 Welcome to PP18, the Plenipotentiary Conference of ITU in Dubai in the United Arab Emirates where I'm very pleased to be joining the studio today by Muhammad Ibrahim, who is the head of Nideo. Muhammad, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Good to see you again. Yes, it's been a long time. Yes. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about what Nideo is because you've changed roles a few times since we last met, so perhaps you could just explain a little bit about what you do. Well, Nideo is actually not a government agency, we own the private sector side, so we're trying to help the country to understand about the new digital economy, but all this mobile money, cryptocurrency, blockchain, that kind of technologies. So it's one way of raising awareness, but also works with the Internet Society. So I was the founder of the Internet Society chapter in Somalia. So between the two, we're trying to raise awareness about this new digital economy. Now there's considerable attention being placed on harnessing the power of information and communication technologies of power for good. I wanted to find out what's your personal perspective on this? Well, as we talked about this, I think this is the third time over the last 30 years, I'm still excited about the technology, but really my focus now has shifted more towards what the technology can do to make the world a better place rather than my younger days when I was more interested in the bits and bytes. So as I guess we grow older, we want to see what can technology do, what can it deliver in terms of citizen, in terms of government, in terms of education, all those areas. So that's where my focus is now it is. Now PP18 is the first planning potential conference since the world agreed on the sustainable development goals. I wanted to ask, what's Somalia doing in terms of trying to achieve those sustainable development goals? Well, the government through its ministry, they're doing a lot of hard work. Somalia came a long way, we're more or less on a fast track to be part of these SDGs. But I have a personal view on this. I think we talked about this in Guadalajara and then in Busan and now in Dubai. The issue with the UN SDGs, I'm sure we all remember, we went through the previous millennium goals. So you could be cynical. You could say we had seven million development goals. Whatever the outcome, now we have 17. So the academic in me and books people will probably say, if you couldn't do seven, how do we do 17? But we have to be realistic. I think it's doable. I think it's measurable. I think it's more focused and I'm very optimistic it can be done. Now I know you're not in the government anymore, but I wanted to ask you, what is Somalia doing in terms of getting everyone connected? About half the world's population are now connected, but half aren't. So I just really wanted to find out what's happening in Somalia to try and redress that situation. The Somali government is doing hard work in Syria through its ministry, through its ICT industry. A tremendous amount of work is happening. I'm very excited. I met some of the folks back home in Dubai. So a lot of work is going on. But there was always a secret about Somalia that we were well connected. Although we went through 20 years of challenges, nevertheless technology-wise we were fine. And we are way ahead in terms of the developing countries when it comes to the connected. Of course we want to do more. We want to move forward. We can't sit and wait because the world is moving faster. But nevertheless that's an area I think we can claim we are a little bit ahead. Finally, this is a good opportunity to give a message to the participants here at PPAT but also our wide audience. I wondered if you have anything special that you'd like to convey? Well I guess to me this is kind of historical. I remember we talked about this about 12 years ago, we were in Guadalajara and Busan and now we're in Dubai. There is some continuity. We are moving forward. There's no argument about this. Technology is moving forward and there's a lot of progress made. But I'm always interested in the outcome. What do we achieve? The ITU, 150 years old, huge institution, older than even the UN itself. But there are a lot of questions still I want to get answered. And some of them are, we went through these meetings. They're huge, three weeks, that's a long time. But at the end of the day though, we want something measurable. We can say, yes, we spent three weeks here but this is what we achieved. It's not all negative. There's a lot of good things happening. The ITU, 193 members, 700 institutions, huge institution. So I feel happy that with all that structure, the ITU can still deliver without ever voting. It's always consensus. So I think I take my head off to see a team that can actually do this. So with that positive note, I really want to say, look, Brenner potentially this year is a fantastic way forward. Well, thanks for delivering yourself to the studio this morning. It's been a pleasure seeing you again and we hope to catch up with you again in the future. And look forward to the rest of this P.P. and very much as I say, and catching up with you again and hearing some more news about Somali. Thank you very much. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Thank you very much. Excellent. Thank you.