 Dr Chesob Lee, director of telecommunication and standardisation bureau at ITU. Dr Sharad Sapura, director of the global innovation centre at UNICEF. Mrs Cornelia Richter, from GIZ. Dr Jim Poisant and Mrs Helen E. Gelfire from Linn Asia. Come on up. Everybody here? No. Thank you. Ah, waiting for a microphone. Lovely. Great. Okay. Well, if everybody's got their glass of water, they're all set and ready to go. Let's begin the discussion, I think, with Dr Chesob Lee. We need to talk about 5G, the internet of things. What do you think is the potential there in terms of developing this real idea of social impact? Do you think they could really make a difference? Or are we aiming too high? Or should we be going for something else instead? Can you hear me? I guess. Now, ITU, I have a responsibility in the TSB. It's a technical standard development. One of our key subject is 5G, as we said, internet of things, virtualisation, softwareisation. All this is our technology subject. At this moment, I want to say is, think about the scope of our infrastructure. We develop technology to implement our infrastructures. 5G will provide you at least one gigabit of such superband, I want to call it superband, to every people through your mobile phone. There is a very big challenge of this. Extend our capacities to get out of this connectivity, but also with connecting with IoT, extend our infrastructures to your life itself. It's a huge difference of changing our infrastructure. Through this, I believe with 5G and IoT, our life itself, is more than the connecting things. Our life is connected, so we will move forward to the connected life. This is a very big impact on our technical development, but not so much far as coming to very near soon. What do you think, when you say very soon, what do you think is the break at the moment? What is standing in the way of the acceleration of that process? That process is now at least for example the 5G we had today. One of the first sessions was 5G pavement of this 5G road. It discussed whether we have some informed some of Asian countries like Korea. They want to show this 5G at year 2018 for the Winter Olympic Games, which means January or February, not December. Japan announced the year 2020 for the commercial service of this 5G. That kind of movement is quite important for us. Even in relation to this, now most of the industry is very keen to develop IoT, so-called Internet of Things. This is another force to develop such extension of our infrastructures. I'm only from the technical side and the market side. I'd like to bring in Dr Supra. Do you actually think that we're in the right direction trying to go for those kinds of amazing whizbang technologies like 5G? What's the point of view from your side? We focus our work largely on areas of disparity and areas where the population living in remote places, etc. Our idea is that while such technologies come there, in some cases they won't reach because it doesn't make business sense, how can we create bridging technologies that would allow people who don't have access to 3G even or 4G or 5G to have the experience which might be similar to those who have access to that? How do you create enough opportunities so that it starts making business sense for business houses to actually invest in this? Right now, just with one tool, we have 1.7 million users in 15 countries, totally in remote areas where there's only 2G available, and they're increasing at the rate of about between 6,000 to 8,000 a day without any promotion word of mouth because they just see the value of it. The interesting thing is that in many of those areas, the operators, and these are mostly in Africa, have actually started putting infrastructure to provide 3G and other things, so it works both ways. There's a business case for it then? Yes, absolutely. Jim, let's bring in you. We are talking about SMEs here an awful lot. Do you think we should be talking about SMEs at this event today when we're talking about accelerating towards these goals of improving social impact and things? Do you think we're going in the right direction? Should we be talking about SMEs? Should we be talking about something else? I think there are two different subjects here, but I think when you're looking at social impact and SMEs, I'd like to look at it this way. Maybe this will help describe the situation as I see it from a personal perspective. When you look out across the globe, you find that if you look at the evolution of technology, the basic killers are already there. In other words, you have operating systems, a couple of those. You have those killer applications that are out there. What you find now is you find an inversion of applications that are occurring on the ground by young people, in some cases not so young people, but they're doing it and most of them are having social impact. If you look throughout Africa, for example, there's a tremendous amount, hundreds of thousands of applications that are coming out to help farmers and nurses in villages and things like that. It's interesting to see that the topic being SMEs and social impact is happening naturally. It's happening naturally. I think we have a tendency to look at SMEs and think of the next Bill Gates. We need to stop doing that. We need to look and empower those folks that are doing it on the ground that are helping people on a day-to-day basis. The social impact is happening. It is really happening. The challenge is to make sure that the good news about these social impact applications are getting out so that other people can replicate them on a global scale. That would be one view. If you divorce innovation for a moment and take SMEs, from an industry perspective, I represent about 90% of all the ICT companies around the globe. What do they need in order to innovate? There are some basic requirements in which the folks in this room are very, very involved in, making sure that there's enabling regulations that allow these SMEs to develop and to grow, making sure that countries invite investment by having a non-corrupt situation in their countries, because nobody is going to invest in a country that doesn't trust. The regulations are important. The financing and the partnerships are very important. Once you find that environment, then you find a nurturing and very rapid growth within those countries. I think you've got those two different topics. Heleni, what's your reaction to that? How do you feel about that? I agree that not every entrepreneur is going to go be the next Bill Gates. We study micro-entrepreneurs in South Asia, and they just want to have a normal life and have a decent income, so livelihood impact. They don't want to be in debt. They don't want to be in legal trouble. They want to be able to withstand financial weather health shocks that all people have, all of us, but poor people are particularly unable to withstand, because they're very asset poor. And connectivity has a role to play in this. The research is very clear that the biggest thing you can do is to give people a phone, be it for calling or internet connectivity, because once you do that, even without anything else, they self-coordinate, they check market prices, they call up their suppliers, they reach bigger markets, so for SMEs. So even without anything else, the access and the usage gap has to be bridged, and you'll see huge impact, and that evidence is pretty systematic and generalisable. So in that sense I'm agreeing, and that has to do a lot with regulations, market certainties and all of that. But the barriers faced certainly by micro-entrepreneurs and poor micro-entrepreneurs in South Asia and Southeast Asia have a lot to do with finances and uncertain regulation and disincentives to formalise, because the taxation is so heavy if they don't register, you cannot pay taxes, you pay bribes, so there are other things other than just the ICTs and connectivity, which have to come together really. How do you get phones into their hands though? If phones is the key, how do you make that happen? Get more phones out, they're more deployment as it were. So you do it through encouraged investment. Investment is what gets people connected. For investment, people want a return. You give regulatory certainty. Your country has to have an investment-friendly climate. However, those are all necessary conditions. That's not enough, because you could have investment and still have a monopoly. So after the regulatory actions, you need to make sure there's enough competition in the market so that the prices are actually affordable to people, because there's no point in having a great monopoly supplier. You really want differentiated service. That's a factor of competition, so all of this has to do with regulation, really. Step back and let private investment come in, because it can do a lot. Use your money for improving your governance structures, making registration for SMEs easy. All of that the government can do, because that services cannot be privately provisioned, like registering a business or paying your tax. ICTs getting people's hands on a phone can be privately provisioned, so just facilitate that, that's how you do it. Cornelia, tell us a little bit about your organisation and actually what you're doing, and then give your reaction to what's been said here. I'm representing GICEP, which is the Implementing Agency for Technical Assistance in Germany. We are working in 130 countries in all sectors, from health to private sector promotion, governance, energy, climate change, all social sectors. The main focus of our core competence is capacity development. When it comes to the topics we are here for, we have a particular perception, and we see that ICT plays a very important role as an enabler in all these social processes. It's not a mean in itself for us, so we do have a look where can we get in touch with social agents, change agents in the respective countries, and there is an abundance of creativity in almost all countries. Can you hear me? Sorry. And we are liaising up with innovation hubs. We are supporting innovation hubs in Africa, in Asia, in Latin America, and we are bringing these people together in Germany, in international conferences, in trying to exchange their ideas. And when you are mentioning the social impact of small and medium scale enterprises, our experience is that SMEs are not a guarantee in itself for creating social impact. Because social impact only is relevant if it creates a scaling up effect. And scaling up effects do not just happen. Insofar, I slightly disagree with you, Jim, because social impact is not something which easily happens. It has to be systematically conceptualised from the very beginning. It has to be accompanied in order to create quality, and it has to be monitored also in order to correct, and that's where GSAT's role comes in as a facilitator of multi-stakeholder processes as someone which, as an organisation, which provides training and which brings people together. What are the people, the clients that you're speaking to, what are the problems they're confronting, what are they coming back to and saying, we really need to fix this? The clients, well, we have different clients. Some of our clients are governments. This is the private sector itself. And in those cases with the private sector, we try to liaise them also with the private sector in Germany. That's why we have very large public-private partnerships also everywhere in the world. But when it comes to governments, I think they come with very general demands. They say bring us innovative solutions to provide better services for rural areas, for example. How can we approach our farmers? How can we speed up, how can we improve value chains? And that's where our concepts come up and where we try to liaise also with these change agents. And very often the resources are already available in the respective countries. Just looking at Africa where we have 42 innovation hubs and amazing ideas coming up from this scene. But everywhere in the world. And very often this also is a surprise to the government. And what we observe is that there is very little dialogue between the private sector scene and the government. And that's where we also try to organise multi-stakeholder fora. In those cases where it is possible, we also do involve the civil society, which plays a very important role. For example, in Rwanda, we were working together with government and transparency international. Also the government in Rwanda had a very clear articulated interest in combating corruption. And they allowed the national chapter of transparency international to come up with documentation and with platforms. You can only organise it if you have a very vivid civil society, which is encouraged and which can contribute to these platforms. These are framework conditions which are not possible in each and every country. And we also do have to respect the cultural and the political situation in each and every country. In your experience for UNICEF, are the right kinds of conversations happening now? One of our roles is to create the platform for right kind of conversations to happen. People are interested in seeing their life's change. We firmly believe that you cannot just depend on the government to do everything and no government in the world has been able to meet all the needs of people. So the whole development model has to be done upside down where people have to... If you are looking at sustainable growth, people have to take ownership. And so how can we make sure that people actually not only engage in that conversation but are involved in the designing of the solutions themselves? IT encoding is a tool. It comes in the end. It cannot be the starting point. It has to be people, what they need, what they want. How do you connect them with the government? How do you get that conversation going? And once that conversation starts going, you will be surprised on the amount of ideas and solutions that people already have, which they are practicing on a very small scale. They might not have the science and the technology and the financing backup. But if you can then facilitate that process, it's just amazing what happens and how quickly it goes to scale. What are your thoughts on that? On the bottom-up concept that he's talking about? What is the question? What were your thoughts on that? He's talking about really getting down to grassroots level and asking people what it is that they want and then building the strategies from there. Do you think that's the right way forward? Well, as mentioned, there's an enormous amount of creativity out there that's happening every day. There are wonderful ideas that are... But you need to have people nurture you. If you look at it one way, oftentimes the people who create are not the people who can market. There are two different skill sets and many of these companies fail because they can't market. They don't know finances. They'd much rather prefer to sit in a lab or sit on a computer and do what... So there's lots of different elements, but I think a good idea, nurtured, has a great opportunity to catch on. But it has to be in the right environment. These young people can't do it by themselves. Let's throw this out to some questions from the floor. We have some microphones around. If you'd like to ask some questions, please go ahead. Anybody out there? Okay. Everybody's falling asleep. And over there. Just in the case... Let me try some further explanation of this. Because of this subject itself is a social impact, specifically based on the ICT. We may think of two different views. Maybe during our talks it might be mixed together. I want to say, by ICT and for ICT, many of the cases ICT we understand very useful, very valuable to support of these social innovations, specifically for the SMEs, very helpful. That's true. But also, because of our technical development, it's going forward, specifically in the case of 5G, we have many software-based approaches. Even IOT brings this technological application to the things. Thing means very small areas. I'm not quite sure of this internal of things we will really look at. So another Bill Gates, I don't know. But at least these small groups, this IOT will give another opportunity to make our own business in these small areas. Maybe something small verticals, or regionalised, very localised, but enough to engage use of these ICT technologies. Even for the SMEs, generally SMEs have a lack of capabilities or capacities in many of areas. But this software-oriented, small devices, another opportunity to challenge from the SMEs to build up their business. Even from the regulatory policy considerations, localised areas, those small devices, is a very good subject to release of this for the market-driven or industry-driven approaches. I want to add of this point. So our technology is developed in going in that direction. What kind of specific innovations do we need in terms of regulation then? So for me, in case of this regulation, still I'm not quite sure all of I'm a technical engineer. We are still in that stage. Telecom is one part of a very strict regulatory regime. IT is another different one. For example, the financial is another different one. If in that case, we really time to think about how we can develop further in answer to this, our regulatory framework's intersectional aspect. Even ICTs already have some convergence in many areas. But to apply of this, to use of that technologies, we still have a variance of this. For example, it's health-related. Someone called health-related but something, the other sense is very emergency services. Something happening of this automatic driving, what happened, how we can resolve of this. If not the case, this technical innovation should not be happened. That kind of things will be IOTs now closed to your fingers, not on your bodies. So it's a subject for intersectional discussions. I think when you ask what regulation do we need, there's a big hole in what you can do with the streams of data that's generated by internet of things or your cell phone, for example. Who can use it, what you can use it for, who has access to it, can you sell it? Big black hole, I think we need to start the conversation about that. We were talking about e-governments earlier and your feeling was in fact that that wasn't necessarily particularly something that people wanted. Can you elaborate on that? Tell the people here your thoughts. People want to be able to do services easily, but in poorly governed countries, everything is based on a relationship. So while you in Europe may be comfortable clicking a button and sending it to the black hole of government, realising that it will get processed and you will get, let's say, an ID card at the end of it, most people in developing countries don't have that confidence and a relationship with the computer, but you have a relationship with the clock who handles it at your local office or you can find somebody who has a connection. So it's very relationship-based when governance is poor and that poses a whole level of challenges for things like e-government because people don't necessarily want to deal with this. And the way people value their time value of money is quite different when you're rich versus poor. So you may just go and stand in line and get it done. So it's going to be a tougher pitch, I think. Do you think there are some areas that basically should be left for 10 or 15 years down the line and that in talking about that, e-health or an e-government, that they should be just left aside for a while and that the goals should be on development of market services, things that are much more common, should we say, in terms of buying and selling things or services or whatever. Do you think that that should be the move that, in fact? No, I think governments need to prioritise. If they understand their role, like the provision of certain types of health services or e-government, only they can do it, cannot be privately provisioned. So they need to get really good at it. They cannot move it down the priority list. There are others who are very good at doing things like the commercial services. Let those people do it. I think the fundamental problem we have is governments trying to do too much when there are others willing to do it. I think that's a real problem. Is there enough? Go ahead. I think it's not sequential. I think it is happening simultaneously. The government priorities can often be dictated by public opinion. And so if government has a set of priorities, but there is enough public pressure, the challenge is how do you aggregate the public voice and visualise it so the decision makers can actually see what the people are talking about. In our today's connected world, we also have connected problems. And even in highly evolved societies in terms of technology, the parliamentarians are far away from what the public opinion is. All they are depending on newspaper polls and very small polls. But today it is possible with technology to actually get public opinion at a very short interval, aggregate that information and make it available. I'll give you a quick example. Four weeks back before that we were talking with a government of Liberia for three years about the fact that a lot of teachers in classrooms are actually asking for sex from the girls' students to actually give good grades. And that was a conversation and all. And then what we did was we did a quick poll three or four weeks back. And 86% of the respondents, and I'm talking about 50,000 people to whom the poll went, who are your reporters, responded that yes, it's a big issue. And then the response from the government was oh, but these are random people. So we set up five full lines and said here's the phone number, this is an issue, please call. The phones went off the hook. The result was within the next day a small group came together and the government put together a team, issued a communique and now they have people going out in the schools and actually finding out the facts. All this happened in a period of five days. Whereas for three years we have been... So there is a huge power of making visible public opinion. We've seen in the last few months when people see that the government is not living up to the aspirations that they have set up, they take charge of things. 10,000 people with their cars to move refugees from one place to the other. It's a whole different world and it makes sense to actually use the social capital that people have and actually link it with the financial and policy capital that the government has so that whatever comes out is an informed policy. It might not be the same what the people are saying but at least an informed policy and informed action. It creates the dialogue effectively. But the flip side of that is security, I suppose, and the right to not have to share your opinion. Do you think that's a genuine concern? Do you think someone's going to fade? No, it is a very genuine concern and therefore we make sure that it's anonymised all the information. So even we don't know who's saying what. But at least you can aggregate it, make it visible and certainly you will see in the most difficult countries, if I may use that word, government lessons and they are careful about what their next policy is going to be and in some countries the head of the state is now meeting these young people on a regular basis because they suddenly realise that their voice and their opinion when aggregated makes a large volume of their polling constituency. What do the other speakers think about that? What's the potential and what are the limits? Well I think each and every technology bears the opportunity of risks but also chances and looking into the potential of e-governance I think sure there are risks for the people but there are also tremendous chances in the process of democratisation also in terms of confidence building because at the very end it bolts down to improved services and if we look into the potential of providing improved services for the citizens I think even those governments who have certain barriers and you rightly described it I'm pretty much aware that in the next people are more used to face-to-face contact looking into the history of my own country you can't hear me? So okay it also took several years that people got used to to e-governance elements and sure it's not a neither nor it's a parallel system actually we are having to take into account the different illiteracy standards also in our country and in the other countries in so far I think most of the governments are well advised at least in embarking on in certain areas on elements or on procedures for e-governance same holds too looking into the potential for the commercial sector, for the banking sector look into the potentials for micro-credits and I think it wouldn't be possible if this wouldn't have been also on a by application of ICT in many countries and otherwise we wouldn't have reached this kind of scaling up effects in many countries in so far I think in order to improve government as well as commercial and social services there is no alternative to ICT but as I also said it brings risks and people in some parts of the world are very sensitive also to the control mechanisms which might go along with these kind of technologies and in these cases strong civil society can play a very important role Helani, what are your thoughts on that what's your experience? I was actually just going to comment on this citizen consultation which Dr Sapra was talking about is absolutely vital and the examples he gave are really fabulous I only just want to caution so now I'm not disagreeing with him I caution because for example things like asking people on a survey or on the internet that in itself is a group of people who are already possibly privileged not only on just this issue but other things so like in India when they were talking about net neutrality regulation they put out a consultation paper over a million responses were received and they were all pretty uniform we did word analysis on that saying we need a completely neutral internet we should ban all free services etc etc those are the people who are middle class have a computer at home or work who are able to respond to this that did not in any way represent the voice of the billions of people or millions in India who are unconnected and these decisions are directly going to effect them whether they get affordable connectivity or not so as a researcher I just draw caution I worry about things you were talking about representation of which groups who are we asking do they have a voice on this digital platform that's all thinking which voice is on digital platforms we've got five minutes and a couple of questions lady at the back behind you searched he's first tell me your name and ask you a question please one good afternoon my name is Guardo Jimenez I'm from El Salvador Central America in my country the government want to approve tax a specific tax of 10% of the telephone call internet and tv for para algunos de nosotros eso tendra un impacto negativo en los en la gente what's the tax for it's not a tax for investment into anything in particular it's just a tax right okay to go into the government coffers what is your opinion about this what's your hearing about hearing that is that shocking surprising I'll start it's not surprising many developing countries have a long rich traditions of taxing the digital media telecom IZD sectors because they have poor tax bases among citizens and it's very easy to tax the companies and pass on taxes on the mobile phone bills etc so A doesn't surprise me we have had a history of universal service funds in many countries like India being really poorly used $4 billion sitting in the government never being used and most of the citizens unconnected so in theory this is great that you have taxes maybe and use it for connectivity but if it is such a married good we should do it out of general taxation not taxing the companies that are already in the sector so it's really sort of economically stupid I think second the history of governments poorly governed countries being able to spend that money usefully in the way they say there's no track record of that happening I'm sorry so I don't think it's a good idea lady had a question back there comment and a question my name is Heather Hudson from the University of Alaska Anchorage coming back to your question a few rounds ago about regulatory what are there any regulatory changes or issues I would say that one keep in mind is regulation to make sure the networks themselves are open because to competition and resale because one of the sources of innovation is small providers they can be ISPs they can be other groups who actually could provide services if they can get access affordable access to capacity although in many countries it's just assumed that there's no market in smaller and rural communities and therefore they must be monopolies so I was wondering about your opinion about open access and dark fibres in the example resale for last and competitive last mile or first mile services who fancies answering that one let me try it in general sense I share with your views but we also think about open doesn't mean of the free if you have something to use of these resources now we are talking everybody talking based on the ICT which means ICT is now our social infrastructure social resources use of this resource we need something payment because we need a continuously improvement of our infrastructure our resources only way is during our use we need a proper payment system if not the case do not think about this improvement I agree I wasn't implying free like Nick Necroponte some opportunity for other providers and hopefully affordable or competitive pricing but the only point is having said that open of access open to the service is very imperative conditions for facilitate our innovations because previously the monopolized situation that was something controlled something limitations of this access to the service but now many many many areas is already going into the full competition still some areas have difficulties but I believe this will continue of this open but it's very important to facilitate of this innovations I believe I think this point on open is not free is really important because I hear it conflated in many many fora which is problematic openness is absolutely vital we worried you know back in the past decade about open networks and the backhaul but now we need to worry about open platforms like who can get inside the world garden who can put an app on Facebook that really has SME micro entrepreneur implications because we've got young people developing apps and if they can't get it in the right platform they're not even playing what's stopping them it could be a closed platform it may not allow them to test it in the right way there could be exclusive arrangements so streaming music provider may not allow another streaming music provider to be on that platform things like that competition issues could be payment issues they can't take international payments like in Sri Lanka PayPal doesn't work so app developers need a foreign credit card or a friend's bank account they have incredibly popular apps which they just can't get paid for so this has implications on how they make money any other questions gentlemen over here thank you thank you Mokta from Tunisia I have a couple of questions I'm sorry for that in the frame of what Mrs Eleni just said in all these SMEs getting difficulties maybe to grow up or to scale up as the lady from GZ said before can we is it convenient today to talk about protectionist measures from Governments is it a word that is acceptable in the global framework we have today I know that in Europe in western Europe there are some talks about this subjects protecting national we will be attending the welcome reception at the Palace of Arts be mindful to proceed to the registration hall and board the shuttle bus's part in the front door so my question is not convenient so I know this word is not but we maybe one day or the other we need maybe to talk to use words like that does anybody want to have a quick go answering that question now it's finished sorry does anybody want to have a quick go answering that the second one but the quick I know it's difficult to answer the first one the second one is regarding public consultations are we sure that the banner representing this answer or this contribution it is appropriate not about the what you said the community that is not connected and cannot answer but even those answer we have a secure process that make us certain that those are expressions of citizens is that an appropriate process I mean for me we have to change our thinking whether we are private sector or anything and I am going out on a limb here intellectual property would no longer be the revenue model in the next 5 to 10 years it would be intellect sharing that would develop the revenue we are already seeing it even in intelligence communities we have seen that countries have started sharing security and intelligence information even though they started with proprietary stuff that they hold close to their chest and a lot of people might kill me for this but I really believe that it is intellect sharing that would be the revenue model not the intellectual property right the second we have to stop thinking of people as passive recipients of every information and service they are the strong communities make strong citizens strong citizens make strong countries unless we have community stake ownership unless we have the communities involved in the decision making process you cannot have sustainable development because no government has the resources or the people to make it happen and it might sound like an outrageous statement but we have seen country after country after country that this is becoming true marvellous okay well it is 25 past 6 now I think we better wrap it up thanks to all the people on the panel apparently some of us might have to go and get a bus in order to go and have dinner with the Hungarian president so thanks a lot for coming and see you tomorrow thank you