 I'm joking, yeah. Hello, yes, we can hear you. Okay, terrific. Everybody can hear me. Welcome everyone. That was a great ending to the prior session and we look forward to getting started with this one. It looks like people are joining. So I'll just start and say hello everyone and good day. I know we're all in different time zones but welcome to today's session. My name is Blaine Murphy. I'm the CEO of Athena Advisory as well as Certify. Athena Advisory focuses on advanced artificial intelligence, machine learning and analytics. In terms of helping companies with product design, smart cities and using innovation, also our company Certify focuses on using technology to address sustainability in global supply chains. So I'm happy to be here. I'm pleased to be your moderator. Feel free to post your questions as we proceed through the session in the chat. We will be looking for some questions from the chat to ask but if we don't get to all those questions we will be following up after the session. So let's go ahead and get started and introduce our panel. We have Dr. Hosum Altwaijiri, the Assistant Director of the Saudi Data and AI Authority. We have Hani Eskandar, the Senior Coordinator for Digital for the International Telecommunication Union, ITU. We have Lasina Kone, the CEO from Smart Africa. And we have Tania Marcos, Vice Chairman of the United Four Smart Sustainable Cities. And we have Davor Orlik, the Chief Operations Officer at the International Research Center on Artificial Intelligence under the auspices of UNESCO. So welcome everybody and welcome to our panel. We're very excited to get started. We're gonna start with a few presentations and then we're gonna shift to asking our panelists some questions and then bring in the group for some additional questions. So let's go ahead and get started with Tania Marcos. She's gonna talk to us about the United Four Smart Sustainable Cities Initiative. Tania? Thank you very much, Wynn. Can you hear me? Yes. Well, first of all, thank you very much for having me here today to talk about the United Four Smart Sustainable Cities Initiative, you for SSC. Let's start then. Well, the United Four Smart Sustainable Cities, next please. We can move. Next slide, please, there. There, the U4SCC is an initiative from the United Nations that is helping cities to cope with these fundamental level digital transformation challenges and enabling them to progress consistently along the path of achieving the sustainable development goals. And this is a UN initiative collided by ITU, UNICE and the UN Habitat and it's supported by a number of UN bodies as you can see in the slide that is dedicated to helping cities achieve specifically the sustainable development goal 11, makes it is inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. It serves as the platform to advocate for public policy and to encourage the use of ICTs and digital technologies to facilitate the transition to smart sustainable cities. It has a comprehensive focus when it comes to smart sustainable cities. It considers every aspect of this within this framework. It is working on the various thematic groups shown here, which span a variety of timely and relevant smart city topics including city platforms to improve city governance and a group dedicated to the idea of economic and financial recovery post COVID-19. Next, please. Well, the approach to enhancing smartness and sustainability developed by U4SCC is meant to be measurable and reportable. To this end, the initiative has developed a set of international key performance indicators, those KPIs for SCCs, to establish the criteria to evaluate the ICTs and digital technologies contribution in making cities smarter and more sustainable and to provide cities with the means for self assessment. That's very important. The KPIs and their framework can be found in a dedicated collection methodology publication with provides city with a methodology on how to collect data for each KPI along with other relevant useful information. The KPIs are based on an international ITU standard. It's the recommendation ITUT y.4903 on key performance indicators for smart sustainable cities to assess the achievement of sustainable development goals. And this is very important because the standardization work done is the basis for all this development. So it has the overarching dimensions of economy, environment, and society and culture. The dimensions are each farther broken into a set of sub-dimensions as well as categories. And they focus on more specific areas of performance and progress, whereas the categories organize the underlying KPIs. And we are close to 100 KPIs that cities can measure and report to capture their true current state in all three dimensions above. Next, please. Implementation of the KPIs in cities all over the world is resulting in many free resources available for public consumption, such as the city snapshot, verification report, fact sheet, and case studies. These reports benchmark and progressively elaborate the findings from the implementation of the U4SCC KPIs in the city and providing useful analysis and important lessons learned, actionable recommendations, and other key insights for the city's future smartness and sustainability. These reports also demonstrate the cities ongoing development and progress as a U4SCC smart sustainable city, thereby providing to be a vital tool to make the market and to promote the city's efforts both nationally and internationally. So it's a very good tool for benchmark. Next, please. As mentioned previously, a key part of the KPIs program has been the development of a benchmark program to visualize a city's progress against defined benchmarks based on meeting the SDGs or related to performance of leading cities globally. So here are the benchmarking results for Riyadh in Saudi Arabia, which undertook the data collection process in cooperation with ITUT early in 2019. This graphic uses the easy to understand traffic light system to provide a powerful tool for city action so that the areas that may need potential action are easily seen in red and yellow. Cities within the U4SCC program have used this tool to prioritize action to address areas of less than optimal performance and to communicate effectively with all city stakeholders. Next, please. The U4SCC has produced and published a number of helpful cutting-edge deliverables since its inception. These comprehensive reports and their complements of cases studies can be found on the U4SCC Deliverables webpage, completely free. And they contain best practice guidance meant to help cities increase their sustainability in a smart way so as to weather disruptive events such as the pandemic. Next, please. Thank you very much for your time today and allowing me to introduce the U4SCC activities. And please feel welcome to contact us anytime if you are interested in learning more about this initiative work in this regard. Thank you. Thank you, Dania. Terrific. All right, let's move to our next presenter. Honey Eskandar is gonna talk to us about smart villages, a whole government approach to digitally transform rural villages. Thank you very much, Tina. And good morning, good afternoon, everyone. It's really my pleasure to share with you some insights from a concept that we've been starting to pilot at ITU with a number of partners since a few years now. And it's really about bringing the power of digital technologies to rural areas and how we see this as what we can call a whole of government approach for digital transformation of rural communities. The interesting part of this concept that we have started to pilot in Niger, in Africa, which is a very relevant approach giving that 80% of the population of a country like Niger resides in rural areas. But what we have seen that this concept is now gaining some traction. There are a number of countries where ITU started to work with to deploy similar type of approaches in Pakistan, in Indonesia, in many Pacific islands and other African countries as well. So we will be glad to share some insights about what is this model and concept is really about and how we can approach bringing the power of technology to rural communities. I think needless to say that rural areas is unfortunately where some of the hardest problems are faced and this is, and you know, there is more like three times higher rates of poverty than compared to urban areas and cities. And we will understand the type of challenges that villages feeds in terms of isolation but also in terms of shortage of access to basic services, whether in terms of health, education, et cetera. While there are around 45% of the global population still live in rural areas. So while digital can bring, of course, as we all know a lot of good potential for rural areas, I mean, the approach itself could be quite challenging if you would like to address many of the needs of the villages in terms of their health, education, agriculture, commerce, et cetera. We cannot do that unless we really change our approach. And going business as usual, if we would like to consider the overall community is definitely cannot work anymore and you really need to adopt a slightly different approach. The current approaches of having this standalone silos initiative that are really pushed by the supply side, et cetera, cannot work if you are wanting to scale those types of initiatives in rural areas and to cover hundreds, if not thousands of villages simply because the cost and the level of efforts would not be affordable. So this is where the smart villages concept comes as a different approach of how you approach the community as a holistic unit and really try to work across sectors and multiple sector in a way that is very inclusive. And this is what you can call it a whole of government or even a whole of society approach where you are not going to address standalone, discrete elements, but you would like to consider them as a whole. And by doing that, there is a huge opportunity for saving in terms of cost and efforts and mutualize your digital investment. We always want to kind of give an example of this as carpooling. Instead of governments would like to have a bus that goes to those villages that are in some cases very, very hard to reach where the bus will take one time the agriculture team, another time the health team, another time the education team. Let's have one bus that can take all of us at the same time and go to serve the community in a comprehensive and integrated manner. So really the kind of the strength of this type of approach is that we are considering also the needs of a citizen in an integrated manner. As we know, a farmer is also a father who has children who needs to educate, he has health issues, et cetera. So the starting point really is to adopt this citizen-centric approach. And what we usually do is that we have this kind of user-centric approach with kind of a needs assessment that are based on the different profiles and personas in the village and really look at all what they need in terms of access to markets, financial services, health, emergency support, in some cases, et cetera. And by compiling those types of needs, we can rationalize investments and really come up with some sort of a framework that can address the needs of all of those people. Here is like a very kind of a simple what we call the solution or the problem tree and how can we address all those problems through this kind of integrated approach where we not only bring the connectivity but we also make sure that it's a meaningful connectivity and that that is also accompanied by building local digital literacy capacities, working on the affordability issues and also considering more than one need of the citizen. How it looks like in reality, I mean, you can imagine it as a kind of a network of communities and some of those communities can be very, very hard to reach. You can take 10, 15 hours drive and some cases to reach a village. So what you need to create is a network that of connected villages that could be served by some sort of a common platform that all the governments, and this is where the whole government concept comes can really use the same sort of infrastructure and platform to reach out to the villages. So not every ministry or government or even some of the development partners, they don't need to invest on their own channel to reach out to the villages. This is a visual way how a village can look like, you know, with a mixture of surfaces that are deployed within a village so that each group of the village can benefit. And we don't only limit the impact for maybe a health center, a nurse in a health center, but we try to expand the benefits or to all the different groups in the village by having some specialized application for health, for agriculture, having a hotspot where community members can come, they can receive some sort of a digital health training. And very importantly that we target at the same time, like individuals, but also we target people who have a role in the village, like professionals, like a health, and a kind of education at a teacher or a school director or all those people. We need to kind of give them some sort of core services where they can start to benefit. We have tried to explain, you know, how is the process of building up a model for smart villages and we have, we've been very glad to co-publish this, what we call the smart village blueprint with smart Africa, with Niger, with the Digital Impact Alliance and with the contribution from many, many partners and also building on the experience of a lot of initiatives that have been, you know, done in this space. And the blueprint really gives a kind of variety of tools and approaches and steps that you can take to really build a model, which of course will not be the same model across all countries, even across all villages. So the whole idea that this kind of model needs to be built based on the current context of countries, based on the current capacities and capabilities in the country, but all with the same objective to serve more than one SDG with kind of the same investments so that we can scale up and we can cover as many rural communities as possible. And of course you can download, you know, this blueprint for free and we will be very glad to, you know, respond to some of your questions or a clarification if you would like to have them. Thank you for your attention. All right, thank you, Hani. Let's go ahead and move to Davor Orlik. He's going to talk to us about smart cities and some of the interesting things they're looking at in terms of creative funding for some of these investments and innovations. Carla, Davor, you just have to click mute. Hi, can you hear me now? Is it okay? Yes, I can hear you. Okay, so let me just share my screen. Got a couple of slides. Just as an introduction, the new center, the new ERCA center is funded by the government of Slovenia. It's quite a young center, although the expertise and the human resources have been there for quite some time. It's inspired by the international work in the field of AI through a couple of different communities in AI, so policymakers, researchers, investors, and so on. And obviously it's set up to showcase AI and how that can benefit humanity. We are involved with, since we are a UNESCO center, we are involved with UNESCO on many, many levels, but I'd like to point out that we are now undertaking a means assessment for AI in seeds countries, so small island countries. And I'll tell you why in a second, how does that work out? As you know, AI is an ecosystem. It's not just one hub or one player or one group of researchers. You need to have quite a lot of that to make it work from NGOs to investors to again research and so on. So the center is at the core of it, we've got program committees that would sort of like drive the research agenda and identify which technologies and AI or machine learning methods could be applied for grand challenges. In terms of communities, this is what we've done with our African colleagues. So we've built up with a couple of partners. The AI personnel built up a network called AI4D. So that was really strong in Africa, finished up a couple of months ago, but we kicked off through this initiative, new networks. We achieved quite a lot, funded workshops, four reports of challenges, language challenges for African languages, Maliub, which is not the case for Europe. Some of the African languages are computationally very interesting because of millions or hundreds of millions. So this is really our best practice in terms of creating smart communities. And the needs assessment work with the seeds is basically trying to understand whether we can do the same thing with seeds countries, the way we've done with the sub-Saharan countries. One of the things that we are setting up now is a global network of AI centers in sustainable development, which we think would enormously benefit the agenda of sustainable development in general. And I can answer questions on that, but what we want to do ideally is find different research groups that are solving different problems by using AI, but at the same time, essentially solving SDG challenges and questions. And a very good example that the center is running is a project called NIADES. I'll drop you also the link into the chat. So the idea is that with this project, we're trying to understand water management solutions on a scale throughout Europe, right? So real-time data for buildings, providing information about maintenance of operations and so on. The idea of this is at the end that we're also investigating social impact bonds. Once you have the technologies done, you can benchmark SDG achievements. So whether you have a specific SDG or not. And how do you then make that an interesting platform for investors to invest in? And we think that social impact bonds might be something that could benefit AI startups and AI researchers in terms of impact investment. So that's all from my side. Thank you, Davar, terrific. All right, let's move on. I've just been informed that the mayor from Tunisia is here today. I'm hoping, I'm looking for her now in the Zoom. I'm hoping that she might be willing just to take a moment before we get started with our other panelists and tell us what she's doing in her city in Tunisia, in Tunis, around smart cities. Her experience with smart cities and some of the challenges and opportunities. I'll start with Abder Ahim, if you'd like to. Yeah, could you speak up for this one, Sila? Yeah, great. Okay, Sila, bonjour. Bonjour à toutes et à tous, mesdames et messieurs. D'abord je voudrais remercier l'Union Internationale de Telecommunications qui nous réunit aujourd'hui afin d'échanger, de partager nos expériences et nos expertises dans un domaine qui prouve de plus en plus son importance dans la vie moderne, la digitalisation et cette réunion virtuelle fait preuve. Nous, les maires, et étant donné notre proximité des citoyens, nous sommes appelés plus que n'importe quel autre responsable d'être en communication constante avec nos communautés et surtout d'être en mesure de faciliter nos relations avec les services municipaux avec lesquels ils sont souvent en contact l'État civil ou l'urbanisme pour ne prendre que ces deux exemples. La crise liée à la pandémie COVID-19 nous a placé quant à elle face à un nouveau défi celui de garder cette proximité tout en veillant à la distanciation. Un contrast que ne peut se concrétiser que grâce à la communication numérique et la digitalisation. La crise nous a aussi montré l'écart énorme qui se trouve entre les citoyens capacité d'accéder à ces services. Le télétravail devient de plus en plus une solution pour surmonter les confinement successives que nous vivons jusqu'à nos jours. Les agents doivent être capables d'assurer leur tâche à distance et les citoyens doivent être capables de recevoir les meilleurs services municipaux à distance. La plupart de nos outils de travail doivent donc être le pensé pour les adapter à ce context. De même, les équipes en charge de nos systèmes d'information doivent être formées à la gestion des projets digitaux. Nos unités doivent disposer de compétences particulières pour prendre en compte le digital dans leur feuille de route. La mise à niveau des outils et la formation des personnels s'imposent afin de les adapter à un écosystème de plus en plus complex. La ville smart, Smart City, doit être globale. Elle doit prendre en compte tout cela mais aussi les attentes de la société civile grâce à une gouvernance participative et ces services ne doivent pas être limités aux services de base. Il est nécessaire d'octroyer les services d'encadrement de l'enfance et de la jeunesse à distance. Les services culturels à distance et même un certain niveau de services de santé à distance. Là aussi, outils et formations. La ville smart doit enfin se soucier des droits humains, c'est-à-dire réveiller à la protection des données personnelles qu'elles accumulent. Et le public ne doit pas être oublié et il est donc important de mettre en place les stratégies nécessaires pour aider les couches d'évaporiser de créer des tiers-clueux d'échange afin d'assurer l'intégration sociale. C'est dans cette perspective que nous travaillons avec nos partenaires internationaux locaux pour jeter les bases de Tunis de demain. Tunis, la ville intelligente et résiliente. Ceci se traduit par des projets phares que nous réalisons avec l'Association internationale des Mères francophones et avec Lui Assaï. Ces projets nous permettront de priser dans notre richesse, de nous baser sur notre réalité pour changer la réalité socio-économique d'une manière efficace. Tout ceci a travers une approche participative et en collaboration avec le patronat et les start-upeurs et en assurant l'amnise en place de l'infrastructure nécessaire et de partenariat adéquate pour innover et avancer. Notre approche est toujours très concrète et soucieuse de la vie du citoyen. Les citoyens savent comment nous précédent. Pas de promesses, pas de grands discours, mais une gouvernance efficace car gouverner pour nous, c'est agir et interagir en partant du réel. Nous tirons les leçons dans que des crises que nous secouons pour devenir plus solides, pour cohabiter dans toute la richesse de notre diversité et pour puiser dans l'innovation. Nous avons besoin de pouvoir parvenir de toute la force de la détermination et du courage. Nous avons besoin aussi de nos partenaires et amis dont le soutien nous est très précieux pour pouvoir avancer. Je vous remercie pour votre attention. Thank you. Thank you very much. Also from Africa, we have the Smart Africa Secretariat. Mr. Lucina Cone. Welcome, Lucina. We would love to hear also about what is going on with Smart Africa and Smart Cities. If you could take a few minutes to update us and tell us what's going on in your region. Sure, yes, I will just do that right now. Files, the sounds. One second here. What is that? Basic. Well, I have my file here from your platform to share. It has to be in Dropbox. Did you send it in advance to Amanita? No, I did not send it in advance to Amanita. Well, you know, I will just send it to me in a minute. Yeah, and put it in there. Sure, if you didn't have it, okay. I can talk through it, no problem. And I will send it later on. Smart Africa, to tell you a little bit about Smart Africa, first of all, Smart Africa is the Pan-African and multilateral organizations created in 2013 with the sole vision of transforming Africa into a single digital market. By saying that, they've created, elaborated the five manifesto. The number one manifesto is to put ICT at the center of national and social economic development. Number two is to improve access to ICT, especially the broadband. Number three was to improve the accountability, efficiency and openness through ICT, the use of ICT. Number four, which is very important, is to put the ICT at the private sector first. And number five to leverage ICT to promote sustainable development in our communities. Today, we are 32 country members, totaling about 815 million consumers as a market. And we have a clear vision as an ambition which is to transform Africa from now to 2013 into a single digital market. We do this through three strategic area. The number one strategic area is to develop affordable digital infrastructure access in the continent. And number two is to promote and facilitate doing business in investing across Africa. Number three is to accelerate the birth and the development of a digital society. So to talk about a sustainable smart cities and the communities in Africa, there are challenges. I will talk about challenges, progress and possibilities. Today, the urbanizations in Africa is progressing rapidly. As we all know, the projections predict that 70% of the African population will be living in cities by 2050. Which means that African population will be 2.5 billion by 2050. And we can see this urbanization has been progressing since the two decade ago. Our approach with this progress in urbanization, there will be some challenges caused by the exponential growth. Namely more traffic, more mobility, more cars in the cities and the water loss as well. We have energy consumption, which becomes a challenge. We have a cost of the health and the social services which becomes a big challenge. Poverty also alleviations, which also create eventually a pollution in the cities. The top challenges per city and region in our views in the Smart Africa, just sample of example, we've taken like three or four countries. In Accra, in West Africa, Ghana, we have the mobility, infrastructure, utility, which are very common to, I believe, most of the city around the world. We have Tunisia as well, which is the e-governance and mobility infrastructure and so on and so forth, as the Bayer mentioned recently. In Kigali, we have the same challenge which is shared across our countries. Therefore, Smart Africa, our approach to sustainable smart cities in Africa, it is every single country has a flagship project and the flagship project for Rwanda was the Smart Cities Blueprint. This blueprint was launched on May 10, 2017, during our Transwam Africa Summit in Kigali here by His Excellency, the Chairman of Smart Africa, President Paul Kagami. And subsequent to that, of course, when you work on the specific country works on the blueprint, just like in the share works on the smart villages, ITU just presented it now, we are considered that as the best practice sharing and so we share these blueprints across the country. As we speaking today, Benin, Guinea, Ghana and Tunisia are looking into the continental blueprint for a sustainable smart cities blueprints developed by Smart Africa. And to move on, to give you an example of a concrete pilot project we've done because once the country goes from the concept nodes to the blueprint, we go to the pilot before we actually scale up on the continental for the pilot of the Smart City. So far, Smart Africa, we have financed, there are 11 big markets in the Kigali. We have financed the Smart Cities, so seven market out of those 11 market, which is basically a smart waste collection and management project. The way it was before in every big market, in the city, there was a dumpster, people would be dumping all the garbage is there, which may not necessarily be sorted out before. So we built a physical location for those dumpsters and we also use the IoT to link it to the municipality who will be tracking whenever, will be tracking the level of the dumpster whenever it's full and the dispatching team will be sent over to collect those. And if now they collected, now the trash bin, the bins are completely separated, recyclable and non-recyclable. That was the first project and the second project is the control and command center for all the Smart City initiative in Kigali, which include meters, electricity meters, water meters and street lights and so on and so forth. And this project will be inaugurated actually this month. So the future, the way we see the future of African city, the African city in the future has to be connected. We have the advantage that we are really working in Africa here on the green field, not the brown fields. Everything has to be done, not everything has to be redone. And it has to be green, the future African city. It has to be clean for the environment. It has to be safe, resilient and also efficient. Of course, you know, we also make sure any initiative in the Smart City domain or the ecosystem we engage in, we make sure that it is bankable and it is open for, I'm talking about the examples of project like a city flow and the city services, the Smart City says smart business services and so on and so forth just to mention a few. And this is what Smart Africa has achieved so far in terms of the Smart City, sustainable Smart City in Africa. We work on a holistic approach by going through a pilot in a specific country and we propagate those solutions to the remaining of our members. Thank you very much. I think you are muted. I keep forgetting that they put me on mute session. I'm very quiet. I don't know why. But let's move to Saudi Arabia. Dr. Hatham Altourji, there's an awful lot going on in your region in terms of the Noam project and the line as well as the Red Sea project. Would you take a few minutes to tell our audience about what you're doing and your vision and the aspirations for sustainable cities along the Red Sea? Sure. So first of all, I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to basically talk about the very interesting projects that are going here in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. As you mentioned, currently and under vision 2030, which was launched in 2016 by Israel, and it's the Crown Prince. There are three mega projects that are going around sustainable smart cities. Let me start by giving you an initial explanation about the first one, which is Noam. Basically, Noam is a new city that we are creating from scratch. We are calling it the city of dreamers where we envision the city to be the city of future, where the main idea basically is to gather the greatest minds and talents around the world and basically to pioneer the smartest ideas to get implemented in that. What makes Noam very much interesting is at the end of the day, a green field now. It's located in the northwest of Saudi Arabia, which is basically a prime location at the crossroads for the entire world. And the area of it is 35 times larger than Singapore. So it's a great portion of land. Basically, and based on the strategies and the ambition that we are trying to achieve and expected income for that, cities should basically increase to reach 100 billion US dollars by 2030. We are envisioning and imagining that this will create huge opportunities for people in the city that comes from the ability to create the jobs of the future. Also, it will help to develop the economy in the region and it will provide a great test bet for the innovators and the entrepreneurs in the future. If you would allow me, I will also move to our second project which is a pioneering project, a unique one, where the idea basically is to establish a city from scratch, it's called The Line. We are expecting to have one million residents in this city. What makes this city very unique is basically a line that goes under 70 kilos and we are basically trying to preserve 95% of nature in that city. So basically, this city will have zero cars, zero streets and zero carbon emissions. The main idea of this city is basically to power it by basically what we call an invisible backbone underground that will basically facilitate all the needed infrastructure and utilities to the city, such as the networking, electricity, utilities, taking in mind how can we design this to be green and preserve the environment. It's basically we envision it as an urban revolution where that we are building as a citizen-centric city taking people as our first priority in that city. The third city that we are also creating and we are also envisioning to be unique is a luxury destination. It's what we call the Etsy project. It's basically the new Maldives and now Hawaii. Basically, it's a luxury destination that we are building around nature and around basically the great nature in the Etsy where basically there are untouched islands where we'll be basically building on top of it those luxury destinations, resorts, preserving the environment and basically allowing people to have those luxury destinations. More importantly, this will give a huge opportunity to show the culture of the region and basically that goes thousands years back in the industry and also ensuring that this is done in a sustainable manner to position Saudi Arabia as a destination on the global tourism map. Basically, in such a city we are envisioning that data and AI will play a huge role by basically allowing the visitors and the tourists in those islands with the best, most luxurious journeys that basically goes from the time they arrive until they leave by having frictionless arrival and departure process where basically the visitor will not worry about getting in the country, getting in the customs worrying about his luggage where we will be utilizing data and AI to ensure that this is delivered to him at his final destination. Concepts of digital identity, digital wallets will be also implemented. So we would like to see a cashless payment and touch free experiences. At the end of the day, our ambition is basically to ensure that we have a one stop shop for the entire journey. Fabulous. Thank you, Dr. Hotham. We are going to move to our panel discussion next. I do want to just pause for a moment and check the time and ask our interpreters if we have permission to go over time, about 10 minutes. Can the interpreters, can you hear me, the interpreters? We want to know if we have your permission. Yes, you have 10 minutes, 24, thank you. Thank you very much, thank you very much. All right, thank you. Let's go ahead and open this up to our panel and have an open discussion. Today's focus is on the LDCs, LLDCs and SIDs, right? So we're looking at some of our cities, developing cities and rural communities. What are some of the use cases that our panelists are aware of? And what are some of the challenges and opportunities in smart cities? And lessons learned that some of these smaller cities can adopt. Anyone want to start? I think everybody's on mute. Yeah, I would like to start if that's possible. Go ahead, Athena, go ahead. Yeah, thank you very much. In the implementation of the smart city project in Kigali here, which is of course connected, which you consider to be not only it's the landlocked developed country, it's only 12 million populations. The country, but Kigali itself is about 1.6 in a day time and it goes down to 1.1 in the evening time. The challenges, the LCDs are faced with the multiple challenges during the implementation to which from the basis of the great opportunity is a challenge and it's an opportunity. And each of which may be seen as a challenge. It's actually a great opportunity, as I said. Number one is the mobility. The city need better, to get the better with the transportations. And in Kigali, it's much more in advance than elsewhere because the mobility wise, you have, of course, public transportations and we have a taxis, we have motorbikes and so on and so forth. Other challenge is the connectivity of the infrastructure. It's very important because when we talk about smart city, mainly we really talk about the core of the smart city. I can say core infrastructure is really the IoT and the infrastructure which runs on the 4G of fiber. I will actually see a 4G, which is wireless because it's not everywhere. It's not every single IoT you can actually reach out using a fiber optic. And the challenge number three we've seen, he's actually environmental management. The city needs to have an efficient waste collection which is very important. Waste management and waste recycling processes have been placed. Most of the produce waste can be recycled, of course, to repurpose it while reducing. That will reduce actually pollution. Also, utility management is the number four. Number five we see as very important is the safety and the security. A smart city need to be safe city where security is granted and the emergency services are responsive also. Fast, effective in serving the residents of the cities. These are the challenges we face when we were implementing our smart city project in Kigali. Maybe I can jump in as well. Maybe to share some examples of use cases from the smart villages type of approach, particularly in the SIDs. I can maybe share an example of a very clear use cases from our current engagement with one of the Pacific Islands, Van Wat Tu, which is a SID. And I mean, there are some very key hurdles or challenges that communities in the islands are facing. For example, because there is no bank ATM in the island, so and of course there is no digital payments available, if you need to have money, you need to take a boat and actually go to another island to get cash out of the bank. And you can imagine how it is time consuming, how it is expensive. And actually, it's not only expensive because you are taking a boat because you are taking the boat alone. If you are managing to bring 10, 15 people going to the same thing, using the same boat, the cost will be down. They have a lot of catches from fishes and because they don't know where to set those fishes and that is they don't have like a clear marketplace where they can say, we have those type of fishes and because there is no refrigeration, they cannot keep those fishes a long time. Those seems to be their reality which creates a lot of hurdles in terms of income generation, makes the cost of living relatively high, but also prevent them of leveraging their own resources. They cannot even promote all the beautiful islands they have in terms of attracting tourism, et cetera. All those types of use cases, I mean, we can imagine that by simple, even a WhatsApp application can help them, creating a group where if you would like to take a boat, send to this WhatsApp group and you can fool a few people, very simple types of application and using digital technologies can really make an impact. So it's really about how would you, you know, bring this real digital transformation and here we are really talking about a real transformation in that life by some wise kind of efficient use of digital technologies which needs to be coupled with digital literacy and things like that, but we can definitely see that the opportunities for real transformation is significant. Perfect, yeah. Anyone else want to comment? Go ahead, Tania. Yes, please. I just, I'm going to give you the link to the latest Deliberate Bowl of the United Foreigners United Forest CC initiative because it is called Simple Ways to Be Smart because you don't need a big effort on the huge technologies. And in this Deliberate Bowl, we had the cooperation and it's already stated the needs of small islands developing states and Sahara and African cities and Latin American cities as well. And I think it's a very good reference document. So I will send you right now the link to this. Terrific. Deliberate Bowl. All right, comments from Davor or Soda or Dr. Hotham. Any comments on the smart cities for developing countries? I mean, so my thinking goes along with the ways of what we were discussing in terms of, I mean, what I mentioned in terms of social impact bonds, for example, the idea is that people will most likely use whatever they have available, but will they be, how will they feel or understand how does that affect, for example, especially in seeds, the small island countries, how does that affect, for example, their life on a larger scale, which is the topic of the center, right? So Irkai is interested in artificial intelligence for sustainable development, which seems to be a phenomenal, huge topic, right? I mean, it's not even tangible as an idea, it's just so big. What is sustainable development when you start discussing technologies, right? And it's even bigger in terms of consumers and citizens. How do they interact with the idea of using these technologies and knowing that they have done or achieved some sort of impact for their own lives? It's smart cities and smart communities, but at the same time, it is citizens and consumers at the end of the day, which Honey was mentioning, right? So I'm interested in how that plays out in terms of when we say smart, we want to kind of hint at artificial intelligence and data, but can we, you know, can we? I'm just thinking out loud. Yeah, are you referring to the data sharing aspects of- Yes. Yes, yeah. So I mean, if we don't have, so what we need is data on a larger scale, right? Something that is not big in quantity, but in quality, I think. So how do we achieve the system where we can say that smart cities are basically producing data that can be reused later on for AI purposes for sustainable development, you know, from climate change all the way up. And then the question is, once you have all of that, what do you do with it? It's just data, right? I mean, it won't do magic. So how can we open it, create a market where people will actually be in a direct way by investing into it? Let's say, let's say a smart city would produce, you know, 70 or, you know, 100 companies, 100 AI startups a year, that would be phenomenal. But how can people literally invest in them? What is the mechanism of citizens investing in them? You know, having the local kind of ownership. That's something that we are trying to understand at Ilkay, whether that can be possible with social impact bonds for AI. So the idea of creating a system that would benchmark. Yeah. That would benchmark countries against, against, I'm not saying against, but countries, two countries or cities, two cities, and then understand which city is actually, you know, becoming smart and then have that reassurance from investors that they can come in and invest with social impact funding. Sorry, I don't want to monologue. No, it's a very good question. How do we bring this data together to measure our progress, right? Either within cross countries, right? Yeah, any comments on that from the panel? Go ahead, Dr. Othman. I think one important challenge that we would also be seeing in LDC, LDCs and SIDS when it comes to having smart cities, is basically the complexity in deploying the smart capabilities to the legacy infrastructures that they are there, which is to me a very important point, especially if the necessity infrastructure, such as electricity and water, and those cities are suffering from not having. Another thing that I would also like to mention and emphasize on is basically the digital maturity of the citizens in those places. Most likely this will be to some extent low, which will mean it will be more difficult for them and for the citizens themselves to benefit and utilize the services provided by smart cities. Last but not least is basically the ability to activate the smart insights once collected. So now we manage basically to educate the citizens and the infrastructure is built. How can I really benefit from the insights that I'm generating from the data analytics, the IoT devices that are put and all of that? This will to me means what we call an operational transformation and not just basically implementing a technology. And I think this is very important and needs to be taken into consideration. All right, it's very strategic. Ms. Abdurrahim, I think you are going to make a comment as well. Ms. Soed Abdurrahim, did you want to make a comment? It's just for a little bit more of the young start-upers that we have to find the necessary investments and concretize their project that is based on artificial intelligence. Currently, these young start-upers who are very connected really can help us, the mothers, to have new ideas. I'm talking about several initiatives that we have seen with our young people and that they need financing to concretize these projects to have for this sustainable development. We have to frame them and be very close to them. There are a few projects, for example, using recyclable energy, photovoltaic energy, how to develop intelligent cities while based on a part, on nature and on artificial intelligence, how to find this bilateral relationship and have new innovative projects for cities. Thank you. Tania, did you want to comment also on the data challenges and justifying our progress towards the SDGs? Yes. I wanted to stress that the most important thing for any small, closer to a very big city or isolated is to have clear in mind what they want to become in the short, in the middle and in the long term. The planification, that strategic vision will give the policy makers in the city to take the right decisions on which technologies to implement and where to put the economic effort. Because it's not only about investing now but also in the maintenance of those technological solutions. You can't just say, okay, let's put all the street lighting and we will connect it and we can do great things because technology allows for that. But what is the benefit for my society on doing that? Do I have a need to do this or I'm just copying what any other city did? Then you first need to identify where is your weak points and also your strengths. What do you want to become? Do you want to become a leader on tourism? For example, we are promoting that in small world areas in Spain to become smart tourist destinations and get the best of what they have and get data and use technology to get the data to take better decisions. And with this, we can offer the cities a very strong tool with these KPIs in the U4SCCs to take these decisions and to get a better position when they face the accomplishment of sustainable development goals and especially those to SDG11 resilience. And this is, for example, with the COVID pandemic we have faced that. The use of technology makes the citizens need for these technologies to reach their local governments and make in remote a lot of transactions and activities. And that is a good starting point that the modernization of the administration through digitalization. And again, there are a lot of publications in U4SCC. We have one dedicated for example to strike the potential of blockchain technology in building trust in cities. Just have a look and get inspired. Maybe that's a part of the solution. Yeah, great. All right, let's open up a question. Let's get one of our participants to ask a question to our panelists. Does anyone have a question they wanna ask? Okay. Can we open the floor please? Then I'll let some of our participants ask questions of our panel. We have just a few minutes, so I'm sorry we were running a little late, but it was a great discussion. Yes, I raised my hand. Yeah. Hello everyone. Okay, who's speaking? Hello everyone, I'm Ashim. I'm the ICT director of Senegal. So at the same time, I'm chair at the study group 20 and for Africa, for the African group. So I really appreciate the panel and the quality of the interventions at the panel's level. And to tell you only about the engagement of our governments or the engagement they have to have for the concept of Smart City. It's not for Africa a novelty or a luxury, it's a superiority in terms of environmental health and all the questions related to the context of view are today managed by what we call the concept of Smart City. So I think that Africa still has to work for a good vulgarization of the concept of Smart City because it's the age of essential development and it directly reaches the goals of development. Thank you, it was only a contribution, not a question. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm looking for the translation. Hello, can I have the floor? Yes, please. Thank you very much. My name is Enginio Kunli Alarondari from Nigeria. I work with the Nigerian Communications Commission and I'm really excited about this session this afternoon. Well, it is afternoon here in Nigeria. So I think this is a very good concept coming up in terms of discussions around Smart Cities and all of that. So I have two issues that I want to bring up because I listen to all the panelists and I think I really appreciate all their presentations. I mean, they have given us a very good excerpt, so to say. And I would like to ask that I think there is need to start thinking about something like a standard or a baseline for a Smart City, so to say, so that if somebody mentions Smart City, what comes to the mind can be enumerated in terms of, okay, Smart City should have, they should have that and I mean, in terms of infrastructures and so on and so forth. So I think that is something that is very, very important. And for the LDCs and let me say maybe African countries, I think the baseline should still be the same with the other part of the world because I think when we talk about standard, it should be something like a baseline for everybody, for all the countries. I haven't said that. I also want Mr. Kune, sorry, Dr. Kune, if I'm right to please explain the concept of smart management and smart waste collection and management because during this presentation, I think about that time he was talking about that, the audio was very poor, so I would appreciate if he can maybe wrap that up too, maybe in few seconds. Thank you very much. So I'm sorry, what I'm gonna have to do is capture the answer to that question. I'm being asked that we have to end this session. My sincere apologies, but we will make sure your question gets answered via email. I wanna thank Amanita for all the work she did to bring us all together and our wonderful speakers and the mayor of Tinius for joining us. Thank you so much. This was a great session. So much wonderful things going on in our smart cities around the world. Keep innovating folks, have a great day. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Thanks. Bye.