 Welcome to WTDC 17 here in Buenos Aires in Argentina. I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio today by Ursula Oussu-Ecufol, who is the Minister of Communications for Ghana. Minister, thank you very much for joining us today. It's my pleasure. Now, I'd like to start off by talking about the theme of this year's conferences, the ICTs for SDGs. What has been the overall impact of ICTs in your country's socio-economic development? It's been immense and let me say good afternoon to your viewers as well. It's been immense. Every step of the way, as I indicated in my statement, from health to education to procurement to e-commerce to digital financial services, to, you name it, the way we live and work with reducing corruption and waste in our systems, improving efficiencies in the public sector. We have used ICTs in scaling up our application of technology in all sectors of the economy to drive growth, job creation, entrepreneurship, women's empowerment, you name it. And it's there. It has a cross-cut in nature. And I say it's an indispensable tool for development in all its forms. And so like an onion, which is used in all sources and stews, you'll find ICTs everywhere if we want to improve our efficiencies. And for us, it's helped us in so many ways that we, like leaving your mobile phone at home, you feel like you've dismembered your limb. That's the way in which it's affected the quality of our lives there. And we're looking forward to even greater application of ICTs in all sectors of our economy and to see it help us to really blossom and grow and get to where we want to get. We want Ghana to be the hub, the IT hub for the West African sub-region. We want to take the leadership in our infrastructure driving down the cost of data to enable young people to explore more its possibilities. And so that's our positioning ourselves. And what would you say are the major obstacles or challenges that you might face in using ICTs for sustainable development? The human resource capabilities in our country, we're really having to deal with improving the capacities of our people to use these new tools, which some may find foreign to their way of doing things. And the high cost of the Internet is also a major disincentive. We also have to think about rural penetration more for the unserved and underserved areas. There's a clumber for IT services around the country. And supply is nagging far behind demands. We're having to scale up our universal access capabilities also immensely as we go along. But these are all issues that we're working on. And we think that once we can deal with these few issues, we'll be well on our way. Ghana is very much cooperating with ITU. ITU is very much a partner with Ghana and a lot of things I just wanted to find out from you. How has Ghana benefited from cooperation, close cooperation with ITU? Oh, I don't think we would have gotten where we are without our keen collaboration and cooperation with ITU. They've helped us develop the ICT for Accelerator Development Policy. They've helped build up the capacity of our regulators and spectrum management in fixing inter-connect fees. They've helped us with cybersecurity, training development of our cybersecurity policy and strategy and the construction of our sets, the computer emergency response center that we have. In every aspect of our lives, we've picked up valuable lessons in terms of universal access from here, from interactions with our various colleagues here and implemented it back home. And we're learning even more every day and hoping to deepen our cooperation in here. We chair various study groups in quality of service and quality of experience, signaling protocols, satellite services. And we're also vying for ICT Study Group 2, ITUD Study Group 2 on cybersecurity, emergency telecommunications and climate change adaptations. We value our membership of the council. We've derived enormous benefits from it and we would hope to deepen our own contribution to the debate and what we also get from it because I quoted the secretary general in my presentation, we're stronger really together and we make each other better and we can build an interconnected world which would only in your to the benefit of all our people. Finally, I wanted to ask you, what concrete actions do you hope will come from WTDC 17? More capacity building, you know, and to develop a strategy for the early realisation of the sustainable development goals. Our president is a co-chair of the SDG Advocacy Group and he really wants to share experiences and see how we can work together to develop the continent that we all want to see. We want greater international collaboration on cybersecurity. We can't go it alone. One part of the world sneezes, the catches are called the rest of us sneeze in terms of cybersecurity. So we really do want greater collaboration in that area and I think it is key as we're scaling up our efforts in the usage of technology at all sectors. We also need to improve or scale up our efforts in terms of protecting safe navigation of cyberspace and child-online protection as well is something that we're taking very, very seriously. And so we see, we're hoping that at the end of this this development conference will be developing the strategies that will enable us to deal with many of these issues going forward in terms of interoperability of networks and systems as well and the mechanisms which support conformance to those are some of the things that we'd like to see from this conference. And as always, if there are opportunities for mutual assistance in terms of even greater infrastructure sharing mechanisms that we can learn from, we would also like that because we think that by doing so we might be able to reduce the cost of accessing IT services for our people. Thank you very much indeed. It is a great pleasure to be with you. Thank you too.