 Bismillahir Rahmanir Rahim. Good afternoon, Honorable Chairman, Mr. Holland Zoo, Secretary-General of ITU. Excellencies, respected delegates, leaders, and gentlemen, I would like to thank you, ITU, for inviting me to attend this plenary potential conference. It is a great pleasure and honor to be here for the first time. Representing Afghanistan, please allow me to begin by thanking the government of the United Arab Emirates for hosting this important conference and for their warm hospitality. Distinguished delegates, in today's world, technology is omnipresent and is the playing a vital role in every part of our lives. It has been an influential factor in enabling countries to achieve socioeconomic growth. Thus, pushing government to invest and facilitate the adaptation of new trends and their agenda and policies. It is transferring completely the way business, medicine, education, and communication programs are being conducted. Therefore, it is very important that ITU has adopted a structure approach to stimulate cooperation and growth in the ICT sphere by setting a strategic goal and targets. The identification of important milestones and benchmarks in the area of growth, inclusiveness, sustainability, innovation, and partnership give us all our guidance in our action. In Afghanistan, we have come a long way during the last 15 years to develop the ICT infrastructure from scratch. A country that had almost no connectivity whatsoever back then operate about 5,000 kilometers of fiber optics and plan to build more in the coming years. We have brought 90% of the country under the coverage of GSM and mobile services. Almost 80% of the population use mobile phone services, internet price, which are almost 3,000 USD per megabyte but has been reduced to almost 40 USD per megabit. Our objective is to extend connectivity within Afghanistan and lower the internet price as much as possible so that our people are providing with ease of access to digital world and thus to knowledge, education, science, and ATC. Getting approval of open access policy last year will further support the private sector to invest in fiber optics, which will result in stronger competition among the operator in the realm of services, quality, and tariffs. We have launched a new project at Scholar Digital Casa, which the government of Afghanistan will extend fiber optics network to the remaining nine provinces and all 25 provinces already connected. With this innovation, we will be able 90% of Afghans will benefit from the telecommunication services. Afghanistan fiber network is connected to five neighboring countries, Pakistan, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan. Recently, we conducted a survey we will soon connect with China. We have made net, noteworthy progress in improving the government institution efficiency through the e-government and digital modernization effort. Government resource planning is under development. The e-government platform is processed. And electronic ID have been issued, which simplified the digital access and identity. The government of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan has recently adopted the ICT roadmap and strategic plan for the upcoming five years. With this strategy, we will have to pay the way to alter almost 70% of the administration procedure electronically and to connect university, school, hospital, to internet throughout the country. We are also working on the successful launch of one stop shop for public services. The idea behind this concept is to bring all the public services under one roof. We are majority of the services we will be using electronically application and program. Despite major achievement, Afghanistan faces considerable challenges as the land law country in the term of connecting to remote area to internet, as well as relatively low ICT literacy. Yet another major challenge is security that hinder our progress as many area. In spite of this afforded mention concern, we are confident that in the near future, in majority of rural population, an urban household will have access to affordable brown bed connection. As a member of the International Telecommunication Union, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan fully endorsed the vision, goal, and target of the United Nations and SDG. This is mainly because we strongly believe the information society is about empowerment of the people so that they can achieve their full potential. We're also committed to be closely working with ITU in the next four years. At the end, once again, I would like to thank the UAE authority for their gracious hosting and the ITU for organizing such a valuable event. I wish you all a successful event. Thank you very much.