 We're here at ITU Telecom World 2015 in Budapest, Hungary, and I'm very pleased to be joined by Helani Galpaya, who is CEO of LearnAge. Helani, thanks so much for being with us today. Now the theme of ITU Telecom World 2015 is accelerating innovation for social impact. I wanted to ask you, how do you see innovation directly impacting on socioeconomic development? So if you look at the ICT sector, particularly telecoms, the innovations in that sector have really helped people's lives to get better, and so that has direct social impact. And the simple thing of rolling out telecom networks in a manner that makes services affordable to people. As it has done through the budget telecom business model, where operators are making money and people are consuming, spending around $3 to $5 a day, and this business model works. That, our systematic research shows, has been the biggest impact, simply rolling out the networks, has had a huge positive livelihood impact on people. Then, of course, this then allows other types of innovations, be it in agriculture markets, for information to work better and farmers to be integrated into international value chains, to help people warn about disasters, because now they all have mobile phones for small businesses to operate more efficiently and reach bigger markets. Innovations in the way we study are things that change the way a small business or a person does things. If they were doing things in one way, an innovation is simply a different way, and a better way, and a more efficient way of doing it. And ICTs have a track record of helping that, and will continue to have more impact. Tell us a little bit about the work of LearnAsia. What do you mainly focus on? We are a think tank. Our tagline is that we are pro-poor and pro-market. So, we do a lot of research on how people, particularly poor people in emerging Asia, consume hard infrastructure, so ICT, telecom, roads, electricity. What are the barriers? How can business models work so that they can consume these things and make their lives better? The end is economic development for these people, but we want to, where possible, find market solutions. So, we do a lot of research, and we try to get it in front of decision makers, which means the CEOs of service providers, it might mean regulators, policymakers, it might mean other civil society organizations, to be a research-based organization. And how do you think that the government and industry, what measures do you think they can take to encourage entrepreneurship and foster the growth of SMEs in the ICT sector? So, we have done work in South Asia on micro-entrepreneurs, which are the really smallest entrepreneurs, really, often self-employed or employing up under nine full-time employees. And we have focused on poor micro-entrepreneurs, you know, not the very rich person who works from home and may have two other consultants. So, the poor, bottom of the pyramid, micro-entrepreneurs. And we have looked at some types of problems they have. For example, registering their business, accessing finance, consuming electricity or the government services. And here, we see, obviously, a situation where ICTs can help, but other reforms are necessary. So, a big barrier is registering a business, because there really is no benefit if you formalize your business. In fact, many say, if I formalize, I have to pay taxes. So, why? I don't get any benefit. On the other hand, they don't have access to finance. Formal forms of finance, because they are not formal. So, then they end up paying much higher interest rates through informal means. So, there really is a trade-off to be made. In registering a business, the government has to make it easy for companies to formalize or micro-entrepreneurs to formalize. And we saw examples in Bangladesh where it is done. It is quite simple. You go fill a form, and it's done quite routinely. Whereas, we saw for micro-entrepreneurs in India, the barriers are huge, because you have to file a huge amount of forms and documents in the same way as a huge Fortune 500 Indian company has to fill. And a micro-entrepreneur cannot meet this documentary burden. So, government has to make things easier and treat entrepreneurs of different sizes differently. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about the phenomenon of zero-rated internet content and what role it plays, if any, in connecting the unconnected. Yes, so this is a topic of very heated debate in a lot of Asian countries. So, in Asia, and like most countries in Africa and Latin America, we consume broadband or narrow-band internet on a metered basis. That means we pay a certain amount and we get a bucket of, you know, five gigs of data a month or one gig a week and so on. And so it's prepaid, and when that bucket finishes, we need to buy more. So, there's a cap on how much you can download and upload. Zero rating means certain types of content doesn't count towards the cap. So, this is obviously an interesting strategy that the telecom operators and the content providers get together and do. So, a very common one to see is Facebook providing a text-only version of Facebook free through a particular network operator. If you click on the videos or pictures or go outside of Facebook, you pay the normal rates, but otherwise you get to consume Facebook, often unlimited Facebook, for free. Facebook is not the only one. You can zero-rate streaming music services. You can make free available certain pictures, videos. So, you put something inside that free vault garden, as we used to say in the old telecom language, and it's free. And the idea is that many of our countries have under 20% internet penetration in Asia. And a lot of times when we do our national surveys, why are you not using the internet? It used to be that people didn't know about it. Now in the new surveys, they say, I don't see the need to. So, giving something free, we think may have the effect of getting people sort of used to browsing, making them aware of that world on the internet. However, the challenge, obviously, is that it might only be what's free that they consume. We don't know. There isn't enough evidence that this is a problem, but it could be. And that would be, in a way, a little sad, because you want people to go beyond whatever that free content and explore the vast possibilities of the internet. So that's exactly why this is a huge debate in the net neutrality community. Some people thinking access will increase because of zero rating. Others say yes, but we don't want that kind of access. So, in essence, the debate will be different in developing countries as opposed to America and Europe. And what do you think you should be done? So, I mean, this really, this debate started in America, and it was highlighted a few years ago, when the content where the telecom operator or the ISP and the content provider didn't have an agreement with was being throttled and slowed down while other things were fast. So fast lanes and slow lanes on the internet superhighway as it were. However, competition can be a partial solution because in America, most people often have three broadband providers, their mobile phone, their cable provider and the ADSL line. In many Asian markets, we have six mobile operators alone or sometimes even more. We often have a fixed operator. We may have YMAX. So, if you don't like what your ISP is giving, you could switch. So it's less of a problem if you have enough competition. So I think we need to really study this and not take the solutions that America did or some other country did. Finally, we're here at ITU Telecom World 2015. I wanted to ask you, what's the value of attending events such as this event? Traditionally, you know, the ITU has been where the regulators converge for events like this. I know the ITU is now trying to expand into sort of the SME and innovation sector. These are all areas that Learn Asia works in or has worked in in the past. So really it has been, I would say, sort of, you know, apart from the regulators in my region and the CEOs of service providers, reaching to a slightly larger audience is part of the mission because you do want to get the message across. A lot of the problems in Asia are not uncommon in Africa or Latin America. So we see this as a place where we could possibly reach out to a slightly larger audience, get our research disseminated, network a little bit, although you tend to see the same faces year after year. There's definitely a lot of people returning every year, but I think you're quite right. There's certainly ideas change and the conversations evolve and hopefully this year will be, you know, will be more interesting than the next and so forth. Hello. Thank you very much indeed for being with us in the studio today and I wish you all the very best with your research and with everything else that you're doing. Thank you very much. Thank you.