 Thank you very much and good morning, ladies and gentlemen, distinguished guests and delegates. I should say that the organizers did ask me to present to them the prepared text, so it was circulated. If I move off script, it might just be a matter of discipline rather than anything else. This is an input by reflecting on two events that I participated in in the past few weeks. The first being the Africa City Summit that took place in Marrakech last week at which local government hosted not only engagements amongst local authorities in Africa, but engagements with a whole range of stakeholders including academia, including civil society business, United Nations, bodies, and a whole range of stakeholders, and in there tried to find solutions to some of the more complex issues that we confront, but also try and identify opportunities for implementation. Some of the key outputs of this conference includes identifying areas of financing, urban development in African cities, urban planning and management, identifying tools for transitioning to sustainable cities and territories, and a whole range of issues that we engaged with. The second conference that I had the opportunity to participate in a few weeks ago was in Johannesburg hosted by the Premier of Hauteung David Makura, which was the conference of the African Development Bank, which is the Africa Investment Forum. And part of the outcome of this conference, or the forum as the organizers would insist that it be referred to, was that in fact commitments were made by those participating in this forum to the tune of 38 billion rents in investments across the African continent in 53 countries by over 300 institutional investors, including investors from Africa. And many of these projects were private sector driven and led and very few, but significant projects were public sector led initiatives. And I thought I should reflect on at least three of these, the first being the extension of the Hauteung train in Hauteung, South Africa, a project where commitments was made by investors at this conference to invest in the expansion and extension of the medium speed rail project that is led by the provincial government of Hauteung. The second being a housing project in Nairobi initiated by both city government and also national government in Kenya. And the third being a rail project, a monorail project in Accra. Now the reason I thought I should reflect on these two conferences is that they possibly bring us to a point where we say cities are beginning to think of and identify solutions. Investors in Africa and institutional investors and pension funds, et cetera have identified a platform through the Africa Investment Forum to invest in these projects. So as we gathered as local government in Marrakesh last week, we said we need to increase the number of city led projects where investors could be able to come in in the next round of the Africa Investment Forum so that city led projects that begin to redefine the urban landscape and the initiatives that are undertaken by cities are at the forefront of what our investors are looking at. Of course there are a number of issues that we need to resolve in the process including ensuring adequate project preparation, ensuring that we go through the necessary feasibility and bankability processes to ensure that investors have a platform from which they can engage because the African Investment Forum has created almost a platform that says investors from across the continent and internationally can come together and identify projects and have demonstrated appetite to invest in projects across the continent. And this is a forum at which they gather where such, if I may use the words of the private sector, deals are struck. The structure of the forum is such that in fact projects are presented, investors consider these projects and literally deals are made and in Johannesburg a few weeks ago there was a commitment to invest $38 billion in different parts of Africa, looking at different projects and the intention next day is to increase this so I am really more than anything else saying that we have a platform to advocate for investments that are led by cities in terms of ideas where we want to take our cities and where these investments should enable us to redefine the way in which our cities function. But coming back to the text because I was asked to talk more about improving urban governance standards in African cities, I thought I should reflect on two definitions of governance, one by the World Bank and one by UN Habitat to just counter pose what these could mean in terms of how we define governance. The first by the World Bank looks at governance from the point of view of accountability and efficiency and one preferred by UN Habitat looks at governance from the point of view of where power exists inside and outside the formal authority of institutions of government and therefore decisions are made based on complex relationships between many actors with different priorities. I had the privilege to serve under my predecessor as the mayor of Johannesburg, Amos Mazzondo who used to say to us that served under his leadership that understand governance from the point of view that leadership and power is dispersed in society and the responsibility of city governance and city leaders is to coordinate this leadership as it is dispersed throughout society. You can therefore think about what paradigm I subscribe to in relation to governance. Ladies and gentlemen, I believe that there are three interrelated aspects that we need to take into account when managing governance in Africa. The first is that we need to take into account and the presentations before mine have indicated this in a succinct way. The unprecedented levels of urbanization in African cities and indeed in Asia, but if I may say in the global south, the unprecedented levels of urbanization required that we rethink the way in which we interface with investment planning and execution in our respective cities and territories. The second is about the growing disparities and inequality. So as urbanization presents an opportunity for access to opportunity and prosperity and for people to continuously climb the ladder of prosperity, the reality is that they do demonstrate the extent to which inequality can be felt in cities. We live in cities, at least I come from Johannesburg where you can see in a very stark way the disparities amongst the wealthy or between the wealthy and the poor, residents and those who live in cities and the way in which in fact cities are planned is almost in response to this reality and sometimes reinforces these disparities instead of rethinking the way in which these disparities can be resolved. So the paradigm around the right to the city is very important to the extent that it not only talks about providing housing opportunities to the city, but it is about creating opportunities for access to what city life and urbanization and urbanism represents in the current era. So in order to improve the standard of living in cities across Africa and to ensure access to basic services, we need an enabling regulatory environment and the access to funding in order to provide our citizens with the requisite services and to create platforms for their own prosperity and for the cities to prosper. Our view from the United Cities and local governments is that the new urban agenda and the broader 2030 global agenda creates an important vision for us to at least create consensus around what we need to do and what we need to address in our cities. And it is also a platform from which we can build the necessary coalitions that we need to ensure that we invest appropriately in our cities and that we are able to achieve not only multi-level governance, but the ability to build coalitions at a local level that involves the local authority, civil society, business and other actors in our respect to cities. We have seen that the initiatives throughout many cities that are beginning to provide leadership in certain areas and create platforms for the private sector and those with innovative ideas to contribute to the direction that the cities take and there are many examples we can refer to in Kigali and Nairobi and solutions that cities such as Addis Ababa, Johannesburg Cape Town and others are looking at in relation to providing an inclusive form of urbanism or at least what we used to call and our leadership in Johannesburg creating corridors of freedom in Johannesburg where we see urban development as a platform through which we create inclusive cities and inclusivity in our cities. I'd like to, having been given the three-minute notice before it gets to stop, make reference to one or two issues that I would conclude my remarks with. The first is to reflect on what I think was an important contribution and remains an important contribution to this discourse by the Deputy Secretary-General of the United Nations, Ms. Amina Mohammed when she says, we need to get urbanization right and that this is dependent on inclusive and integrated national urban policies to ensure balanced territorial development and urban design and land use planning to promote growth, climate mitigation, urban resilience and poverty eradication and I think that statement itself possibly summarizes what we need to think about when we are addressing urbanism and urbanization in our context right now. And as I close to then say that finding a local and provincial national government symmetry as a result of the interventions that we make quite simply would mean that governance is a collective practice addressing societal problems for first land allocation and land use management, second the provision and management of basic infrastructure and services and third the movement and accessibility systems which means it is essentially about how people and goods can get around from one part of the settlement to another and in this regard I'm referring to a contribution made by Smith and as he talks about the issues that we need to deal with when we talk about urban governance in the current era. I look forward to participating in today's session and indeed also participating tomorrow engaging with all panelists and all other participants in this conference. Thank you very much.