 Welcome to PP18, which is the ITU Plenary Potentiary Conference 2018 here in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates, where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by Mr Joseph Mucheru, who is the Cabinet Secretary for the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology for Kenya. Welcome to the studio. Thank you. Thank you, Max. I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about there's considerable attention being placed on harnessing the power of ICT's information and communication technologies as a power for good, as an enabler for development, for the benefit of people, families, communities and nations. What's your perspective on this? I think it's definitely the main way to go. Technology allows you to be able to cover everybody, whereas in the past if you had to bring people together in the normal, analogue way, it would take a long time. If you look at mobile technology, for instance, you can be able to reach people anywhere in the world, even in the rural areas, by simply putting in wireless networks. And then you can provide them with the information that they need. They are able to use that same technology to buy things from anywhere in the world, because they can use it for mobile money, pay for goods, those goods are then brought to them. They get the right information. They can vote the way they want. They can learn about their health, of course, entertainment, and they can have the peer-to-peer communication. So plenty of opportunities that you can use technology just to better lives for governments, creating openness, transparency, efficiency in the way that we provide services. So without technology, I think we cannot be able to move at the pace that we need to. We cannot leapfrog the way we need to leapfrog. So technology is key. And I'm glad to be in the sector myself. Absolutely. And Kenya is no stranger to that. Of course, Nairobi dubbed very much as Silicon Savannah. You've got the hub there. You've got all sorts of great innovations. And SMEs are being encouraged to make sure that they're at the top of the innovation structure there. I wanted to find out from you that this Play Potentially conference is the first since the world agreed to sustainable development goals in 2015. Perhaps you could provide some examples of how ICTs are helping to drive sustainable development in Kenya. So the first thing, ICTs are able to reach everybody affordably. I think the cost of being able to build networks that are wireless is much lower than trying to put cables and dig in the ground and so on. So it reaches people quite quickly. So we're able to then give them the right information. So let's take, for instance, health. Health care is important. As a government, we've also, through the president, come up with what we call the big four agenda that takes care of people. So we're talking affordable housing. We're talking about universal health care. We're talking about manufacturing and food security. So health care. We need to be able to ensure we're providing every Kenyan with health coverage, insurance. And one way to do that is to ensure we've registered them. We've got the right biometrics. So when they go to any health center in the country, they're able to get services quickly. We have centers such as Huduma centers. This Huduma means services where citizens go now they can get over 80 different government services in a one-stop shop. Technology allows us to be able to provide the services. We go all the way to education, access to information. There are many, many areas where using the technology and the services that we've now developed, we're able to provide citizens with the right for them to choose what they want, whether it's in education, whether it's actually food security and so on. Now, in terms of connectivity, it's very much the perennial question and our perennial challenge about half the world is the world's people are now connected to the internet, the other half is not. What is Kenya doing to get everyone connected? So when I think we're being optimistic to say half the world is connected, there is a huge number that is actually not connected. Connected means maybe there is coverage. Devices are important because if you don't have the right device, even if you have network, you're not able to get a service. You're not aware about the services that you can get. That's also a problem. So what we're doing as a country is making sure we're providing, first of all, the enabling policies and framework for competition, because we want to see that this is driven not just by government, but also by private sector. So we've seen roll out of 4G services. We now have more than four fiber cables, submarine cables coming into the country. And we're going to the extent now other than the 4G services that are provided with the existing network operators. Google with their project Loon is also coming to our market. They've been testing and so we expect the balloons will come and that should hopefully give universal 4G coverage across the whole country. So there's a lot we're putting in terms of infrastructure. We're encouraging investors to come and invest in local manufacturing so that we have the devices that can be used, whether it is phones, tablets, and so on. We're putting these devices in schools. The president is very committed to providing our young people with access to technology so that even as they grow, they can be the innovators that use this technology to really come up with new innovations. So a lot going on in the education sector as well. As a ministry, we are using the same technologies to ensure we have both local content in the broadcasting side, film, all the different areas that we need to use so that technology takes us and leapfrogs us much faster. Mobile money obviously is a big area for the country. We have more than 80% of our adult population using mobile money. Actually more than three quarters of our GDP is transacted through mobile money. So huge use and uptake of technology and we hope that will continue. And you've been very much at the cutting edge of that. I just wanted to finally ask you, we're here at PP18, is there any message that you would like to convey to the participants here and also to our wider audience? I believe technology is a big enabler but it can also create different outside gaps. So we've been talking a lot about the digital divide. One of the things we're worried about is that there could actually be an intelligence divide because we've moved into this age of now artificial intelligence and you find that the various different products that are coming up are mostly from one region as opposed to everybody being covered. So at some point, these new technologies, these new services, Siri, Watson and so on, may only speak one language and the rest of us are left out. So we need to really make sure we're harmonizing and working together across all the different markets so that we have equal access to all these opportunities. The over the top companies are providing great services across the continent, across the world. People have all the tools and all the platforms that they can actually use. They should now start taking also content from some of our countries so that then you have content available for everybody. The privacy data protection are also key to look at and we want to make sure that again, this is covered across the whole world but does not exclude those that are maybe not as fast in adopting all the different technologies. I think we should lift everybody so that then we grow together. So those are some of the key things I would say. Generally ensuring we have the right use of spectrum standards across the world so that there isn't all these complications with scale is important. So yeah, looking forward to more discussions and we'll see how this beneficiary goes. Well, it's been a genuine pleasure having you in the studio. Thank you very much for the fascinating and inspiring insights and we look forward to catching up with you again in the future. Thank you, Max. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you, much appreciated. Thank you.