 It is indeed my great pleasure to welcome you to the Global Symposium for Regulators 2017 Edition. Mr. Ulinizawu will certainly say it in the louder voice, but let me take this opportunity to congratulate you, under our Prime Minister and the people of the Commonwealth of the Bahamas for your 44th Independence Day. And to thank you for the very warm welcome extended to all of us and for the excellent facilities put at our disposal to conduct this meeting. The Global Symposium for Regulators presents us with an opportunity to continue as we started in 2000, the dynamic dialogue among the regulators, the policy makers, industry leaders and other key ICT stakeholders. The theme of GSR 17 is living in the world of digital opportunities. You will see in ITU we talk about opportunities, not challenges, because we don't think we have challenges. We just have opportunities in the ICT sector. It is important today more than ever to address such opportunities and to foster the enabling environment that will help all the people of the world to benefit from those opportunities. Today we are all very well aware that ICTs cut across every, each and every sector, economical sector through education, EF, agriculture, banking, smart cities, smart countries. And it is our responsibility to embrace emerging technologies set as big data, open data, cloud computing, internet of things and artificial intelligence to tap into the huge opportunities offered by the ICT for achieving sustainable development. As a matter of fact, as the international community, as embarked in the implementation of the 17 sustainable development goals, our action as ICT sector should go beyond the ICT sector to take into account the ICT ecosystem. A new ecosystem where ICTs are no longer about gigabyte, megabyte, optical fiber. A new ecosystem where ICT are about streamlining government processes, providing health to the most needy people, providing education to the most remote people and ICT just about people. This is what it is about today and ICT found itself, ICT sector found itself to be at the center of the digital economy, which is very good and we should play this role of helping other sectors to achieve their objective in education and other. In the short term we say we are in a particular and a very unique position today to accelerate the attainment of the SDGs. But this requires for all of us to change the way we have been working. We need to change the way we are interacting between the policy makers, the regulators, the operators, the academia, the consumers, all this ecosystem we need to change the way we have been interacting so far. And in doing so we will make sure we play our role in helping all the population of the world without leaving anybody behind, make all the population of the world tap into the use opportunity of ICTs for their own development, development of the community, development of that nation and the development of the world. Honorable Prime Minister, I am happy to report that the activities of GSR 17 started very well. Since yesterday we have four pre-events. Yesterday we held the global dialogue on digital financial inclusion where we addressed the protection of e-transaction and explored the transformative impact of emerging technologies such as blockchain and artificial intelligence. Yesterday also we have an information session on the 5G technology and 5G network configuration which is the network of the future that will really help us to carry all the traffic created by the new services. This morning we had the regional regulatory association meeting that addressed affordable access to ICTs and international mobile roaming. Those are also issues, affordability at national level and affordability when you move around, when you talk about regional integration, if you move around you have to stop speaking to your country, you have to stop speaking to other countries so we need to work on the international mobile roaming. Together not against the operator, not against the regulator, not against the government but together to work on the mobile roaming issues and what this is what ICT is doing with the support of the regulatory association. We also have, I mentioned the information session already so, okay. Also I can report to you other Prime Minister that these pre-events went very well and I would like to thank all the participants for the lively discussions and their invaluable contributions. Before I conclude, I would like to use this opportunity to reiterate our invitation to all of you to join us at the World Telecommunication Development Conference that will take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina from the 9th to the 20th of October. And the same by the way of this conference is ICT for SDGs. ICT for SDGs and we mean it, we need to make ICT work for the SDGs. We will also be celebrating the 25th anniversary of the ITU development sector. Honorable Prime Minister, your presence here today is a clear testimony of your strong and very strong commitment for using ICTs for development. I am aware that your vision is to make the Commonwealth of Bahamas a smart island Please reassured that ITU will continue to support the implementation of this vision and to take Bahamas as a best practice we can bring to other countries. Honorable Prime Minister, we search a vision and commitment. GSR 17 can only be a great success in Bahamas. With your blessing, I thank you.