 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the second day of the World Economic Forum's growth summit on a very sunny, crisp spring day here in Geneva. My name is Taree Ali Ahmad. I am the head of the Research and Studies Unit at Arab News, and I will be the moderator for today's panel. Now, first of all, I'd like to introduce you to my esteemed panelists. To my right, you have Dr. Erika Kramer-Mboula, Professor of Economics at the University of Johannesburg. We have Secretary Fadlallah Aqaqabani Ahnadeh, the Secretary of Economic Development of Mexico City. We have Sonia Shorri, Vice President of Strategy, Marketing, and Communications at Area XO in Ottawa. We have His Excellency Rashid Al-Blouchi, the Undersecretary at the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development. And finally, Mr. Maurizio Tamanini, CEO and Managing Partner at FSI Milan. Now, given that we have such a large panel and such little time, I'm going to keep my intro very brief. Cities are at the front and center of some of the most pressing challenges we have in the world today. By 2050, two out of every three people are likely to be living in cities and urban centers according to a UN study. And this highlights huge potential that cities have in terms of economic growth and innovation, but also flags growing challenges in sustainability, economic opportunities, and services that will be faced in the future. Now, economic resilience within cities is only possible through multi-stakeholder cross-industry collaboration. City governments have been shuttered by a loss of residents and business due to increased cost of living in urban environments and accessibility to urban infrastructures. While some cities have developed diversified economies and emerged stronger, others, however, with monoculture economies struggle with really devastating consequences on employment, small businesses, productivity, and inequality. So how can a shift in thinking align public and private partners to future-proof cities? And this is what we hope to answer today. So I'm going to start off with a question to you, Dr. Kramer Mboulou. Africa is the continent that is set to be impacted most by this rapid urbanization trend. It currently has three mega cities, which are Cairo, Kinshasa, and Lagos, and is set to have four more by 2050. These investment magnets are obviously a boon to many people in the continent. Would you walk us through, please, what this means for investors and the private sector, and how you think we should address this to ensure resilience and inclusive growth for all people? Thank you very much for the question and for being in this panel. I'll try and be very quick. It's a big question, but urbanization, as you well point out, is one of the most visible transformations in the African landscape. It's happening faster than in other regions. African cities are growing faster, some of the fastest growing cities in the world, and they are also the youngest in terms of the population. It's estimated that about 40% of the workforce is going to be in Africa, most of them living in cities in the next 20 years. There's a recent report by the OECD and the African Development Bank that highlights the positive contributions that living in cities has for the population and the residents in terms of increasing the living standards and also the socioeconomic outcomes. When you compare the performance of some variables of people living in cities as compared to their national average, that difference between living in cities and the national average is larger in African cities. There's a positive impact of urbanization, but there are also some challenges. Very obvious ones have to do with infrastructure, with the delivery of basic services of housing and electricity and mobility, as well as the straining natural resources, water and land, and the risk of informality. People living in informal settlements and townships also increasing. This is the setup, but the pandemic has really highlighted how important cities are in building resilience, not only for the region, but also globally. When you have opportunities in the cities, the residents find work, find a way of living, there's less mobility, less migration and so on. What is happening is also in the dynamics of the pandemic, we see that cities are rapidly digitalizing. We've seen an acceleration of digitalization in African cities, including e-commerce and digital payment solutions and so on. In fact, many of the African unicorns and this boom of investment that has happened have started by providing solutions that were targeting this large informal base of the pyramid users and consumers of digital technologies. For instance, you can go to an African informal trader and pay without cash. I think there are huge opportunities instead of targeting that base of the pyramid. Also, we are facing a situation, for instance, where you look at the case of mobile money. Several years ago in Kenya, you found about 90% of the population without banking and the same percentage of people had access to mobile phones. Mobile money entered almost provided banking solutions to large portions of the population and almost without resistance of the banking industry because you are in a situation where there are less legacy systems and therefore provides huge opportunities to set up new mobility systems, energy solutions that bypass and leapfrog, in other words, what is happening in the rest of the world. Let me stop there. Thank you very much. Secretary Fadlalla, collaboration between different stakeholders is crucial for the success of cities and the global economy. How do you engage and involve both the public and the private sectors in your efforts to bolster the local economy of Mexico City and what strategies have you found effective in fostering innovation and entrepreneurship in the city? Yes. Well, first, Mexico City is a global city with investment for all over the world. Mexico City has connectivity, new infrastructure, strong financial services, the best universities, social and economical stability, and the mayor, Claudia Sheinbaum, wants to reduce inequality and environmental degradation. They want to give first the elemental human rights because we have a big inequality between the families and the towns in the interior of Mexico City. Education, health, safety, employment, transportation, housing. This is a strategy to reduce inequality and this is the first step we do for attraction of investment. We make a permanent networking between the academia, private sector and the government. Just one example. Since 2019, the start of this administration of Claudia Sheinbaum to March 2023, 73,100 of new business, low impact started operations and they make 700,000 new jobs and we give 111 million dollars of loans for small businesses and I think this is the way we choose to promote economic development in Mexico City and to reduce the inequality because this is the first challenge we must attend. Thank you very much, Secretary Fidlalla. Sonia, innovation is crucial in ensuring that we can harness growth potential of cities and this requires both public and private sector to cooperate. Please tell us about your experience in Ottawa. How do you ensure a successful public and private cooperation to advance this kind of urban innovation there? So it's a pleasure to be here. Ottawa is Canada's capital. I think it's very well recognized as the seat of the federal government. It's also a global tech hub and that's something that we are really, really excited to harness and apply in novel ways just to give a bit of context on our city. It's just a little over a million people, 1,800 tech companies and the highest tech talent concentration in all of North America ahead of Silicon Valley. So 11.6% of our global of our workforce actually works in the tech sector and about 88,000 people when you look across the public and the private sector. So there's a tremendous opportunity to harness that horsepower. In addition, it's a very educated workforce so about 61% of our workforce has a post-secondary degree. We have four post-secondary institutions and deep, deep decades of deep technology expertise, particularly in telecom, ICT, advanced networks and cybersecurity. So when you look across our ecosystem, which I believe is certainly very collaborative, it's thriving. We have a strong entrepreneurship sector. We have large multinationals that are large job creators. Shopify, of course, one of our best known companies. We as the Economic Development Agency wanted to find a way to create moonshots for our region that were really based on that collaborative public-private sector model and also delivered social, economic and environmental benefits to our region, to the companies we support, whether you're small start-ups, scale-up or a multinational, to contribute to Canada's well-being and to contribute something meaningful to the world. And so as an Economic Development Agency, one of the novel ways I think we employed private-public sector partnership was through ARIX.do. And that is our R&D complex for next-gen smart mobility, autonomy and connectivity. So we serve all of those different stakeholders from early-stage researchers and innovators right up to start-ups, scale-ups and multinationals in all the different sectors where those technologies enable innovation. And we do it in a way that's safe and secure, that enables the development, testing, validation, demonstration, and ultimately the adoption of those technologies. And what's novel about the fact that we have this tech sector and the seat of the federal government, we're able to bring together or mash up all of those audiences with regulators who are responsible to drive all of the legislation and the frameworks that will allow those technologies to be implemented safety, whether you're on the roads, intelligent transportation, whether you're leveraging our smart farm and accelerating solutions for long-term food safety and security, public safety, defense, there are so many applications and opportunities. And if I was to highlight one particular project where we had global, national, and local participation, it's our smart safe intersections project, which brought together startups, multinationals, Transport Canada, the World Economic Forum using their Safe Drive initiative in the University of Warwick's data safety pool. And so the opportunity for us to take this R&D complex, which was founded by all three levels of government, the city of Ottawa, the province of Ontario, government of Canada, with five multinationals, all of which have strong R&D capabilities and presence in our region, including Blackberry, QNX, a world leader and 200 million CURS worldwide, Nokia and Ericsson, leaders in 5G and Intelli Communications, of course, Accenture and Microsoft together with our post-secondary institutions. We've created something that's valued at about 51 million dollars, but I think the value is so much more significant. It's the opportunities to harness our strengths, bring something to bear for every single one of those stakeholders that adds value to them commercially, that adds value to our society and to our environment with the opportunity to reduce carbon emissions through the implementation of these technologies and of course sharing and taking in many learnings from around the world. So it's very exciting to me. Thank you very much Sonia. Your Excellency, Abu Dhabi is known for its efforts to diversify its economy. What strategies and initiatives has the Abu Dhabi Department of Economic Development implemented to attract investments and foster this kind of economic growth? And how did you have these strategies contributed to the city's overall development and resilience? Let me try to summarize that in three minutes. The establishment of the country was in 1970 and at that time the economy was very basic. So within time, thanks God, we had oil in our country. So we managed to use the resources of the oil to build the infrastructure of the country, of the city. Today, when we look at Abu Dhabi specifically, it is one of the most advanced and the structured worldwide. And now it takes us to a third phase of the development of the economy, which is having a vision to diversify our economy away from oil. As we took today, 51% of the economy in Abu Dhabi depends on oil, 49% depends on non-oil. And we have a very clear statement from the President of the United Arab Emirates. Arab Emirates, we need to celebrate the last barrel of oil. When we introduce that, we need to have a very strong, well-diversified economy. What does that mean to us? We put a strategy, a vision to have an economy, relies on three main things. One is the sustainable growth, two innovation, three knowledge-based economy. Based on that, all sectors related to non-oils are important. However, we believe there are six sectors. If we concentrate on the impact would be huge into the economy. These are financial services, ICT, agri-tech, industrial, bio and pharmaceutical, and I think the industrial. Now, let me dig down into the industrial. What we want from that? We believe that we have all the resources and the structures, rules, regulations to further develop our industrial sectors. We want by 2031 to have the GDP portion of Abu Dhabi and to the industrial to be increased by 100% reaching $46.8 billion. We want the export to reach $48.7 billion. That is an increase of 143%. We need to have 13,600 new jobs to that sector. And now, to get to there, what we want? We have allocated, invested $2.7 billion into this industrial sector. We believe from the history, from looking at the people that we have, we believe that we would reach. Now, it is not only industrial because you need to create ecosystems. So we are making the life for the investors, their families, their financial situations, their style of living all around this ecosystem that we are trying to develop. I think I'll stop and thank you. Thank you very much, Your Excellency. Mr. Maurizio, the CEO of FSI, what role do you believe that the private sector plays really in supporting growth and development within the cities? And how can this private sector really contribute to making cities more affordable and accessible for their residents? Thank you, Mr. Chairman. And thank you for the invitation. I think the role is critical and I will summarize it at the beginning and the end and then introduce very quickly FSI. The role is of the one that manages the projects that need to be started and supported by public. Public and private need to work together. But our experience, our research around the world on what are the failed attempt and the winning experiments, the winning experiments are the one where the private is actually leading the management of the project inside of the city with a very strong support, cooperation and many times start up through legislation, regulation and financial aid from the public. So that's the quick summary. FSI is the largest, one of the largest continental European institutionally led growth equity investor and we do make investment in healthcare and technology mainly. But we did get involved in a very large project in Milan which I think is very relevant to what we call the old part of Europe by connecting in those cities industrial location, industrial sites that have been abandoned and making them part of the future. So in a specific also looking at what has happened in France and in Germany and in Spain and maybe later on I would mention some other success project that we have seen and tried to copy from it. We have focused on a 30 actors project which is an old industrial site that at the time in the 1850 to 900 was collecting gas for the industrial companies. At this point has been abandoned. 30 actors inside of a very large dynamic and active city. So together with the various state regional and local entities we have devised the potential construction of a tech citadel which basically will draw from very important contribution from both the university, the Italian Milan Polytechnic, from entities there but at the same time from the contribution not just of money but of specific know how from very large corporates. Therefore around these 30 actors will be built and it has really been starting building the one of the largest wind galleries. There will be a sophisticated frontier optic center led by Luxotica. There will be a micro fab producing 200 millimeters chips inside of this site and on and on and on and this will become the venue which will be shared and divided in five blocks of more than 5,000 youngsters that will be leaving there and trying to produce their dreams through building new towns such as in a similar way to what was described by the colleague from Canada from Ottawa. And the key to this project is really linking what was in the past. Therefore the architect will not destroy the old buildings, will not destroy the old big containers of gas of the past. Those actually will become the icon for the future clearly in a sustainable way but nothing will be destroyed. And out of the five pillars that will be built yes there will be a very important pillar where the startups will be leaving through their ideas, building companies, destroying companies, failing and resuscitating there will also be a place of exchange for corporates more than 40 homes for corporates or houses but at the same time and as important there will be three other blocks which would be a residential place where people could leave inside of the citadel and not move in and move out. There will be the largest food court in Europe with cuisines and small courts from all over Mediterranean cuisine therefore again an aggregation and an inclusion place for people that come from inside of Italy but more of all from people that will come from outside of Italy and then finally a very large outside sports center again in this new way of putting together all these which I think COVID has left us. It's a very large project 500 million euro but again money we are seeing it around the globe I think on this project is not the issue. I don't want to say that this is trivial to find the money but the issue is really execution therefore I will leave it where I started. We need the cooperation without selfishness from all the various public institutions and private institutions but at the same time we need a clear private management execution of the plan because I would put you into a very interesting book of Josh Lerner which is called the Boulevard of Broken Dreams. It's for everybody to think a very interesting read to be to be done. Many projects have failed not because of the purpose they failed because of the execution of this PPP purpose. We'll leave it there maybe for later for some of the other examples. Thank you very much. Just to remind the audience we will be taking questions from the audience but first I wanted to ask more of a general question to everyone. We discussed as you said COVID-19 which was a huge effect had a huge effect on cities where people just essentially migrated to remote areas and they had left with huge office buildings empty and then as we come out of COVID these office buildings remained empty and continue to be remaining empty in some cities so I wanted to this basically highlighted the importance of digital connectivity and the digital economy so perhaps we can start with you your excellency. How can cities leverage technology and digital innovation to drive economic growth and enhance accessibility for all residents including those in far away areas? We have a very interesting story in Abu Dhabi related to the COVID and the technology. We were asked over the weekend to close down our offices shops to be closed everything to be closed immediately we had to run next week our students has to go to classes we had to provide our services to our stakeholders our wives mothers has to buy foods and groceries from the shops immediately found out that the due to the strong infrastructure by the way we are the first country in terms of the fiber optic the first city in the world so immediately we shifted our services from face to face services into electronically so the shops were not closed we had like hotels we had places for weddings we converted that into either medical care or into storage for the groceries to go to these shops when it came to school next day all our kids were getting the classes from through the phones when it came to groceries we were able to buy we had the mindset the ability to shift immediately so I found out we shifted into buying our goods and services electronically again we used the taxis to ship the products to the homes and next day the purchasing power was increased these services this is what is interesting we said you know what let's provide our services into the website the normal website very soon within a few weeks we were able to convert that into smart applications we loved them so much we said no let's make them smart so we had as a DED for example we have introduced with the cooperation of the government of Abu Dhabi 700 services you could get them today through smart applications you don't need to leave your chairs then we said you know what time is very crucial we pushed that down to six minutes we are asked by the president all the services that we provide the 611 to be provided to the stakeholders to be accomplished within six minutes it is done today all those services are within six minutes now we have technology we have efficiencies we have reduced the cost of issuing a trade license to 1000 dirham it is almost 300 360 dollars so you could open a shop today in Abu Dhabi get a license within 360 dollars the documentation we have reduced this documentation by 75 percent why because again everything in the database everything are available so you don't need to all what you need to do just put your finger and to the screen and everything are available and what's next now we're going to the journey going back to our restaurant it is not getting a license you need to start a journey get a license open the shops get laborers do the tax now we are into the journeys we really hope we're going to sit again and within those six minutes we finish those journeys thank you thank you and dr. kramer mulley who also highlighted mobile paying within africa is there any other initiatives that are including digital including digitalization of certain services yes so as i mentioned there are there are huge opportunities in integrating the small players many of whom are informal businesses in this whole story about resilience and inclusive cities during the pandemic there were many examples of for instance informal traders where some of the most affected because of the lack of mobility and and the lockdowns and so on and and they are great examples of e-commerce platforms that were created to to allow informal businesses and small players of all types to to still continue and expand even the the markets so so there are great initiatives and many of them involve several actors not large players there's there's the jumea example there's a that that provides an online platform for for informal traders to also access markets but there are other initiatives where large businesses government and in some cases NGO sort of partner together in in in providing solutions for the small players and i think those are really i mean some of the some of these informal businesses and small businesses um have are highly innovative and they have a deep understanding of social needs and the social and the demand but they have lack of access to technology to finance to train in and skills and so i think focusing on that and exploiting the opportunities that exist in that in in that vast resource really in the in the african continent i think is really something to take into account thank you very much sonia i wanted to ask you about infrastructure development within Ottawa what strategies have been employed by the city the city in order to make sure that there's affordable and accessible infrastructure for its residents so when i think about area x.o and the opportunity to harness all of the technology capabilities the deep expertise all three levels of government coming together the r&d complex that we've created has really democratized in my opinion the opportunity for many different types of companies innovators researchers to come to this facility and access technologies and opportunities that would have typically been far beyond their reach so the type of capabilities we have in terms of next generation 5g delivered directly by ericsson and okia before they even hit the market that adds tremendous advantage and opportunity to founders that are looking to test and validate their different technologies whether for smart cities and you see those types of implementations moving forward across the city of Ottawa and the learnings that we're sharing with the world as a as an incredible opportunity that leverages i think that that infrastructure certainly when i think about how our city responded to the pandemic one area of opportunity was of course the opportunity to support the main street businesses that had been shuttered as you've heard from some of my colleagues on the panel the governments came together with invest Ottawa we were privileged to deliver something called the digital main street program that enabled all of those businesses that had been shuttered to get online many of which were bricks and mortar family-based had never even thought about something like social media or the opportunity to launch an e-commerce store so we came together with a lot of funding and literally in two weeks time businesses were able to launch that online store continue generating revenue at a time when they would otherwise have been shuttered to keep people employed to keep those jobs moving to keep services flowing to the community so that's another way we took advantage of the fact that Shopify which of course is a company that has emerged out of Ottawa very proud of that headquartered in our city together with a host of other different technologies being developed in Ottawa serving those innovators and founders and a particularly passionate I leader women founders and owner strategy inequity was the shining north star that was driving us equitable economic development is absolutely critical and the pandemic exposed the deep systemic barriers in a far greater way than I think we had certainly seen and so we wanted to meet women and marginalized founders where they were at to take advantage of that infrastructure whether you are a smart mobility innovator or whether you were a small business or a technology entrepreneur how could we pivot and provide access to the programs to the services to the funding and the infrastructure to keep going we saw drones delivering medicines and vaccines and supplies to communities that were rural that could otherwise not have accessed them as quickly we saw some mobile transportation opportunities we hosted the first on-road pilot of a low-speed automated shuttle in the province of Ontario during the pandemic so it was an opportunity to test safety protocols and determine how we could increase mobility during some of these types of challenging times so that we're prepared better for the next crisis I think there's a lot of ways to leverage that type of infrastructure thank you very much for that Secretary Fadlala would you care to to elaborate on that and add your own opinion on the subject yes well Mexico City has nine million persons and with the metropolitan area 23 million persons the Mexico City government is investing in hospitals new universities schools water systems green spaces new mobility like two cable car transport system in the the orient part of Mexico City and an aggregate program for electromobility in this part of the city the Mexico City government developed the Bayejo e program to recover the industrial vocation for Mexico City we want to support the Bayejo center to meet private sector academia and government we hope in this place develop collaborative innovative and sustainable projects to benefit all the industries in Mexico City and in the counties around we want to take advantage for nearshoring we receive only in this administration eight hundred million dollars only for the Bayejo zone and we are working for reduce the inequality between the people the families and the enterprise thank you thank you very much and I'd like to open up to the audience do we have any questions coming in hi good morning working my name is Abselam Ali from United Arab Emirates I'm based here in Geneva and I do the present you a in a war trade organization what a great session what a great panelist from different part of the world and different backgrounds and countries as well I've seen a lot of trade policy reviews at the WTO from different countries a lot of african continents as well canada ui and others as well the trade now is not like the trade like today gets back right a lot of challenges and two different sectors and through different strategies as well now my question is how would how would you see the capitalizing or leveraging the new cities whether it is develop or developing or the LDCs with the new initiatives coming up on the new sectors such as AI artificial intelligence and the new digital digital economies and also the new industries as well and I know what my country have done but I'd like to hear a lot of theories and successful stories from the others as well thank you um Maurizio sure um I think it's uh it's a wonderful new situation that is being created and again points down to execution I would make one I like to make concrete examples I chair a chip company uh and this chip company produces all around the world I think you will have a combination of two effects to your question large cities will drive major investments in certain areas such as numeric uh there will be mega centers in which inside of the last cities there will be this numeric digital quality AI uh development at the same time we have people around the world that are working from home in those very fine frontier companies and we have people that have been poached in very remote parts of Europe such as Sicily from companies that are based in the Netherlands think about how beautiful is this situation for our children and grandchildren therefore it will be again down to creating a very agile system based on which people in a very intangible way can move resources the one that will be heavily penalized are going to be the one that will be bureaucratic again I think I'm taking to a couple of comments that were made from the friends from Abu Dhabi and from Mexico this is not the time anymore where you need to stamp stamp and stamp to produce a company or to free up resources for work because people will not listen to you but as long as you can implement this word of very flexible resources resources coming and moving I think if you can give people our young good education and good life in terms of quality of life countries that wear a disadvantage in the past could be at equal footing or maybe even at the equal advantage in the future and this is I was listening yesterday to some of the very interesting sessions in the morning this is a humongous opportunity for the southern part of the globe again will be up to the leaderships to implement it because I don't think there will be mercy for lack of implementation that's my view thank you does anyone else want I think we're really excited about the opportunity to collaborate in very novel in different ways so as a city of a million people we look at our strengths we are looking at what type of contribution we can make and how we harness those strengths and put them together with broader networks so we collaborate with a series of networks in Ontario dedicated to connected and autonomous vehicles and smart mobility were connected into a national network of technology incubators and accelerators and we're connected to many international partners through the world economic forum and many other networks and so we're looking at how we can take these novel strengths couple them and combine them multi-sector multidisciplinary opportunities for innovation that give opportunities to our entrepreneurs and companies allow us to attract foreign direct investment into our region that's what our global expansion team is dedicated to and then harness all of that horsepower back and hopefully make contributions and create market opportunity not just for our founders but for opportunities with others that we're collaborating with and the chance to tackle big societal problems that that no one individual team company country can solve on their own so to us that's that's what is most exciting about some of the developments we've undertaken at Eric Stotto with the multinationals with the forum and so many other collaborators thank you very good comment thanks so much for the for the question they are the issues around trade are very very very topical in the african continent you know the african continental free trade agreement free trade area that that has been recently established as a major institutional development that is oriented towards building african markets and increasing intraragional trade but also trade with the rest of the world so it's you know it's really in the hot spot of the discussions when you look at the the centers where you know you look at Nairobi and the digital based services that are that are emerging the digital savannah you know you see Legos and Johannesburg and this big big sort of haps of digital innovation and how that is going to affect trade in services across the continent I think it's a very interesting area and again you know the issue of we are a critical time when we have to be creative and very proactive in thinking about regulation the types of regulation that we need to for instance manage things like online payments and things like that which is still not in place but I think this these issues have to be at the center of their regulation agenda thank you secretary for the would you like to add something yes well we have a challenge in Mexico City about small businesses to incorporate the system of a sale with digital economy we are working with a lot of fintech to digitize the public market the public markets the small business to accept payments credit card cure codes debit cards and Mexico City is in craze every year the the purchase in e-commerce and the challenge the challenge is we don't accept that the small business cannot sell by this way because they get out of the market and this is a new challenge we have and we are working to reduce the the small business with big business and the medium business and this is now the challenge we have and we are working with a lot of the fintech services to reduce this this question and the other question is the inclusion between the 16 towns have Mexico City we have one zone in the in the west is with a lot of infrastructure and in the east with a low infrastructure we are working to construction a new infrastructure like mobility a new ways transportation schools hospitals to have like a new systems to give opportunity of all the people to increase their their jobs their salary and other questions and other questions to make a level the level of the of the of the life is very high thank you thank you very much I realize we are running out of time so I just wanted to wrap up the conversation by asking all of our panelists a question apart from your own city what are success what is a successful city model that you you look up to we'll start off with you well I will I'll keep I'll keep in the African continent I think there are great examples of of cities that are that are fast moving fast changing and really adapting to particularly driven by the youth as I mentioned you know the African continent is the youngest continent and and and I think this is very much driven so we look at when we look at Nairobi at and we look at Cairo we look at what is happening in Lagos and in Johannesburg there is there is a release of this very sophisticated but in a way islands of excellence so I think what we need to strive for is to create cities of excellence that connect these these key players in those cities with the with the vast majority of smaller players thank you Mauricio two very different ones again to the question of our friend in the second row Estonia is an example of a city without being physical it's all digital the second one is the one that we're trying to draw which is much more of an old continental economic city which is la station Freisson e which is station f in Paris which has really turned and made a revolution out of French tech French tech would not be there without station f and station f is a wonderful cooperation between various states entity in France and this phenomenal entrepreneur who is called Xavier Nio was really made in flourish and then one very quick last comment I would caution on a couple of things as we talked about this these things is data data can get in trouble our friend from Ottawa can tell us about Google and Toronto and then profit we need to be very careful in telling if we want to make profit into these initiatives or if this is philanthropic because the public opinion will have zero tolerance on those two issues thank you very much your excellency I really would like to say Abu Dhabi again we ask investors every once in a while why Abu Dhabi you're coming Abu Dhabi what's in Abu Dhabi first of all for the investors rules regulations in the last two years more than a hundred radical laws were introduced rules regulations protecting the investors two investors come they want capital they have different channels of getting the capital three the infrastructure today Abu Dhabi is doing business in 2022 right number nine three the life of living today you live in Abu Dhabi you bring your family your kids we have the best schools best environments best buildings best it makes the life of the businessman with his family happier connectivity we are at the point where 80 percent of the world population could be reached within five hours through the airplane and you have good relationships because when you make a business you want to create a chair you want to develop it you want to have an R&D today we have different incubators for the innovators today we have taxis arriving driving in Abu Dhabi without a driver those robotic delivery it's already introduced last week so it is a place a green field for any businessman innovators export wants to expand I really see Abu Dhabi is a good paradise but apart from Abu Dhabi apart from the city that you're from which would what is another city that's I'll go to Dubai Sonia I'm going to share an opportunity that I think a lot of cities are beginning to reap the value of to me it's if you can create a powerful bold shared vision something that's purpose driven where you know everyone rallies around that goal but acquires a different benefit an opportunity something that adds value to the individual to the region to the city to the different stakeholders and also makes a contribution to the world I think that's a model that's very powerful something that's founded on a triple bottom line not simply commercial opportunity something that's focused on equity and inclusion where we're equipping everyone to fulfill their passion where we're creating jobs of the future and empowering talent that allows everyone to rise so that we can solve those big societal problems I'm seeing it with many cities that are gathered here today at the growth summit certainly I put Ottawa in that camp and I think that we can be leaders and really have a major impact on the world and on future generations to come if we look at that big bold vision where everyone has a win and it's triple bottom line and it's equitable thank you and finally secretary Fadlada well on one experience of success we proud about Mexico City has become the most connected city in the world with 30 000 free wi-fi spots across the city now holding the world business record as the most connected city in the world and what about another city that you find as a success what other city well we another city we found the Otawa another city is like Tokyo or I don't remember even in Latin America Sao Paulo all very very good answers and with that I'd like to wrap up this extremely insightful panel I wanted to remind the audience and those watching at home to please come up with the initiatives remember the cities that you're living in you can also reach out to the World Economic Forum and reach out to any of our panelists here if you may thank you very much to each and every one of you for your insightful comments and thank you all for tuning in