 Welcome to the 2022 ITU Plenipotentiary Conference here in Bucharest, Romania, where I've got the great pleasure of being joined in the studio today by Admirim Aliti, who is the Minister of Information, Society and Administration for North Macedonia. Minister, welcome to the studio. Thank you. Thank you for having me. Now, I'd like to talk a little bit about digitalisation. I wanted to inquire in particular about the digitalisation of public services. How is that going in Macedonia? Well, with digitalisation, we see it in two aspects. One aspect is digitalising the communication of our institutions with themselves. When ministers communicate with themselves right now, a lot of processes are done with paper, with hard copies, and the idea is to increase transparency and accountability of our institutions. So that's why we are working on platforms such as document management system, which would in fact digitalise the processes that are right now going in a classical way. And the second aspect is digitalising services that our institutions give to the citizens of North Macedonia. So merely our ministry is the intermediary which links the institutions with the citizens. Right now we have a new services portal where we have hundreds of services given to the citizens, but at the moment we are in a process of upgrading also this system because right now the system, how it's set up, a lot of requests go without being validated to the final institutions and sometimes it's time consuming to check those requests and the citizens lose time. So the idea is to make those services even better and of course add new services which are most sought by our citizens. So what are your plans for broadband and 5G to North Macedonia? Well, as far as 5G is concerned we have already rolled it out this year. According to our national broadband plan which was drafted and signed in 2019, until 2023 we should have at least one city with 5G signal and then until 2025 we should have all the highways in our country having a 5G signal. Then 2027 we should have all the cities and by 2029 we should have all citizens of North Macedonia should have access to 5G signal. So as far as the first phase is concerned we are good because we have already rolled it out. In most of capital cities in Skopje we have a 5G signal but parallel with this we are working on making also fiber optics or ultra-fast internet accessible in all North Macedonia. As far as this is concerned we are in a process of doing a feasibility study which is going to give us a better picture and a clearer view as to which cities should be the focus of the implementation of broadband because right now ultra-fast internet is mostly concentrated in the capital city and the idea of the government is ultra-fast internet to be accessible especially in rural areas but of course in all the country this is in line with the gigabit society objective of the European Union and we as a country have recently started our negotiations with the EU so that's why this is also a requirement in that sense. Now you're taking the time to be here at the ITU planning potentially conference I wanted to ask you in general why is cooperation with ITU important? Well as you know ITU is the technology organization of the UN and as far as we are concerned it is the most important organization in technology in the world setting the standards and connecting countries with each other because most of countries of the world are part of the ITU so we see very important our relationship with ITU and me as a minister and my cabinet are working in strengthening this relationship both for the idea of being updated with the latest standards and latest trends and so on but also ITU has been for us and I suppose for other countries instrumental in connecting countries with each other because you know in all forums of the ITU we see that we can learn a lot from other countries good practices because we as countries of the world many times share similar challenges and that's why a lot of formulas that have worked in other countries can be implemented in our country that's why it's my intention as a minister to really strengthen this relationship with ITU We look forward to carrying on with this long and strong relationship with North Macedonia and thank you very much for being with us in the studio and sharing your insights and we look forward to catching up with you again very soon so thank you very much Thank you very much pleasure being here