 Welcome to the ITU Plenty Potential Conference 2018 here in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by Shasad Arubi who is the Minister for Information and Communication Technology and Communications for Afghanistan. Minister, welcome to the studio. Thank you so much. It is a pleasure for me to be participating in this very important conference. It is my pleasure. I voted for the General Secretary-Director and the Deputy General Secretary-Director. Yeah. That's wonderful. Now I want to talk to you a little bit about the fact that there is considerable attention at the moment being placed on harnessing the power of information and communication technologies as an enabler for good, for development, for the benefit of people, families, communities and nations. And I wanted to ask you what is your perspective on this? Thank you. As you know this is an era of the technology and in each sector and in each field we need to use technology and especially I will talk about Afghanistan because we in 2002 there was a scratch, we started from scratch, there was no cell phone, there was no infrastructure, there was no technology, there was nothing, no discussion about the e-governance we started from scratch but right now about 23 million people using cell phones in Afghanistan. We have like a complete infrastructure, lay down like fiber optics in 25 province in next two years we will complete the whole country. We're connected with five neighbor countries. This is a huge improvement and like 8.7 million people using internet in Afghanistan. In that time like internet price was like $3,000 and now we reduce it like $40, $3,000 computer for $40. But if you talk about to change the life of the people, yeah exactly like with education there is a huge improvement technology brought to the life of the people with the medicines and beside this with agriculture if you see there is so many improvement and changes in the life of in the field of the agriculture with the help of the technology we should focus on the e-governance like for the public services for the people who are who need in the daily life and their businesses and how government can improve overall system for the people those who need like public services. We have done a very good job like we started our own software public services the idea behind this concept is to bring all the public services under one roof and we will pay the way for the e-services people will go to one place and they will how like their national ID card their passport their they can pay taxes and their driving license so many things will be in one place and it's help a lot with the bureaucracy remove the corruption and also like people can get online application and this is something what we need for the people. Let's talk about the sustainable development goals because we've got a limited amount of time here but I wanted to really focus on the fact that this is the first plenipotentiary conference since the sustainable development goals were agreed by the world. What is Afghanistan doing towards this? Sustainable development goals we almost what is the targeted and we almost achieve for the last several years like we have enough revenue in this sector and people using this technology and there is some more like in the nutrition and in the health sector there is so many other things in the SDG what we have identified now we are working on all and we also committed for next four years we will be working closely with the ITU to achieve the SDG goals of the United Nations. About half of the world's population are currently connected to the internet the other half are not. I wanted to find out what's the situation in Afghanistan what are you doing towards that? As I mentioned we were connected with five of our neighbour countries and recently we conducted the survey of the fiber optics to use to be connected with China. Afghanistan population is like 35 million around 35 million but we like 9.7 million population using internet in this time. This is something what we were working to expand to other remote area to the provinces that they didn't have access to internet but we were working on the infrastructure and this is something we were using satellite services in some area people also benefiting from the internet but the price of the internet is still like expensive in Afghanistan we were working to reduce the price of the internet. Afghanistan is a landlocked country and we are not connected with the submarine and we were paying transaction fee to our neighbour country Pakistan Iran some Turkmenistan other and now we are working to connect with the China through Wakhan corridor which is like a very high peak and very cold area. There are so many challenges but still we have some progress and compared to our neighbour countries and compared to like other still Afghanistan is like work this is like we're still not the secure but still we have a lot of improvement in this ICT sector. Well we wish you the very best of the future I'd like to give you a very brief opportunity just a final message from you. The messages that from the ITU like they should do more focus on the developing countries like Afghanistan we're expecting more that with the standardisation with the capacity building and we need to work with them how we can use the updated technology in Afghanistan. This is like a request for assistance from the ITU. We wish you the very best of the future and thank you for joining us in the studio today. Yeah one more message like Afghanistan is the country that the government facilitated a lot for the international investors we're welcome to them and hopefully they will invest in the ICT community to work together with us thank you so much. I'm sure they're hearing you loud and clear thank you.