion of having an embedded assumption in your mind, which you weren't really aware of. And that really is really why I want to talk about brain chains today and not really the difference between new IP and the quick protocol. So next slide, please. Now, the reason why it disturbed me was obviously when we were thinking about the internet development in Africa over the last 20 years and the next 20 years, it seems to me that there seems to be the set of assumptions that somehow invisibly limits or confines or restricts the freedom of your thinking. And that was a comment that was made in my session, and it really disturbed me. And so today's sort of focus and spotlight is in some sense to try and unpack that this brain chain, that was what my term for this phenomenon of, in some sense, these hidden assumptions. So I'm going to be using two examples. The internet as the first one and Bitcoin protocols as the second to illustrate really that we should be very sensitive to these brain chains and surface them as soon as we can. Next slide, please. So as you know, the chain is a series of links. And to break a brain chain, you're trying to find the weakest link. And in some sense, the weakest part of the series of assumptions. And so today, again, using these two examples, let's try and surface what is a brain chain by using some examples and seeing how we can break them. Next slide. So as was mentioned, we have LDCs, LLDCs and SIDs. And to be honest, I wasn't actually sure what these meant. So obviously, I'm trying to go and lead into the poll next if we can have the next slide. And what I would like to know is where are you from? What's in a name for these least developed economies or landlocked developing countries or small island developing states? If you're from any one of these, choose one, two or three in the poll. Or if you're from none of them, please choose item number four. So could we run the first poll? Yes, please. I will do it in a minute. I have a small issue here. Sorry about that. No problem. And what I'm basically trying to find is where is everyone? Recording stopped. Okay. Thank you. The poll is not quite there. But what I'm trying to figure out is we have 100 or so people on this video conference. And the whole theme of the week is LDCs, LLDCs and SIDs, small island developing states. So I want to actually try and figure out where everyone's from when we can get the poll running. Okay. So here we have where are you from? Well, are you from a least developed country? Are you from a landlocked developing country? Are you from a small island developing state? Or none of the above? If you could just choose one of those and press the submit button, let's just see where everyone is from. And we'll bring the results up once the results come in. The point I'm trying to illustrate though is in what's in the name is, you know, do you accept this framing? And this framing for LDCs, LLDCs and SIDSs is going to be persistent for the rest of the week. And to me, it was in some sense the first example of a potential brain chain, primarily because, and I'll go through it in a moment, there is some assumptions with the naming of this. And I'm not sure, given my experience with the African Internet Summit, that I entirely agree with both the terminology and all the framing. Next slide, please. And we can show the results from the poll whenever they're ready. And the reason why... 54% voted. Okay, let's just wait for a few more minutes. The reason why I don't accept this is because of some of the words that sort of trigger me based on last month's discussion of the Internet Development in Africa. These are words like small, least, island, landlocked. I mean, they're implicit in the terms of the definitions, but I would argue that we may not necessarily need to use this geographic or size-based framing. Next slide, please. In some sense, I think we should really get rid of it. Now, what COVID-19 has taught us is this disease which has spread globally has in some sense divided us and conquered us. But at the same time, we have our own way of having these so-called lockdowns to also divide and conquer the disease itself. More importantly, next slide, please. The ITU and the way that this conference has been framed is really from, obviously, the ITU nation-state viewpoint. The 193, 194 members of the ITU and members of the United Nations. This has an implicit assumption of nation-state actors. In other words, if you were to be a member of the ITU, I mean, nation-states as a treaty organization, you are then obviously welcome. It has been succeeding as a framework for 130-plus years. The last 20 years, though, in terms of the networks, a network like the Internet that doesn't see borders, there is a, I think, an implicit tension now between the nation-state view and, I would say, the global network view. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. So COVID-19 talked, in some sense, about we can, many of us who don't have to go to a factory, we can just work from home. And, in other words, the importance of the network is now paramount, especially in the COVID-19 era. And so, as I said earlier, I would like to use two examples of trying to surface brain trains through two famous networks. The first is the rise of the stupid network, something that I was involved with in the early 1990s, which was actually the rise of the Internet itself. Next slide. So here's an example of the Internet as it was in 1973. It's gone from this research network with a minimum small number of nodes to now this massive global network with 80,000 different networks, which will participate to form it. And the current view is through evolution of protocols like Qwik or UIP, that this network of networks will continue to expand. Next slide. Now, time does not permit me to go into, but I would highly recommend you look at this wonderful essay called The Rise of the Stupid Network by the AT&T senior researcher, called Dave Eisenberg, at the very beginning of the commercialization of the Internet. Now, this was from the perspective of the person who was deeply involved with the phone network, an international voice such as IDD, in other words, the domain of the ITU. And in this essay and this famous essay of The Rise of the Stupid Network, several of the assumptions of the phone network were in fact put completely upside down and he basically highlighted that. And I would encourage you to read it when you can. Next slide, please. So in the old days, we had this five ESS voice switch. The network was very smart and we used to collect these very dumb black phones to the network. There wasn't any computing power on the edge of the network. It was all inside the core of the network with these very smart electronic voice switches. Now, as has been said elsewhere, the Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones. We in fact had a different kind of architecture which was completely different, which was not a smart network. In fact, it was a stupid network. Next slide, please. Now, the stupid network was very different. It didn't have any real intelligence in the core of the network. In fact, the intelligence was pushed out to the edge of the network. The network itself was stupid. It was a dumb network. And the edge devices that connected had all the computing power. And this, in fact, was perfect for the evolution of the semiconductor boom over the last 20-odd years and the change of the network attaching methodology. And this is the network that we know today. So this is kind of ironic that you would do something which was take the intelligence out of the network, put it to the edge of the network, as in the case of the internet and this different internet architecture, this different set of assumptions, in fact, changed everything. Next slide. And what it changed with the internet is once you take the intelligence out to the edge of the network, you could tinker at the edge and you wouldn't have to rip out the core and upgrade the core. And many of the famous internet companies now, the social media companies and the platform companies exploited that. And it was a great period of permissionless innovation, primarily because you didn't have to upgrade the whole network. You could just upgrade the edges and the applications on that as you saw fit. Next slide, please. But the internet is a global network. It's not an international network. And what I mean by that, I want to go through because this is again, in some sense, the first brain train. If you can just think about what is different between what is a global network and what is international network. Next slide. And the key thing here is to notice that we're not talking between nations, between nation-state actors. So obviously the ITU is framed in those terms and that's one of my chief concerns today, is again moving away from this international only viewpoint, but yet a network that is still global. Next slide, please. And so if we just look at this change in world view, this change of world from just only having nation-state actors and the genesis of where this Westphalian view came from, which was in the 30 years of war from 1648, this seems to be an impressive assumption, at least it's worked very well for the last few hundred years. But then the internet is a global network but doesn't rely explicitly on nation-state actors. Next slide, please. So what the internet taught us was that geography is forever in a sense. You can't divorce your neighbors, countries are next to each other. But when we have the internet, everyone now is your neighbor. And that changes in some sense how we view things. Next slide, please. And the potential as we know from the headlines with internet ransomware and hacking and hacking incidents and security incidents that now when everyone is potentially your neighbor on the internet, we also have the downside that potentially everywhere is a bad neighborhood. Next slide, please. Now, Jeff Houston is no stranger to the ITU and there are two papers again as part of the homework exercise that I would encourage you to read. And that is some concern. And I share Jeff's concern that the internet as we know it today is potentially failing. So here's one view. And if we go to the next slide, please. Here's another one that the internet is actually rotting and this is by a Harvard professor. We don't have time to go into that. But there is some concern right now. The internet itself is not that there's a question mark over the internet that in some sense to connect to the internet given all the security issues, there is a careful calculation that needs to be made. It's no longer that connecting to the internet is good. Connect to the internet may actually have quite a big downside. And that leaves the opportunity for considering other forms. Next slide, please. We can also see that the network itself has evolved to be a very, very surveilled network. And we have these social platforms that does all the surveillance. This was again, not necessarily a foreseen forecast, but that is the way things have evolved. So what I want to do, I think we're running a little bit out of time is really to get to the crux of the matter. So I want to skip forward to the slides. Actually, let's leave the slides as they are here. Actually, the next slide is good. Which is, with the nation-state view, we have this rule of law within nation-states. We also have this chief problem which we've been dealing with with internet governance for the last 20 years, which is all laws have borders. So the examples of brain chains to go through and to highlight was that the internet, there was a fundamental assumption and that assumption was distance equals cost. And old networks, such as the International Direct Dial network had the accounting rate settlement assumption. And with that, that governed the world of the telephone network. When we have a different architecture, like the internet architecture, where distance did not equal cost, if you understood that that was the first chain that you didn't have to, that you could break, that distance did not equal cost, then you would have made them a lot of money out of the internet era. There are other examples as we wrap up in the next few minutes. The second one is, in some sense, the Bitcoin protocol. The Bitcoin protocol is not a, it's not only, it doesn't only run on this stupid network, the internet. It coordinates every 10 minutes with these blocks that are produced. So it's a very slow network. And so the irony here is when you have something that's both stupid and slow, that's not normally a recipe for success, but it does lead to some very, very interesting properties. And in the latest slides, which you can go through after the call, I would go through two examples of this slow network. The slow network itself, where you have, in some sense, the assumption here is that time is money and Bitcoin is example of that data equals money. But more importantly, that by relaxing some of the constraints of decentralized systems, we can have massive replication from not just replicating a few tens of nodes, but on the Bitcoin network, for example, about 100,000 nodes. So the summary here is that the small island that I see, or the landlock island that I see, is in fact between my ears. What I mean by that is, I think there is a third way. I think there is not necessarily a binary choice between new IP or the quick protocols. I think if you accept these terms of being least developed or small island or landlocked, it doesn't really resonate with the challenges ahead, which is the opportunity to lead. And so what I would like to encourage us all is listen very carefully over the next few days about the developments in space and development 5G, the development in decentralized identifiers, and try to surface what are the hidden assumptions? What are the brain chains, if any? Because I think the risk here is to accept the discussions as presented, and they're not necessarily maybe relevant to your local context. Thank you very much. Please, let me show the polls. The results, we have 81 persons who voted. Let's see where everyone is. And now you see, right? Right, wonderful. So many were from, again, if you accept this definition of least developed country or developing country, then again, that is actually most people are actually from none of the above. So that's pretty good if you accept that. So what I encourage you is to reach out over email, please do share the slides after there's pretty self-explanatory. But the point here is, if there are any chains of assumptions, let's surface those as soon as possible because accepting the argument as given is probably the biggest mistake you can make. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Pinda, for this presentation. We are running out of time, but maybe I can allow one question if we do have in the audience quickly before handing to the next moderator. Otherwise, the slides are uploaded on the website already so you can download them. And then they are shared in the chat here. I will now, because I don't see any hand, I will hand over to the next session. We are late a little bit. I apologize to the moderator. So I will hand over to Mr. Sherman Hong, who is Senior Advisor, Digital Impact Alliance for the next session, which is entitled, Scalable E-Government Solutions for Developing Countries. Thank you so much. And then after this session, we will have a session at 2 p.m., which is the opening ceremony. I welcome you all for these sessions. Thank you, Pinda, again. And then if we have any other questions in the chat, I will be sure to forward them to you. Bye. Mr. Sherman, the floor is yours. Hello, everybody. Thank you very much. I would like to pass to the head of the European Office at ITU, Mr. Galsop-Onder, for the opening. Thank you very much, Sherman. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. This is a great starting of the week with this event. So good morning, good afternoon, good evening, depending on the part of the words you are connecting from. I'm pleased to welcome you at this special session on the Scalable E-Government Solutions for Developing Countries that is held within the framework of this emerging technology for connectivity, a special event. Ladies and gentlemen, digital government services are vital for developing a digital economy and that benefits also its citizens by expanding access to critical services such as health, education and social protection. Countries are seeking to achieve the SDGs in the next 10 years and they are increasingly looking to national digital strategies and agendas to transform the way they do the business and improve the lives of the citizens. More importantly, however, they are looking towards the concrete solutions that may address their needs. And the example of the GovStack is one of them. So that's why welcome to this special session which will provide more detail on this offering. This has never been more true during the times of the COVID-19, putting several constraints to the traditional offline government services. Therefore, there is a need to act, particularly in LLDCs and seeds that face challenges in terms of infrastructure and the capacity to implement such services. ITU estimates that 430 billion US dollars are needed over the next 10 years and to bridge the gap and to get everyone in the world connected. And we have still over 3.7 billion people offline. A part of this much needed investment must be aimed at engaging citizens online and offer meaningful ways to connect and benefit of the government services. Ladies and gentlemen, and the GovStack Initiative seeks to tackle the barriers and to implementation and scale up of government services within the countries. Current challenges to digital government include lack of coordination and the habit of working in silos, funding constraints, absence of scalable solutions, all opposing significance constraints and to digital transformation in government, increasing costs and inefficiencies and often leading to inaction. A whole of government platform approach to developing government services through the reuse and minimal customization of quick and easy to adapt to building blocks is at the heart of the success of digital government services projects. Open source models for the government platform that is built from modular and reusable components, leveraging a secure and standards-based approach are an optimal solution to solving these issues in a cost-efficient and scalable manner. This is what we consider as an emerging technology and emerging new paradigm, which many best practices across the world that can be replicated in developing countries as well as LLDs and seeds. Ladies and gentlemen, today, you will hear more about this initiative and the concrete next steps that are on the horizon. I'm very pleased to recognize that the partnership forged by two countries in Europe, Estonia and Germany, which have joined the forces with the Digital Impact Alliance and the ITU in October last year to bring this project to life. As we proceed towards the implementation over the next two, three years, we can expect a significant impact for beneficiary countries and the outcomes of today's discussions will be an important step forward towards this goal. Let me also remind that this initiative has also been originated by European countries within the framework of the working as part of the Europe for Europe approach, as well as Europe for the other regions. This is a significant contribution to our ITU Regional Initiative for Europe, focusing on the citizen-centric approach to build services for national administrations that seeks to facilitate the development of transformative and paperless citizen-centric services that are accessible and available to all members of society. Ladies and gentlemen, before I conclude, let me thank Estonia, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, German Federal Ministry of Economic Cooperation and Development and the Digital Impact Alliance for the work carried out so far and for continuous support to this initiative. Let me also thank the European Commission that is taking a closer look and as potential for scaling up growth stock across the world. ITU stands ready to contribute and support this important process. With that said, I would like to thank once again and all those who are with us today and wish you a great session and the event throughout the week without further ado, I would like to introduce our distinguished speakers, including Mr. Sherman Kong, Senior Advisor at the Digital Impact Alliance and at the UN Foundation, who will be moderator of this session. I have also a great pleasure and to introduce my colleague Hania Skandar, Senior Advisor, Digital Services at the Telecommunication Development Bureau of the ITU. Sarah and Teresa Fischer, Consultant at the Deutsche Gesellschaft für International Zusammenarbeit and GIZ of Germany, as well as Martin Kavett, National Digital Advisor of the Government Office of Estonia. This session will take a look at the following proceeding. We'll introduce, we'll provide the brief introductions and opening statements by the speakers. We'll have the panel discussion and as well as we'll have more interactive parts with the polls and Q&A's. But without further ado, let me hand over to Sherman Kong to chair this session. And before doing so, I would like to also invite our IT moderator to provide a few announcements and that we know how to proceed with the session. Thank you. Hello, thank you so much. Just a second. Dear participants, thank you for joining. Before starting, okay. We don't see me. We don't see me. Here we go. Dear participants, thank you for joining. Before starting the meeting, I would like to give you some instructions on the Zoom platform and the meeting itself. This meeting is entirely remote. The audience is kindly asked to keep their camera and microphone switched off to minimize bandwidth apart from where taking the floor. Please rename yourselves and add the represented member state, sector member or academia before your name. To do so, please right click on your name in the list of participants. The moderator of each session will recognize the speakers and will give you the floor when the turn comes. Everybody I invited to use the chat for any questions or comments. Moderators will be monitoring and any comment may be read out if time allows. You can view and activate the captioning by clicking on live transcript at the bottom bar of the Zoom interface. The meeting also benefits of six UN languages interpretation. Please select your preferred language from the bottom bar of the Zoom interface. Dear participants, please note that when using headphones with Bluetooth, interpreters are not able to hear properly. Kindly use headsets with USB connection. The meeting is being recorded and the recording will be used for report writing and communication purposes. Every floor is being made to facilitate the smooth flow of this meeting. Thank you for your cooperation and I wish you a good meeting. Is that a cue for me to intervene now? Okay, hello everybody. Ladies and gentlemen, member state delegations and other ministerial officials, partners, colleagues and friends. As Yalstof introduced, we are wanting to talking about scalability and the government solutions for countries especially in your context and a newly established partnership across the four agencies that are represented by the speakers here today. This is a kind of an, you know, in the context of the emerging theme of this week we'd like to introduce basically a practice or a model that we have been observed in advanced digital government in context and we want to introduce this concept to you and the work that we're embarking on since the end of 2020 and how we would like for you all to engage and to see that there is continue effort and technical support provided to member states represented here today in the audience. Next please. Next please. So what we have been noticing in terms of countries that have been recognized for advanced digital governance is this kind of model that's been converging and we've seen this in our review and in discussions with countries and it's recognizing government as a singular platform for citizens and you might have seen this diagram in literatures in other contexts and in other debates or discussions it might vary but the notion behind this is that there is a shared digital service infrastructure in place that is facilitated and operated by government in a more cross-sectoral hold of government approach manner and however you divide it there are some fundamental elements that we've seen that leading countries are practicing. So it's around developing and maintaining and operating these foundational elements within the infrastructural context of digital government services. So in some countries you see generic components being stood up that can facilitate services and needs across different agencies and as well as other government branches at large such as digital ID, authentication, seen cases of unified payment interfaces or gateways and then common applications that are built on top of it contextualized for different agency needs. So it moves away from the traditional sense of despair solutions that has been deployed by different agencies or as siloed or limited by lack of funding or lack of demands or needs and they move towards a more centralized shared approach where agencies describe and express digital needs that are coming across and to aggregate and to build together in this more centralized way. Next please. And you've seen cases like this and you will hear today very fortunately a representation from Estonia in terms of how they've done this kind of work or approach. But in a sense there are some illustrative examples that we have seen in the context of Estonia or in other countries as well. This happens geographically very variance across the variance of geographic boundaries of countries recognizing or government recognizing these generic components that needs to be deployed in order to facilitate sectoral needs but using a more shared approach. So in the case of Estonia, you see this notion of building blocks around a singular identity, interoperable service layers that can connect different components or agency in a context or blocks so speak and some other digital components that underlie the digital government services for structure itself. Next. And similarly to the case of India we've heard of the success of the digital ID there around Aadhar and moving towards the notion of this India stack where there's the digital ID component in place connected with other generic digital building blocks around unified payment schemes around e-signatures and so on that help to build this fundamental working layer where then you have different sectoral services that are built on top of it and this fully facilitates a lot of digital government needs and it makes for easier scalability. And in the case of India especially looking into the financial inclusion context that this had really kind of accelerate the delivery of services in that regard and you can see that there's a list of generic building block elements that are kind of enshrined in the agile India enterprise architectural approach in the government documents itself. Next. And lastly a case of Singapore as well and they've also emulated the stack approach where there are fundamental generic layers that are built underneath which services different sectoral components and connecting with citizens in more of a one government or one platform approach. Next. So across these different leading examples we've empirically abstract what are the core elements that are technologically informing the design of this and this is really as you have seen the term already a generic reusable sets of building blocks that form this underlying layer where the different high impact use cases can be built on top and multiple SDGs can rapidly be effectively impacted or delivered and it leads to more efficient scalability it leads to more cost optimization as well as you will see in a few minutes. Next. And so we, in this partnership that Yaroslav mentioned label GovStack we've started to look into these fundamental building blocks if you will that forms this underlying general digital services platform and the characteristics of them are that they are reusable, that they are cross sectoral that they serves fundamental generic processes. There is no kind of a sectoral only focus in this because if you look on the right a library of building block sets we have identified so far payments identity, security, information, mediation and all the other components that we have identified and in leading country examples in terms of digital governance these are fundamental blocks that they've developed and maintained and in combination to facilitate the delivery of services much more rapidly. Next. And it's, I mentioned there are there's not just good practice in terms of efficiency and scalability in the context of what we're talking about today in terms of scalability governance solutions but it has good business sense as well because we have seen real demonstrable economic values or cost savings that countries have enjoyed. We've seen research done by GSMA on the case of India or Australia where there is tangible cost saving in terms of providing shared infrastructures to different agency services and real economic values if there's a more whole of government approach in terms of providing digital services and cost optimization as well and in our discussions with Saudi Arabia. So both in terms of providing shared services in order to optimize costs or in terms of facilitating a faster delivery of services in order to generate real economic growth has been observed by our studies as well so far. Next. So then touching on the initiative that has been introduced in the beginning. Next. What Gaustik really is aiming to do as a partnership and as an initiative is really to help empirically abstracts and demystify these kinds of approaches. We've seen commonalities across the cases of Stonia, India, Singapore and so on on what's kind of generic digital components that they're focused on developing as part of the foundational elements or core engine that drives digital government services. So what we as a partnership or initiative aims to do is really to unpack this technical approach and make the case for more reusable comprehensible references for countries represented by audience today as well as other advanced member states to model against to learn from this and to be able to start moving their digital government service portfolios towards an approach like this so that they can also accelerate their own government services or government implementations. So the model itself is really an extrapolation of what has proven to have worked already in countries. And this is something that we have observed as an emerging trend that advanced digital government states have converges towards. And it's a little bit of background, ITU and the Digital Impact Alliance had worked on this initial and publish a logical model behind this called the SDG Digital Investment Framework. So the Gustach Initiative really is an extension of informing the technical notions behind this. And you will see on one of the outputs that we're aiming to achieve is really informing the technical design of these building block components that I've touched on earlier. So as I mentioned, it was brought on by four founding partners, ITU, Dial and the government of Germany and Stonia as well. And we aim to work on this in a very collaborative manner. And with that, next, I would like to kind of call on the different agencies represented by the speaking panel here today now to talk about their rationalization, motivation behind why we are part of this government Gustach Initiative, as well as taking a step back on some of the challenges and opportunities and leading samples in terms of how the government solutions have been scaled. And so to that extent, I'd like to kind of frame our opening statements around the three key themes here. So I would like to first call on IT representative, Mr. Hania Skander around how we want, how we've aimed to accelerate initial digital government services in the context of a model as such, Hania for sure. Okay, thanks very much Sherman and good morning, good afternoon everyone. Actually just to build on what Sherman has been saying about ITU interest to be part of this initiative is really dated back to many years where we've been seeing continuous increasing in demand in terms of digitalization. And I think this has been even accelerated recently by the push from COVID where it's becoming evident that the digitalization is very essential to... That's Julian Eason, what's going on? Which really proved that digitalization is essential to ensure business continuity. Now with this increased demand on digitalization there will be also increased investments. And if those investments are not well managed this can lead indeed to increasing the difficulty to manage your digital resources and digital assets because this is what we have seen previously that there are a lot of duplication, a lot of fragmentation, a lot of siloing. So we felt that we need to adopt business as usual cannot continue and we need to adopt a slightly different approach in terms of managing this is that investment and that's why a few years back indeed the ITU work was dialed to think through how can we have an approach to make a digital investment that can be done once but serve so many different sectors and so many different use cases. And this will have huge implication in terms of increasing the efficiency, improving cost efficiency, but also accelerating and increasing the speed of delivering new services. And this is the basis for which we have developed this SDG digital investment framework which is really based on a number of the concept of reusable building blocks. Now from ITU perspective it's extremely important now that we work with countries on how they can adopt what you can call those types of architectural approaches and how they can really put in place what you can consider as a digital public infrastructure. Actually this concept, digital public infrastructure is an emerging concept and then I think that's why we are bringing it to the emerging technology. It's been now used by so many different organizations to explain a little bit that while we usually tend to think of infrastructure in terms of connectivity in terms of cables and internet and all of that, when you look at the service layer there is also the concept of what you can call a digital service infrastructure. Meaning that there are some components, there are some capabilities, there are some shared services that are, they need to be so ubiquitous, so present, they can sit on top of internet and they are available to hold the government and as mentioned, this can have huge implication for rich countries like European countries and some of the Asian countries, but also if you look at it from the LDC and its perspective, you cannot by no mean afford to have these types of duplication which is happening so far. So this concept of digital public infrastructure this service kind of platform is not an option anymore and you cannot adopt the business as usual. From the ITU perspective, we are really focusing now on building country capacities so that countries can on their own lead this establishment of these types of infrastructure and really being able to make those investments and make some good decisions in terms of investments and put in place those types of foundations that will enable reusability, but also interoperability and they are secure by design and they can really accelerate the whole digitalization. So we looked at it from an ITU perspective in terms of how we facilitate and bridge this knowledge transfer. Countries are looking to some of the countries like India, like Singapore, like Estonia like so many other countries who have gone very far in terms of digitalization and really looking on how they can start from where the other ended actually, and instead of repeating the same mistakes and reinventing the wheel. And really the objective of this joint initiative which we call GraphStack is really to bridge this knowledge gap is to say, how can we make available some, what you can call digital public goods, meaning how can we make some digital resources available and open and accessible to everyone on how you can go about building your digital government platform and put in place these types of foundations that we are talking about. Of course, we all know that there are different approaches for capacity development, like the classical traditional training, whether it's remote or face to face, et cetera. And we all know that while this is extremely important it's not enough. And you need to go one or two or even three steps ahead in really in order to bridge this gap. So one of the things is that we have adopted and this is why ITU is really part of this is to say, let's adopt the different type of approaches by learning by doing and learning by example. So in that sense, this is how we approach it is to say, let's try to provide a digital public good, meaning an open digital government platform that is implemented as a model or as an example, or you can call it a reference implementation or off a digital government platform. You can think about it more or less as a mini, you know, digital government platform of Estonia or India or other types of countries and how you can apply all the principles and concepts of standard based approaches, secure by design, protecting privacy, ensuring the citizen consent, enabling interoperability, how you create, use open APIs, how you adopt all the new trends in scaling up digital services like adopting microservices, et cetera. So there are a lot of things that we would like to bring and make available as a demo platform where countries can come and learn and play with it and learn and experiment and even build, you know, services on top of it and see how those types of principles would be implemented in reality. So the way we approach that is to say, okay, let's make available those new digital public goods, DPGs, let's really make sure that as a model platform or the, you know, example platform is really built based on best practices from a number of countries. And we use this as a resource for knowledge transfer and making sure that we give more and more ownership for governments to see themselves and can implement similar types of platforms in their own countries. So the whole idea is that this type of, you know, open accessible resources will help countries, first of all, of course, to learn but also potentially to replicate this in a way or another in their countries and how can this also can inform procurement processes because we all know that procurement is something that is always a challenge in order how you can, procure those types of solutions that goes beyond the one specific solution scope or beyond even one department or one agency. And you make these types of whole of government type of infrastructure available. So we do hope that those types of DPGs, digital public goods, we really accelerate this process of knowledge transfer and give more ownership and give the leadership for countries so that they can take ownership and really lead the development of their own digital foundation and really enable their governments to be forward-looking and to be ready, you know, for the future. Thank you. Thank you, Anias. As Hani rightfully mentioned, this is really to support country capacity and one way that we're trying to do so in terms of the partnership we have established here today is really to align others around the notion that this could be a way forward and it requires not only us developing these kinds of references and help inform the model but it also requires a level of ecosystem alignment. So in terms of building partnerships for others to come along the ride, I would like to now invite Sarah Fisher from GIZ for her opening statement. Excuse me, I didn't hear you, sorry. Dear Mr. Eskander, can you repeat the last phrase? Oh, you're waiting for the presentation, right? Yeah, sorry, I think we need to unmute Sarah. Okay, she's on mute. I should be working now, right? Sorry, I couldn't unmute myself because I think that needs to be done by the host but I'm hopeful that everyone can hear me now, perfect. Thank you very much, Sherman. And also let me start by saying it's great honor to join today's panel on scalable e-government solution alongside our partners in crime here from the Gustach Initiative, Sherman Honey, Martin Yaroslav, I'm happy to be here. And I can just say from GIZ side, from the German development side, digitization or the digital transformation has become a key priority over the last years because we really see it as a useful tool and helpful tool to address global challenges, to promote sustainable development and thus hopefully create better access to services and solutions for all of us. And as Sherman and also Honey pointed out, I think especially the last year and COVID has shown us yet again what tremendous role digital technologies can play not only in fighting a global pandemic in the end but also in keeping communication flowing and keeping services accessible. And really I guess have we been made so aware of how much our faith also depends on science, on digital innovation as we have been in the last year. And since the start of the pandemic, we also have faced an increased demand from our partner countries to support on national digital transformation on strategies but also on the use of data, for example. And I think countries across the globe have recognized the significant potential at digitization holes for, yeah, to weather the disruptions that the pandemic hold and bought but also to inform and to better build government services and infrastructures and thereby keep access for citizens open in that sense. What we see at the moment is that numerous citizen services and public administration processes such as say contract awards, patient files, accurate cultural market systems but also building of health systems cause an enormous volume of administrative IT work and order for these processes to work also more smoothly. I think we highly depend on reliant IT systems on reliant solutions to process this kind of information also in an efficient manner. And I think this is where the Guffstack collaboration and the Guffstack initiative will truly power digital transformation and give governments a good chance to build and deploy digital services and applications in a more cost efficient and accelerated and most also integrated manner. And the Guffstack approach or also what we call ICT building blocks, digital building blocks, thereby can definitely help governments to easily reach their own digital platforms and systems. And I think we're getting to sketch out for building blocks at the moment, such as payment or ID. Sherman also gave a bit of an overview earlier on what concrete building blocks we're engaging in but I think there is a great progress being made at the moment. And I think this is a great initiative to contribute to not only to smart development goals as well in the end, but also to make government actions more transparent, more participatory and offer citizens really the administrative services that they need in their local context. Over the last years, we also witnessed that more and more donors, as Hani pointed out as well, support the development of digital infrastructure. There is a growing interest in investing in this field, but we also see that these investments are still often duplicated, they're fragmented and thereby they're not really often scalable or sustainable in the end. And I think this is also where we see a great chance at the moment to align efforts. I think it's a great time to rethink a little bit also the funding structures behind digital public infrastructures to align efforts and work jointly on this very ambitious agenda for international cooperation on good digital public infrastructures because this is also the time where we can decide and influence what kind of digital public goods we're going to build and to make them good, meaning also secure and as resilient as possible. Yeah, I think that has been mentioned as well already but we often operate when it comes to also investment into digital public goods still in silos, so in different sectors and especially now it's really important to address these parts of digitalization jointly because there are overacking mechanisms that can be used also in different sectors and thereby also give us the chance to basically maximize the return of invest also when it comes to that. And I'm pretty sure that better coordinating investments in DPIs and DPGs really gives us an opportunity to overcome these silos. There has been major interest and a great lot of work also done by other partners in this field, for example also the Melinda Gates Foundation who are also gathering around the similar efforts. There is a group of donors also at the moment establishing or discussing the idea of establishing a global fund to support partner governments, talking also about Gates, not about KFW. So there is a lot going on at the moment, there are a lot of discussions and I think that a crucial point at the moment to align donors' perspectives a little bit more around digital public goods as well. And I think not only COVID showed us now that, yeah, it's important for us to collaborate on this manner, it's important for us to cooperate on developing good digital government solutions that help us in the end also build solutions that are inclusive, that are secure, that also protect privacy and in the end also support human rights when it comes to that. And yeah, we are very happy to be part of the GUSTAG Initiative, I can say, from the German side, I think it's great to further develop this global community that we already started and I also warmly invite everyone to join us on this journey. I think we're always welcoming technical expertise in our working groups and yeah, we really want to make this also a global approach. So yeah, I'm glad to be here today and thank you so far. Back to Sherman, I guess. Thank you, Sarah. I think what other donors are realizing as well is we are really providing a generic model where collaboration and alignment can happen. So in the context of what Sarah mentioned, the GUSTAG model itself or what we're trying to extrapolate from successful leading country examples is that it's not really no favoring or exclusively looking at one specific sector or one specific kind of sets of products or goods available, but also a more generic approach or framework where there's an understanding that these building blocks or foundational pieces tie into the escalability of a more national focused digital government strategy in countries we've seen and certainly we would like to see or support or assist LDCs and LDCs that sits in this regard as well. So going back to Hani's perspective a little bit in terms of accelerating country capacity and always transfer one very good way to do this is to connect to countries and other ministries and government examples that have done this. So we're very pleased to have the representation from Estonia, Mr. Martin Kaeff to speak about this from an Estonian experience perspective of how their journey was. So Martin, the floor is your under-opening statement. So I hope you can hear me. I've had some bit of a technical difficulties, but basically, yes, for Estonia, we realized something like five, four years ago that our own current governance architecture is not adaptable enough. So one of those reasons of taking a hold of government and the building block approach is about building adaptiveness within government. So the reason for this is that the problem that we are trying to solve with the building blocks and with the whole of government approach is actually not a technological problem. Digital government and digital transition is always more about the change in mindset and culture starting from the public sector. So in the Estonian story of starting to build a digital society in 2000, in the end of 90s, basically, one of the core lessons learned is that in order to change the mindset and culture within a society and within a public sector of context and specifics, it's smart to change the tools people use on an everyday basis. And one of those issues, I think, not only in Estonia, but in many other governments as well, is the reason of building monolithic architecture, building this huge monster of pieces of infrastructure that are really hard to change and adapt. And as we also got stuck in legacy in certain parts and certain services, then we realized that it's wiser and smarter to do this domain-driven microservice approach, which basically allows enough adaptability. But again, having the lesson learned from Estonia and knowing that the tools we use change the way we think, then our goal in piloting and testing these microservices is actually much longer than just technological. It's more about the organizational culture around it and how can we build adaptive organizational governance architecture in one government. But one of the tricks that we also see is that in Estonia, we actually kind of feel that we have already solved the easy questions in regards to digital transformation, meaning that yes, we have a strong working digital identity, we have a secure data exchange layer, we have data integrity all across the ecosystem. So the problems and challenges that we face are basically much harder to solve than some of these very basic components. But in order to solve these much harder problems, then we also have realized that, well, we are still a very, very small country and the future of government services are cross-border. So basically it's very important to try to do these things in a collaborative way across the borders because this GovStack or the microservices approach only starts to work when there is enough community of developers around it, enough of the different public sector governments, entities, authorities that actually utilize and use this toolbox. Then basically from Estonia's perspective, GovStack is essential to build our own digital government advanced in an advanced way as well. But in order to do that, we need to do it collaboratively because otherwise we couldn't reach the critical mass of those participating countries, the developers and so on, but this kind of ambition only works at scale. So that's why we are really, really happy to work together with Germany Dial and ITU on these building blocks because it's not only about the low resource and middle resource settings, but it's also about the digitally advanced countries because I'm pretty sure that many of the different governments that are considered to be somewhat advanced in digital tools, then many of them are actually thinking about the same lines. We may talk about Singapore or Australia or New Zealand or many other governments or Finland that are deploying their whole of government approach based on microservices. But we also need to acknowledge that this is a road that takes a long time and it's more about building trust within a community so that all of these different kinds of microservices and the collaborations around the different domains may be healthcare or social welfare or unconventional cash transfer or any of the other things could be implemented and deployed. And then of course, one other key aspect why Estonia is very, very invested in this effort is that fundamentally the next 10 to 15 years about building government services is much more about the cross-border effects. So for example, in Estonia, we have managed, well, we haven't stood in a line of a DMV or a to register a car or something like that. We can do all of those things online for already 10 years. If we could do those things for other countries as well like in other countries, then this would significantly boost the economy and make our lives better. So the future is on cross-border interoperability. It is still the key here. And in order to achieve those things, we need to build trust between different stakeholders and GovStack is definitely a very, very good example of putting these different bits and pieces together and finding a common language and APIs that all of these different applications could potentially talk to each other and build trust step by step starting from the small, easy use cases and then collaboratively evolve into much bigger and difficult ones. So I hope my message was heard meaning that there were no big technical difficulties, but back to you Sherman basically. Thank you Martin. Good to finally to have you to join. I know there's some video trouble from your end. So I apologize on behalf of Estonia for the audience. Usually we see Martin's walking around and this kind of connects to the notion that we have this reach theme in terms of connectivity. Estonia has a great example. If you meet Martin, those we know Martin, he can basically connect and speak from anywhere. He's probably in the woods somewhere right now. So thank you for having the time and the connectivity to join us today. So I think I would like to bring back all the speakers now onto the same stage virtually should we speak and just have an interactive engagement and just to get your perspectives and views a little bit more. Maybe starting with the questions, going back in terms of accelerating and supporting country capacity, what has been really observable in terms of traditional challenges? Each of us have seen a digital government where countries are trying to engage in terms or move towards that path of digitalization of government services, but there are some challenges and barriers in terms of addressing it in a real scalable manner in context of scalability that we are here talking about today. So what are some really core challenges that you have observed so far? So maybe from Pani, from my Tew's perspective, having the vantage point of all the member states and seeing the incoming needs and requests, what can you share with us? Thanks, Chairman. Yeah, I think there are some commonalities in terms of the type of challenges that many, many countries are facing and probably they are known by now, but I think it's important to kind of revisit them just to understand what is the problem that we are trying to solve. And this is, you can see, I mean, yourself, when you go to any government department to get a service, you will see that each government agency is trying to build their own systems and the systems are, of course, very different. And of course, it's very difficult to kind of make sure that the data can move from one department to the other, which ends up by having a very difficult type of experience for the end user because in many cases, they need to go to more than one department and more than one agency to get a service from end to end. The problem of having uncoordinated investments is not by any mean attribute problem. From one side, it has implication indeed on having a kind of, let's say, not optimum user experience, but also it has huge implication in terms of the ability to scale and the ability to mainstream digitalization in all different services. There are hundreds and hundreds of digital services that needs to be digitized in a government and there is no way that to digitize each service you have to build this service from scratch. The way the investments are happening now, as Martin was saying, is by developing this, what you can call a monolithic type of application. By monolithic, we mean that it's like a big chunk of code. It's like a big system where everything is bundled in the system and there is no way to reuse small parts or small capabilities or even to access the data that is kind of captured within this application. So that's why I mean you have, then each agency has to duplicate its own investment and then that is of course no consistency. So each agency have a slightly different approach of doing things and then it waste a lot of time. Just to give you examples, very simple example, just think of a very simple thing like consent management. Consent management is something that is emerging again in line with the emerging week kind of theme because of all the raised concerns about privacy and data protection, et cetera. Currently, there are so many different ways of understanding what's consent and how you manage the consent, how you get the citizen to kind of control his own data and being able to give his approval for using his own data, he needs to know who has access to his data and he can even revoke this access if he or she wants. So consent management is a very, very, very critical small piece that is now needed to be integrated in all government services. Unless you deal with this small piece as a shared service, what will happen that each department will reinvent the wheel and they will try to rethink consent from scratch, particularly that it's an emerging area that is no one clear cut what's consent and how you manage it. And then you would have huge waste of time, huge duplication, lack of consistency, not as mainstreamed experience for the citizen where they have to give their consent in a different manner, in different services and maybe services will not have consent at all. But if you have this small piece as a shared service as part of your service infrastructure accessible through APIs, it makes life easy for any new service to reuse this. If you take this and multiply it by 20 or 40 different services, you can imagine that each building block can have huge implication in terms of the impact. So this is part of the challenge that the way we are approaching the investment we are approaching it not by breaking down this big thing that we are trying to build into small pieces. And we are trying to create the small pieces that will really enable paperless, cashless, presentless and consent-based type of services. Identity is another thing because if you don't have a way to identify people then you will not have the opportunity to give the people the services that are entitled to. And you cannot deal with this issue of identity several times. Same for registration, registration huge. All governments needs to run some sort of a registration service. And what they are doing now if you are registering a vehicle or you are registering a kind of a vessel or you are registering a farmer or a farmer, you are completely duplicating. So the whole idea, how can we think of this registration as a very abstract and generic service that can serve all those types of services of that has to do somehow with registration with some sort of an approval workflow, et cetera in a way. So this part of the current challenges in building digital government service it's easy to build one or two or five services but it's very difficult to build 500 and to scale them and more even more critical to maintain them and being able to update them, et cetera. So the challenge or part of this kind of fragmentation and duplication that prevent us providing a kind of a seamless end-to-end experience for the citizen and really think of the citizen as one citizen, one government. That I am the same citizen, I don't need to put my data and the data needs to flow on the back end and then I need to get a service as if it is one government. One of the challenges that now citizens are very much used to receive this type of value added services in the online environment. Now you can do a lot of things online and you kind of having more and more raised the expectation that governments also needs to be that responsive and provide the digital government services in the same manner which I said can really have huge implication in terms of improving quality of life but also cost saving, combating corruption and all of those kinds of things. So it's this kind of uncoordinated type of investments that makes it very difficult for governments also to mainstream digital into the whole economy because of that the difficulty to manage and also the level of investment that we need without having those types of approaches. So this is very, it becomes even for government who have already digitized a number of services they still have huge number of services that still needs to be digitized and then even the services that are digitized today they are not necessarily digitized end-to-end. What you can see in many countries that in some cases you just have like an online form that you can download and you can fill it manually this is not like a full digitalization of services or that you have to do part of the service online and then the rest of the service physically where you have to go again yourself so it's not really getting the full impact or the full value proposition that digitalization can bring. And now I think that the governments have done their strategies in many, many cases we see that there are digital transformation strategies there are digital government strategies already formulated and developed but one of the challenge is to say how can I implement these types of strategies in a way that is cost efficient and that it doesn't create a mess later on. And how can I also govern my digital government investments and digital government services? So this is part of the challenges that currently are facing I think the challenge is not anymore about raising awareness or understanding the importance or critical need for those type of things I think it's more in implementing and putting in place those types of services and scale them up because what happens so far is of having this inability and also a lack of understanding of how I can govern these types of investments in a way that I can enable reuse across different agencies we still one of the challenges actually is in the governance as well because you see that while there are some in some cases central CIOs in governments those CIOs don't have necessarily enough mandate or enough capability to coordinate the work with the other ministry CIOs. So there is still some improvements or some challenges that needs to be tackled within the governance of digital governments in the government space CIO of course is a chief information officer in some even countries there is no chief architect for example this position even doesn't exist there is no central unit that is managing the standardization how can you agree on similar APIs that everyone should use for example to kind of enable interoperability if you don't have those types of mechanisms in country then you will never be able to put in place those types of architectural and those types of infrastructure etc. So I think it's also about having the right coordinating agencies who have the right mandate but also have the right skills and capacity to be able to enable this whole of government approach which is of course is not very easy to do but as we try to explain to scale up you cannot avoid of having it's not a luxury, it's not an optional anymore you need to really think how can you rationalize your investment and create these types of shared service infrastructure. Thank you very much Lani it's a great overview in terms of some common challenges that countries faces maybe enlightening the audience here we have Estonia representing advanced the Joe government and so they might have moved forward in terms of resolving some of these challenges so Martin if you have any intervention or can shed some light on how maybe a particular challenge you faced in Estonia in the early stage of transforming the Joe government and how the country itself move past a particular barrier or issue. Thank you Sherwin I think the early days of building the digital society in Estonia were very much different from those countries that might start the journey now because this was the end of 90s beginning of 2000s and for example in Estonia making the digital identity happen making secure data exchange actually work and actually these were not mainstream questions at that time but one of those examples that I would like to bring out is for example two, three years ago we started actually testing this microservice based architecture and one of the services we did at the one of the first ones was in Estonia when you become a father or a mother you can have one and a half years full salary maternity leave and in order for usually newborn mothers and newborn kids to get it before that this particular service basically needed filling out different forms in different pages but now with this microservice architecture because well anyway the government already knows that you've just given birth and basically you log into one site for once just confirm to whose bank account the money should go and basically it's a one-time thing and you get this whole one and a half years of maternity leave really easily but the key here is that this process is not fully automatized all of the routines not yet have been automatized but what the microservice architecture actually provides us is that we can automate all the different routines and different processes also in a later phase so for example if one of those processes currently seems to be complicated leave it on a log do other things before so we can have this gradual growth because the architecture by itself allows it and another good example from Estonia that is just went live I think 3-4 months ago is that we are building a digital 3D twin of our... I believe we might have lost you Martin can you hear us? currently has a team's call or something let me reconnect him Martin are you with us now? so we'll come back to maybe the Estonian inside our experience in a moment once he's reconnected but maybe moving on given that other countries are looking or along this journey of digital transformation now and us as a partnership looking into broadening the impact and acceleration of other people other countries progress maybe calling on the speakers here what priority countries or regions what kind of impact with a model or approach around the whole of government strategy or model would have and what was the rationalization behind it maybe with Sarah you can help start us off in terms of where GIZ is focusing on this and why there is a realisation of this model that's impactful I think Martin is back maybe just if you wanted to allow to close on the previous question sure Martin sorry there is some connections I mean a super remote place in Hiuma in an island on a holiday but basically the whole goal is that in Estonia we have set our own agenda so that our goal is to automate 90% of the routine bureaucracy within the next 10 years and this type of examples like the 3D twin and the maternity leave calorie are very good case studies for our country to know that we can build technology in this new kind of way which will help us to become more adaptive as organized I think we lost Martin again maybe let's do move on then because in the interest of time we are a little bit behind so Martin meanwhile you're trying to reconnect and maybe find the nearest you know connectivity tower so on in the middle of an island Sarah maybe moving on then to the question earlier that I've posted around where GIZ or where you probably see this model or this kind of approach being most impactful in terms of other countries seeking to be honest for any of digital transformation yeah maybe before we start looking into countries or regions that we want to implement I think it's also important to emphasis again that I think the charm also lies a little bit in the sense that we're trying to create with Augusta global solution right and a global approach and basically provide a bit an approach that can be used I guess in Berlin as much as in Kigali and I think that is also from a German perspective very interesting because let's be honest Germany is also not at the forefront per se when it comes to the digitization of government services so I think it's really really a global approach that we're looking at here and one that we as well can still learn a lot from and I think when we look a little bit on where can can we look on the Gusta initiative and digital building blocks or ICT building blocks to be implemented is of course also very important to ensure that we leave no one behind that the digital infrastructure that we're talking about needs to be equitably accessible for all in the end and I think the situation that we're currently facing is that access to digital solutions is still often limited through copyright regimes and proprietary systems and I think when we look at the development of these building blocks at the moment it's also crucial of course to ensure that that the solutions provided to also work in in low resource settings in the end and that and I think that's the important point that open source solutions and scalable solutions can then play a major role in making government services more accessible in the end and I think one of the biggest chances of course that these digital public goods hold is that they allow countries to yeah cost efficiently build that digital public infrastructure that we're talking about and I think that's one of the things that we're talking about is that we're also looking at what has been said already to avoid that large sums are spent in development and testing solutions but actually that can make use of blueprints of best practices to develop your own digital government applications that are also localized to the local needs in the end and when it comes to implementation and I think active in right away because I think this is also from a German Development Agency perspective the point where we can really contribute is when it comes to capacity building to technical assistance and to basically yeah closing also a little bit knowledge and capacity gaps in that sense we're at the moment looking at three core partners that we're going to work with first through our cooperation with the Smart Africa with Smart Africa which is for us also a very important strategic partnerships that helps us to link to local partners but also yeah to promote the harmonization of standards for the most important ICT building blocks and advance yeah applicability in the end second we're also working closely with the BMZ Digital Centers for example and also in Rwanda and Kenya the Digital Centers there hold close contact to the local ICT ministries and the local digital ecosystems as well and thereby provide us with a with a great framework for capacity building and technical assistance in the countries when it comes to a government solutions and the development of them and of course yeah the capacity building mechanisms surrounding them and last but not least under the Horn of Africa initiative we brought together over 100 key representatives from the governments of Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya Somalia and Sudan as partner countries and really try to develop their original approach to again ensure that yeah it can be benefited from best practices and we can ensure a maximized return of investment there as well and I think what will be especially helpful for us when it comes to also more the implementation part of this initiative is the sandbox environment, the reference platform that is to be built which creates a great framework for governments to try out a little bit to make it a little bit more haptic what we're dealing with here to basically build their own use cases because in the end it's of course really about making it work for the very specific context and not footprints that can be used identically in all settings in the end and maybe just a little side note there we are currently in the process of yeah of building this platform or on the procurement process as well and we're having a request for interest out there and our eye out there where we're looking also a little bit for what the market looks like to get an idea of what system integrators might be able and willing to build that platform and I'm going to happily share this link also later on but there we're also looking for interested parties of course and I think maybe one last note when it comes to the whole implementing part I guess we're well aware that in a lot of cases digital government solutions or services are already in place and that we're not starting here from a green playing field but what we witness often when it comes to digitalization of government services and what we often see and as I said Germany is definitely not exception when it comes to that that it is still very much often operated in silos and I think this is where we still can make a good contribution with the gas stack initiative to break up the silos a little bit to follow a whole of government approach and make sure that the investments now are spent in a multi-purpose and cross sector digital solutions and yeah that's all for now I would say thank you thank you I think one specific point you alluded to that maybe we'll call on to reflection from the panel here again is when we talk about digital transformation or digital government services enablement by the partnerships that were presented here this model itself is not solely you know the solution itself it cannot be implemented in idle solution of other enabling factors in terms of the overall strategy required by member states by country governments to really provide holistic citizen services centered services in a digital mean so maybe questions to the overall panel here what are other enabling components or a enabling environment looks like in order for successful digital governance especially in the context of the country audience that we have here maybe drawing on insights and experience and learnings that you've seen on what other you know elements needs to be in place in institutionally or in principles so that a more whole of government approach can actually be realized so anybody would like to provide an intervention on this maybe let me kick off just to I think we have already mentioned a few of them because indeed I mean we all know that it's not only about technology it's about so many other things it's about the you know the people capacity you need to have smart workforce for a smart government you cannot just have a smart government you need the workforce itself needs to be ready you know to adopt and use and also create those types of services but I would like maybe from at least the ITU perspective really remind us all again for the connectivity issues because you know particularly in you know LDCs and the SIDS etc I think the connectivity might be still an issue particularly in some geographical areas where you don't have necessarily a full access to broadband and I think the approach that we are trying to take in the gas stack is really to think how can we enable all the government services different across different channels I mean you know it's not only about you know being able being available online but I think that you need to make you know some of the services also available whether through the normal mobile channels like you know ussd type of an SMS type of approach even IVRs and the things like that but also think of you know enabling those types of government services already on the tools or through the tools that people are already using so this can cater a little bit to the issue of digital literacy because we still see that there is you know still a kind of a gap in terms of you know citizens capacity to use those types of services and we all know that you know social media now is one of the tools that is being uptick by a lot of people and it's important that we leverage those types of channels to make sure that you know that anyone can access you know the government services you know the use of chatbots for example I think all government services should be or could be available through those types of you know chatbots particularly if those chatbots are also AI enabled where you know people can use natural language processing and and you know even sometimes their voice etc to be able to find the types of service instead of them being you know have to browse hundreds of services until they find what they need I think the government needs to think of how to make those accessible even in in areas of infrastructure that is still not developed and also to cater to digital literacy issues so those are two examples of other enabling elements that will have huge impact on the uptake it's not enough to have a service available the most important that people use it because we saw that in some countries services are available online but people are not really using it at least at large scale so I think you know having this kind of thinking in terms of all the other you know enabling environment factors and really try to address them is key that are of course other things but maybe others will try to touch base on them as well thank you Ali I can maybe and I'm not sure if Martin is back with us but I think I just want to underline one thing that he also mentioned earlier I think it's often also really about not only a change of infrastructure or provision of a technology infrastructure but also really about a change of mindset when it comes to digitalization and it's just very important to take that steps to see clearly I guess the chances but also the risks of course that some some infrastructures hold yeah but also to to overcome a skepticism that often comes with the use of new technology and in the end of course I think one of the key aspects is to really focus on citizen-centric solutions and on the key and focusing firstly on really understanding the key challenges and the citizen challenges that that are faced when it comes to the access of government services I hope when the Hertz can somebody confirm I can comment as well yes so basically one of the components that is really obligatory to develop it is the actual practice of it so meaning that actually the first use cases that can be deployed these can be fairly simple and easy but what is critical about that is that we need to celebrate this practice when there is a good success story even if it's a small digital service then we need to celebrate and talk about it as well but why is this important is that for example in Estonia we we have this way of getting the society in digital transformation on this positive feedback cycle it's it's kind of the way that every once in a while I don't know once a year twice a year there is some sort of a new digital service and the society thinks it's useful and it's practical but you need to keep this this positive experiences on a regular basis but this also builds the technical and the community of domain experts around the different services so it's important to celebrate the practice and also to start small it's not important to start with the most difficult and bigger services it can be done in a very very subtle and easy way and then start with the more difficult ones thank you great reflection Martin and certainly as I mentioned you know Estonia is a great example of seeing how digital governments actually really advance I think some other you know complementary components or elements in the enabling environment is the setup of good holistic policies and regulations in place and of course the underlying infrastructure as well and you know learning from a unique model or other digital governance settings where there is vibrant connections between private and public sectors make these services fully available and digitalized it's also something we've we were observing and we're looking to see how we can broaden that learning and experience into into countries that are looking into establishing a similar structure or model as such I think in the interest of time we will probably move on to wrapping up but also opening up the floor to the audience here if there are any questions to our panel here so maybe over to ITU as a technical monitoring agency to to help us funnel through questions maybe Sherman I see a question actually from from the floor from Ashim Malik who I send my regards by the way we work with Ashim. Me connect to the Senegal. Oui donc j'ai déjà même éclise sur le chat donc de prendre en compte eh bien merci d'abord de l'initiative et de la qualité du discours des des experts des différents experts qui ont exposé seulement je voulais attirer l'attention du des consultants et des experts sur un phénomène qui nous rattrape peut-être avec la COVID-19 mais aussi qui est essentielle aujourd'hui dans le développement de nos de nos pays et de nos économies c'est les aspects e-commerce donc nous avons de partie d'autres des pays l'Afrique développer des stratégies sur les e-commerce mais ceci inscrit dans le cadre de la zone de libre échange économique qui fait 1.2 milliards d'habitants donc c'est un marché commun colossal de par satin mais aussi de par ses exigences parce qu'aujourd'hui je crois que la technologie a trouvé en fait a trouvé la solution idéale pour le développement figurant donc des échanges commerciaux en Afrique ce qui fait qu'aujourd'hui nous devons prendre en compte et sérieusement en compte cet aspect donc de développement de e-commerce et ensuite par ricochet prendre en compte les moites de l'interoperabilité l'inclusion financière numérique qui sont des aspects de développement très essentielle sur lesquels lutter doit avoir un accent particulier aujourd'hui sur je veux dire cette ce problème d'accusé ça je salue en passant Hanny qui a fait un travail extraordinaire avec nous qui l'a fait avec la santé aujourd'hui je suis heureux de le revoir donc sur d'autres problématiques qui sont liées au développement de l'Afrique, merci beaucoup merci Achim peut-être je peux fournir quelques éléments de réponse et je salue d'ailleurs Achim je crois qu'on a travaillé ensemble au Sénégal pour beaucoup d'autres problématiques et peut-être cette initiative en fait répond en quelque sorte à quelques défis qu'on a rencontrés lors des premiers projets qu'on a essayé de faire ensemble certainement on est tous d'accord en fait sur le fait le commerce électronique devient de plus en plus important surtout avec la fermeture des marchés en fait de l'ordre de Covid et la nécessité en fait de passer immédiatement pour le commerce électronique et d'ailleurs dans le context du projet Gavstech en fait on prend en compte en fait ce qu'on appelle the building blocks il y a effectivement un module sur les plateformes e-commerce et comment ça s'intègre en fait avec les autres modules en circonstance par exemple le paiement électronique et l'identité numérique aussi et aussi tout l'aspect, la sécurité etc. bien sûr le commerce électronique est lié à beaucoup plus autre élément aussi il ne suffit pas d'avoir une plateforme pour vraiment mettre en place le commerce électronique il faut avoir aussi avoir toute la chaîne d'approvisionnement toutes les transports il y a beaucoup des éléments en fait qui sont nécessaires aussi il faut y réfléchir par rapport aux aspects réglementaires qui sont liés en fait au commerce surtout si le commerce aussi concerne entre pays en fait donc ces aspects là seront entre guillemets étudiés mais aussi inclus dans le travail qu'on est en train de faire pour établir, pour aider les gouvernements en fait d'établir ce genre de plateforme, ce genre de solutions qui seront disponibles pour, qui doivent être disponibles en fait pour tous les secteurs concernés qui ont besoin d'avoir ce genre de plateforme et de solutions et je crois qu'on travaille aussi en close collaboration en collaboration étroite avec les agences du nation unie en fait qui gèrent, qui sont spécialisées dans le commerce comme le UNCTAD ou le ITC International Trade Center qui font aussi partie de ce groupe et l'argie de partenaires avec qui nous travaillons donc effectivement j'espère que ça va répondre à vos préoccupations et encore une fois je vous envoie mes meilleures salutations et c'est très bien de vous faire au fur et à la fois Thank you for the question both of Ida and Senegal I believe there's a question from the Kuwait delegate Ms. Samair from Kuwait, the floor is yours Sabah al-Khayr, al-Masaa al-Khayr al-Jami' I would like to thank you in the beginning for this very important event for all of us as a member of the UNCTAD and also for the UNCTAD We know that the modern technologies and the transformation of the numbers are one of the most important issues that are going on the stage of prayer in the present time but I have a very simple question I noticed that the website doesn't include the Arabic translation this question was I put it in the chat why there's no translation for the Arabic for this event All of the languages that exist in the Arabic language we are interested in this topic and in the final meeting for the we asked as an Arab group to take part in the discussion on the topic of modern technologies in the declaration I would like to end this topic to help the Arab region with the complete discussion of this topic Thank you Thank you for your effort I think that the translation of the topic on the website is about the event or the event itself which is the emerging technology and in that case I would like to return the topic to the members of the organization of this event and the interpretation can be resolved for the rest of the week is there any questions any other questions from the audience I believe there's a full comment from Senegal I wrote on the chat Thank you I wrote on the chat Thank you, I much appreciate it I think there was an earlier question before I'm not sure from which country it is but Ms Rosario Galvin commented or raised the question about how interoperability would work for crisis management in national disasters or others and by building blocks on top of core administrative layers how feasible would it be a stitched and deployed blocks on demand to serve decision makers on the ground under critical conditions when there is an urgency and every minute matters is there any reflection from from the panel in terms of how responsive and agile deployment of services from the country's perspective to many of crises particularly in the context of the light of the pandemic recently what could be learned from an experience like this Maybe I can provide some elements there but also others can chime in I think the whole concept of power in governments was right service infrastructure is key particularly that if you have this type of infrastructure it becomes very quick and very responsive to deploy new services particularly in cases of emergencies and not only for emergencies obviously but also in terms of emergencies however establishing this type of infrastructure takes time it's a significant investment and I don't think that we can do this quickly it takes years to establish this type of infrastructure but once the infrastructure is there then adding new services creating some sort of alerts or some sort of campaigns for citizens to inform them about a disaster or having your GIS infrastructure in place that you can use also for natural disasters this is exactly the type of readiness that we would like to have governments powered by having and be ready to deploy services in a very short period of time and with little investments as well however establishing the infrastructure itself is extremely something that is costly and it will take time however if you have this infrastructure it's also easy to launch services that are also interoperable because they are based on a foundation that is interoperable and can enable interoperability so I think this is maybe one additional reason why governments need to consider investing in having those kind of building blocks that are standing and ready to be used and consumed depending on the needs maybe to just what Hane just said I think as well it's not that the building blocks provide a super agile measure to directly adjust government services but I think situations as the global pandemic also over the last year show quite intensely in what sectors and areas good government services and accessible government services can help in providing education and as well as in making social welfare payments maybe etc etc so I think it's also just per to portrait again that's also poor crisis preparedness it is essential to have good digital government services in place and if this is happening it makes things easier in moments of crisis as well thank you Sarah I believe with that we are coming to a close and thank you very much for our panel today engaging with the delegations here talking about scalability and government services reflecting on Sarah's earlier comment on leaving no one behind if there's one message that I could leave with the audience today it's what really resonated with me recently in the Mobile World Congress Ms. Doreen Bakdan-Martin the director of the Digital Development Bureau ITU's look about leaving no one behind meaning leaving no one offline so in the context of that as we're thinking about deploying digital government services allowing to Hani's point we would really like to make sure that countries continue to seek effort to broaden coverage and create more equitable access for all of your populations in terms of engaging government services in that regard so on that note thank you very much for coming today and enjoy the rest of the emerging week back to ITU so thank you very much for this great session also thank you very much to all our panelists for running this session as well as to the captioners and all interpreters I'm calling for our facilitator of the all events to take over and now to lead us towards the next building blocks of the event so I don't know if Aminata is already with us and this is open call I don't see but if she's not with us she will be just soon in the following session so ladies and gentlemen and all colleagues on behalf of all organizers of this session and the GovStack we would like to thank you very much for being with us and we see at the next session and the opening ceremony of the event so thank you very much and see you soon thank you thank you session is closed thank you bye bye bye