 A very good morning to WSS stakeholders from the ITU headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. We are on the fourth day of the WSS Forum 2017 and we all welcome you if you are participating on-site or following us remotely. The high-level track of the WSS Forum 2017 is moderated by high-level track facilitators and these high-level track facilitators represent the different WSS stakeholder types that have selected them to be presented out here. That is the government's private sector, civil society, the technical community and the academia. I have here with me today the 14 high-level track facilitators who facilitated the different sessions on inclusiveness, on capacity building, on 2030 agenda and various other interesting sessions which were multi-stakeholder and had a very interesting discussion and the outcomes are already online on the WSS Forum website. Good morning Shernon. You are representing the technical community here at the WSS Forum high-level track. What were the main outcomes and the key takeaways of your session? Okay, first of all I would like to thank ITU and you all for giving us the opportunity to be here to serve. Actually most of the times when we are talking about ICT and services in my particular session we have been focusing on climate change as well. This is one area that normally we don't focus much on but we believe this is very important because while we are focusing on making money, while we are focusing on continue developing ICTs, it is very important for us to conserve this very important asset that we are living on which is the planet. So our focus has been in addition to the other technical areas to focus on the climate change as well. Thank you. Focusing on climate change and saving our planet is our joint responsibility. Dr. Grinn is representing the private sector and they had some very interesting panelists on their high-level session. Let's hear more from him about the key trends that were captured during his session. Thank you Kitanjali. There are a number of them and all of them fortunately are positive. One which impressed me quite strongly is that now we all or most countries moving from building infrastructure to efficient use of it. So it's e-government, e-health, other services are reality now. Second trend which is very interesting, it's new one, like role of such invention like artificial intelligence or cognitive sciences which can be available already right now for developing country and can greatly enhance efficiency of and use of knowledge which is everywhere in the world. And maybe the last one which did impress me, it's presentation from Facebook. So they are going from content providing, also taking care on different ways how to serve and the serve population and it was really impressive. Thank you. Thank you Dr. Grinn. Indeed you had a very interesting panel discussion. The recordings are all available online so we request you to please go to the WSIS forum website and listen to the recordings out there. Good morning Mavish. You had a very interesting discussion and dialogue and in fact a lot of participants as well you know joined into your dialogue. Can you please share what happened during your session? Sure. Thank you Ghitindjali. It was very interesting. We had two panelists present and the case studies they presented were very interesting and quite disparate. One presented on the National Digital Library in Russia and the other talked about e-health technologies in Bangladesh so they were very different but what was interesting was that they both talked about fostering a more robust information society and they talked about it in very similar ways so what they said was whether you're talking about fostering innovation or generating better more efficient knowledge extraction it really needs to be drawn from the local context and address local needs tap into local capacity and so that was a really interesting discussion and as you said the audience got involved and it was wonderful. It was a great dialogue. Thank you Mavish. The most important aspect of WSIS forum is to be inclusive and to ensure that everybody gets a chance to participate in the dialogues. I have here with me today Ms. Gayathri from APC. She's representing the civil society community. Gayathri, I heard that your panel was extremely multi-stakeholder and there were great discussions around the aspect of linking the WSIS action lines with the SDGs. Can you share some of the key outcomes of your session? Thank you Ghita and thank you for having us here because I thought it was a really interesting dialogue. The session that I managed to facilitate related to ICT applications and services and that was great because it's really ICT applications and services that make the internet relatable and experiential for the people beyond the infrastructure and that's what makes the internet real even for the people and during the session we had really interesting dialogue between the government as well as the private sector. There were very interesting examples for instance in Facebook and Bangladesh where people are mobilizing on Facebook for really interesting initiatives like for instance people got together to plant 200,000 saplings, clean up the rivers as well as Bangladesh has also been using these e-filing services that's been saving them a lot of cost in terms of physical infrastructure but it's also been improving their efficiency. And another very important case study we looked at is in the case of Liberia and the very tragic situation of Ebola and the key role that ICTs played in tackling and to a great extent mitigating that situation. One of the key things that came out of that session however is that it was not all one sided. The participants and the speakers were very aware of and cognizant of the challenges that we have with ICT applications and services because the two main challenges are that the world is increasingly getting connected but there are many people that are still unconnected and as we keep moving to ICT applications it's very likely that those people who are unconnected will become even more marginalized. So that kind of highlighted the need to push and make sure that they get connected soon. And the second issue that was highlighted was in terms of cybersecurity and the need for states to be able to trust each other when it comes to cybersecurity but also to have a human rights based approach to make sure that we put users first and that their privacy and personal data remains safe. So they had very interesting discussions about how to go forward but civil society was able to present the challenges as they saw it and the ministers were able to respond to that and that was great. Thank you Gayathri indeed. That's the purpose of the WISIS forum to provide a equal and just platform for all multi-stakeholders to come and talk together and to forge new partnerships to ensure that ICTs play a crucial role in enabling the sustainable development goals. Andhrae good morning you were the youth representative of the high level track facilitators. I want to hear more about what you captured as you know the young person attending the WISIS forum. What were your key takeaways from your session and from the WISIS forum in general? Yeah I was very surprised in my session because I feel that I would see a very formal session but we achieved a very informal dialogue and we see a very concern about the not just the regulation problem and a fight between the private sector and the public sector but a real concern about the multi-stakeholder model and concern about the necessity about the change and the urgency of the question about the digital divide and about other divides about the gender divide, about the youth divide. So I think that it was a great experience to be here in the WISIS forum and represent the youth. It was a great step in this forum. So it was a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you. The pleasure is all ours and we hope that we will continue to engage with the youth. During this WISIS forum we had students from different schools and universities of not only Switzerland but all over the world participating in the hackathon and also a virtual reality experience that connected the schools in Switzerland with various other schools in parts of the world. Good morning Jessica. Can you share some key takeaways from your very interesting high-level session? Sure. Thank you and thanks for this opportunity to be a high-level track facilitator. My session was on the knowledge society capacity and e-learning and some of the takeaways were that there's been a lot of progress in how to extend learning opportunities using digital technologies but there are still some challenges particularly with literacy, both digital literacy and traditional literacy. Some of the solutions that were sort of proposed were that by expanding digital literacy sometimes traditional literacy can also make progress. Another key takeaway was that we need to be thinking about new technologies like big data, artificial intelligence and how they can be integrated into capacity building and e-learning and the building of knowledge societies along with smart cities as learning environments and centers of excellence where as long as there's some horizontal learning that takes place between these smart cities that this would be sort of a next step in how we continue to build the knowledge society. Thank you Jessica. Dr. Habib's session was the last one in fact on Tuesday and even though it was the last session I could see the excitement and all the participants were engrossed because it was such an interesting topic and such an excellent discussion had emerged in that session. Dr. Habib could you please share some key challenges and opportunities that were shared in your session. Thank you. Good morning. So this is my first time in the WISIS forum and as academia member it was very exciting opportunity to discuss and make some cooperation and it was a great dialogue with ministers from Iran, from Uganda, from Vietnam and representative from Mexico, Moldova and 50 more ventures. The speakers highlights the need to focus more on how we can solve the problems of digital divides and they also present their plan for the next years and the new strategies that they should make plan. So what I also like in this forum, in the WISIS forum, it is mainly the international networking. So thanks for ITU, for inviting me to this forum and congratulations for the success of WISIS forum 2017. Thank you Dr. Habib. You were also a mentor at the Hackathon, Hack for Health on the first day of the WISIS forum. How was it to have so many young people here at the WISIS forum and develop applications in the area of e-help? Yeah, it was very amazing. Two days just before the WISIS forum. So during more than 24 hours, continue time, the teams make a great challenge and presented some great work projects and I hope that they will continue to develop them and congratulations for the winners who are from Poland, from Norway, and from Tunisia. Thank you very much. Hello, Suchita. Suchita was moderating the panel on gender and streaming and in fact, one of the achievements of this WISIS forum was a lot of women speakers, panelists. In fact, even in the participation, there's an increased participation from women at the WISIS forum. This is a great thing to see and let's hear more from Suchita because she had an excellent panel on gender and streaming and ICTs. Thank you so much, Kitanjali. And thank you so much for having me here. My panel was absolutely fascinating. So I think they also opened by speaking about the WISIS forum itself and how you're making strides in including women participation. I think 38% this year were the targeted 50% in the years to come. I think the HLTFs also have nearly 50-50 participation but they also highlighted that there are many parts of the world that have much more severe problems. The gender digital gap is rising in LDCs. More developed countries also have fairly significant problems when it comes to equal pay for equal work. There were lots of really interesting ideas about how to improve that. But the challenges remain, the barriers to education, lack of access, stereotypical representations, tokenism, just a whole host of others. Some particularly interesting ideas that I thought came out of the discussion were the increase of auditing of programs that introduced promoting personal branding for women in earlier stages so that they can progress well through the stages, bridging the skill gap is, of course, incredibly important. The encouraging note that I think everyone struck was that gender mainstreaming is actually at the top of a lot of national and global agendas right now. So there's a whole lot of scope to actually make positive change going forward. I'm hoping we get to see that sometime soon. Thank you very much, Suchita. Today we heard from all the high-level track facilitators who were nominated to represent their different stakeholder types here at the WSIS Forum 2017. They did an excellent job of capturing the key trends, the opportunities, the challenges, and the key linkages of their session with the sustainable development goals at their respective high-level policy sessions. We thank you for listening in, and we hope you enjoy the next two days of the WSIS Forum 2017. Thank you very much.