 A warm welcome to WSIS Forum 2016. This WSIS Forum is special and extremely important as it is the first after the United Nations General Assembly, WSIS Review that was held in December last year. The United Nations General Assembly recognized the necessity of holding the WSIS Forum on an annual basis and called for a close alignment between the WSIS and the Sustainable Development process and its targets. On the occasion of the United Nations General Assembly Review, Mr. Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, said, �We will strengthen the WSIS Forum as a key platform for discussing the role of ICTs as a mean of implementation of the SDGs and targets. In particular, UN Action Line facilitating agencies were requested by the United Nations General Assembly to review their reporting and work plans to support the implementation of the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development. The WSIS Forum has been the perfect example of collaboration and partnership between the UN agencies. Last year, depending on our mandates, we developed a WSIS Action Line and SDG matrix that maps the Sustainable Development goals with the WSIS Action Lines and gives us the clear linkage between the two. I am joined here today with a few Action Line facilitators who will talk to us about the fresh priorities, the challenges, the opportunities that this new era brings for us. Good morning, Mike Melle. Mike is the Action Line facilitator of C4 Capacity Building. Capacity Building is crucial for the development of any project and for ICT for deep projects in particular to facilitate sustainable development. Can you share some of the challenges and opportunities that we see in this regard? Thank you, Gitanjali, for that question. Capacity Building is actually about developing the skills and competencies of people to do something. And in this respect, you will find that Capacity Building is cutting across every single SDG that we have. Here, we are talking about raising people's awareness, talking about education, we are talking about training, we are also talking about the concept of lifelong learning. And you will find this across whether it is innovators who develop life-changing innovations or it's policy makers who have to put in place policy frameworks that guide the development agenda or even if we look at people who are implementing programs, all these people, there's one thread that runs through them, they need to have capacity. So we find that the challenge is to ensure that Capacity Building is all-inclusive, it's not just for some stakeholders living other stakeholders because across the development value chain, everybody needs to have Capacity Building in order for sustainable development course to be achieved. Thank you, Mike. Education and lifelong learning, indeed extremely crucial for the attainment of the sustainable development goals. What role do the ICTs in particular play in Capacity Building for achieving the sustainable development goals? Oh, a very big role, actually, as you know that one of the things that we're challenging, the community was digital exclusion. In other words, there were some people in communities that were not included in the digital society simply because they, A, they did not have enough money to go to school, they did not have access to ICTs. But thanks to mobile access, we find now that people can actually develop their capacities through mobile learning. There are many cases and many examples of digital literacy programs, digital e-skills programs that have been accessed mostly by people in remote areas that never had the opportunity. So ICTs are playing a role as enablers for Capacity Building to ensure that everybody is included in the digital society. Thank you, Mike. ICTs as enablers for Capacity Building for achieving the sustainable development goals. We have here with us today Mr. Dennis Suzar from UNDESA. He is the Action Line Facilitator of Action Line C1, C11 and C7E Governance. Dennis, what role does, you know, international and regional collaborations and partnerships play in this new era of WISIS and SDGs? And what are the opportunities and challenges that you see? Thank you Gitanjali for hosting us here during the WISIS Forum 2016. UNDESA is the Action Line Facilitator for C1, the promotion of ICTs for development by governments and all stakeholders, C11, International and Regional Cooperation, and C7, ICT applications e-government. This year, in order to give the dessert credit to all Action Lines, we will have two facilitation meetings. There are many things that governments can do and also other stakeholders can do for promoting ICTs for development. We see many initiatives around the world. To name a few, WISIS is one of the most important ones. This week, we will be making voices, making our voices heard about the role of ICTs for sustainable development goals. Internet Governance Forum is another important initiative that was created at the end of UNIS Agenda in 2005. It's a multi-stakeholder policy forum for discussing all Internet Governance related issues. But we need to see more promotion of ICTs by all stakeholders, especially to address digital divides and also to make sure that users have trust and security in the online space. So when we talk about digital divides, access is one of the main areas, but we should also focus on real access, affordability, content, capabilities, and we need more initiatives in these areas. Access, affordability and content to bridge the digital divide is indeed extremely crucial. You are also the facilitator of E-Government. What opportunities do you see in this era of WISIS Action Lines and SDGs? E-Government is the delivery of public services through online platforms. And E-Government can contribute to many SDGs. Thanks to E-Government, those citizens who were not able to access public services can now access services through their mobile phones, through community places where they can connect to Internet. So E-Government makes government operations more effective, more efficient, and also it can give transparency. It gives opportunities for citizens to participate in decision-making. And there are also many larger potentials for governments to make use of ICTs to achieve sustainable development through E-Government. Thank you, Dennis. Dennis highlighted the role of partnerships, collaborations among stakeholders to achieve the sustainable development goals. The WISIS Forum this year is expecting more than 1,800 participants, UN agencies, civil society participants, more than 80 ministers. So we hope that it will be a perfect venue for collaborations and partnerships to achieve the sustainable development goals using the WISIS Action Lines and ICTs. We have here with us today also Sophie Maddens from ITU who facilitates the WISIS Action Line C6 enabling environment. Sophie, what are the key challenges, opportunities, and fresh priorities you see in the area of enabling environment? Thank you, Gitanjali. I think today we really are seeing a huge amount of opportunities with technology trends and evolutions. We've basically moved from a world of second-generation mobile to third to fourth and now stand at the eve of fifth-generation mobile technologies. That in itself will open a world of opportunities. Just think of artificial intelligence, M2M, cloud computing. We're also seeing technology players offer new opportunities, new facilities. We're looking at high-altitude platforms, drones, high-throughput satellites. So all of these elements together will really make a difference in providing connectivity to people around the world. And that brings us also to the Internet of Things. We're seeing smart societies, smart cities, smart things, the Internet of Things, the Internet of Everything. So we are having smarter societies, individuals, communities. Think of smart water, smart energy, smart electricity. That in itself will also provide opportunities, but it also provides a challenge for the enabling environment because there will need to be collaboration so as to understand these opportunities and the challenges and the technological changes. So I think that is something we really want to take into consideration when determining the enabling environment. Thank you, Sophie. Do you have an example to share with us where we have had a perfect enabling environment for facilitating ICTs to achieve the development goals? Well, a perfect enabling environment, that's work in progress, but we have seen the evolution of regulation and policymaking. If you think that just a couple of decades ago, telecommunications ICTs were basically seen as a public service offered by government. It was like water electricity, but it was seen as a luxury. It was mainly offered on a monopolistic basis. Then we had the introduction of competition, and so we evolved through the generations of regulation, from monopolistic to slightly liberalized, to the opening up of competition and privatizing, to really the supervising and getting the competitive framework right, to now, as I said, at the eve of the fifth generation regulation. What do I mean by this fifth generation regulation? Well, we are seeing, particularly with all the discussion on the sustainable development goals, ICTs are really at the core of the achievement of many of the sustainable development goals. We are seeing the need for collaboration for an inclusive dialogue amongst all stakeholders, so that together we can make a difference. Together, ICTs can help to achieve the sustainable development goals. And that, to me, is the best example of how our enabling regulatory environment has made a difference to the sustainable development goals. Thank you, Sophie. Indeed, together we can make a difference. WISIS is really unique because it is one of the only platforms that is multi-stakeholder, which engages with the different stakeholder types, and all the different action lines facilitated by the different UN agencies, ensure that the voice of each and every stakeholder is heard. We thank you very much for being with us here today. We will have another round of interview with different action line facilitators to hear more about the key priorities, the trends, the challenges, this new era of WISIS and sustainable development goals bring to the WISIS action line facilitators. 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