 Welcome to WISIS 2016 in Geneva, Switzerland. I'm very pleased to be joined today by the Honourable Etienne Sine-Tambou, who is Minister for Technology, Communication and Innovation for the Republic of Mauritius. Minister, thank you very much for being with us today. Thank you to have me on the television. Now, it's the first day of WISIS 2016. I'd like to talk to you a little bit about your own personal situation. You are Minister for Technology, Communication and Innovation. I know that you were actually Minister for ICT 10 years ago. You must have seen a lot of changes since then. I wanted to perhaps ask you whether you could tell us a little bit about those. Yes, that's correct. Well, first of all, I attended the first WISIS Summit in Tunisia in 2005. And one very important thing is that 10 years ago I was Minister of ICT. This time I am Minister of Technology, Communication and Innovation. And that is far wider. And I think this pays tribute to the fact that ICT is not only an enabler, it is now also an industry by itself. I think that is one of the major shifts I have seen. The other shift I have seen is the extent of the development of ICTs, at least in my country. When I first became Minister, the Mauritian government wanted to make of ICT the fifth pillar of the Mauritian economy. And already, three and a half years later, it had become the third pillar of the economy. And today, the ICT sector contributes 6.4% of the Mauritian GDP, just out of the financial sector and the tourism sector. So there has been a lot of developments, I would say. And in the Republic of Mauritius, how have ICTs changed the climate? How have ICTs made an impact there? Well drastically, let me give you just one example. When I became Minister first time, the former Minister, and that is politics, you are always trying to prove that you are better than the other. And he was saying that there were five e-services in the country so to prove him wrong, I said OK, if he's got five, well this year we'll have 50. And so the number of e-services in the country, for example, has increased. The use of ICTs, I'll give you an example. Very often, people who are at a disadvantage, let's say the unemployed, the disabled, you have people who are socially and economically disadvantaged who don't have access to ICTs. And I set up something called the public internet access points. Because apart from the Ministry of ICT, I was also the Minister for Postal Services. And if there's one thing you have in virtually every town and village, it's a post office. And what we did was to equip each of those post offices with pieces, printers and now broadband internet. And ten years later, when I become Minister again of that sector, I realized the equipment has not been updated. So I just got Cabinet last month to approve the updating of that particular scheme and we'll be equipping again each post office with those public internet access points. And what makes it a very loadable thing is that it is free for senior citizens, unemployed people, disabled people and widows and orphans. So it's about a fifth of the motion population which gets it free of charge from post offices. And of course, I see that the title innovation is in your job title now. Is that really helping? Is that what's striving to very much bridge the digital divide? Well, innovation in itself may not be the primary source for bridging the digital divide. But what it does, it comes at the higher level of the equation. To give an example, to me when I speak about innovation, it's about the internet of things. Now you are speaking of a higher level with innovation. For example, we are launching in a few months what we have called the National Innovation Framework. So that's much more at the higher level of the segment, but at the lower level we are also looking at different angles. Very briefly, just to wrap up, you said you were at WISIS in 2005. Just really wanted to ask you, why is WISIS important? You're here again. Why is WISIS important? Why is this an important event for you? Well, because it allows societies to improve their fate. It allows countries to develop. I mean, I was just hearing one of the professors from Oxford saying that there is a need to have transfer of technology from the more advanced countries to the less advanced countries because the least advanced countries actually don't have the human resources nor the financial resources. So WISIS from that perspective is not only very important, it's most important. Minister, thank you very much for being with us today. I thank you very much. And thank you very much for watching. You can watch a number of these videos on the IT YouTube channel. And please follow us also on social media and keep us posted. Thank you very much indeed. Thank you. Thank you.