 Education. It's the shared answer to so many of society's most urgent questions. How do we expand the horizons of our children? Multiply their dreams. Enlarge the scope of their opportunities in a way that builds a brighter future. How do we help them meet the broad range of global challenges they'll face in the decades ahead? Equip them with 21st century skills needed to succeed in today's competitive digital economy. Education is the answer to so many questions, but providing it raises so many others. Like how do we best harness the power of technology to improve the reach and effectiveness of education efforts worldwide? How do we orchestrate the professional development of tens of millions of educators around the planet? How can students, teachers, governments and industry all work together to develop truly sustainable change in our global education models? How can we create vibrant, productive learning environments that will enrich the lives of every student on Earth? We know education is the answer, which means there's really only one question that matters. How do we make it happen? How do we make it happen as that video finished? My name is Tim Unwin. I'm Secretary General of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organization. I also have the privilege to have a UNESCO chair in ICT for development. Your Excellencies, Honourable Ministers, Distinguished Panelists, Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to this session on education transformation, the importance of ICT in 21st century education. We have a distinguished panel of ministers. We have some other ministers here present who are going to contribute as the morning progresses. We only have 75 minutes. Everybody has been briefed that at the beginning there will be three to four minute opening statements. Travelling through this wonderful city, you cannot but help see advertisements for a certain football side from Britain. So I know the population here is very keen on football and I need your help in controlling the ministers here present. The yellow card means that three minutes is up. The red card means stop. So if you see me do a red card, can you sort of make protests? So I don't have to use this alternative way to keep time and order. So if you see a red card or hear the symbols going, please that means be quiet. I'm going to encourage as much possible interaction from the floor. I would also encourage you to keep your contributions to an absolute minimum. I will briefly introduce each of the speakers in turn and let them say more for your understanding of their position in due course. But without more ado, I have the very great pleasure to introduce someone who's become a dear friend of mine and the CTO more generally. Brahima Sanu, who is what you all know, director of the Telecommunication Development Bureau, BDT at the ITU. He's going to make a few opening statements. We're then going to have presentations very briefly from the six panelists. And we're then going to get going with some exciting discussion. And I know the panel is very keen to hear your thoughts as well. Brahima, thank you. Over to you. Thank you very much, Tim. Before I start, do you mind to lend me your cards? So they don't apply to me. I have this. I won't fall for that one. Good morning. Excellencies, honorable minister. Distinguished delegate ladies and gentlemen. It is indeed my great pleasure on behalf of ITU to deliver some opening remarks to this very important dialogue on education transformation in the 21st century. Let me start by saying when you look at all the people in this room, we are here just because we are being educated. Those who didn't have the chance to go to school are not with us here. This shows us how education is important. I'm sure that you will agree with me that there is now a clear consensus of the major transformation in learning that ICT has brought about. We, I say we in this room, the digital migrants have seen the education transformation that took us from the paper book world to the ICT world. It has been and continues to be a steep learning curve for all of us as broadband enabled learning takes new steps every day. The experience is completely different for the digital natives. By digital natives, ITU defined digital natives as a population of network youth aged 15, 24 years with more than five years online experience. Of course, the experience of learning totally different for them and also for the future generation as technology comes naturally to them and learning through technology would surely be in the future their preferred way of learning. The 21st century skills require 21st century tools and broadband clearly stands out. Whether it is about ease of access or availability or best learning content or maybe more importantly about overcoming the geographic, economic, social, cultural and talent barriers. From a policy perspective, it is a tool to meet the objective of education for all. As such, it is well recognized in the UN millennial development goals. I'm happy to report that over 145 governments have adopted or are planning to adopt a national broadband plan policy or strategy. Looking at more detail of the sectorial goals of those national broadband plan, education appears in the top in 86% of the broadband plan. One of the key technologies successes are the current age of mobile broadband. It is becoming a key catalyst as the fastest growing access technology expected at around 2.1 billion by 2013. Let's remember that we estimate that by the end of 2013 we will have 6.8 billion mobile subscribers out of which we will have 2.1 billion mobile broadband. In addition to that, the failing cost of smartphones, the advent of lower price tablets, cloud computing and the rise of open education resources all provide tremendous opportunities for access to education in underserved areas. By underserved areas, let's not understand only geographic areas. We also should understand marginalized people who are vulnerable. Recognizing this potential, I have launched as director of BDT the M Powering Development, M for Mobile, Dash for Partnership and Powering Development. This is what it is about. This initiative aims to capitalize on the ubiquity of cellular mobile technology and under this initiative M Education is one of the key areas. And I'm happy to report that the advisory board constituted for this initiative met in Geneva and Professor Tim Nguyen is actually the chairman of the working group on M Education. So you have spent all his life in education, you continue to do so. The importance of ICT for education and digital literacy will clearly spell out by government and industry leaders during the connect Asia Pacific that took place just two days ago. And also the education have been spelled out by the World Bank Commission. I'm happy to see surrounding me here three member of the World Bank Commission in this panel. So I give the credit to you. And some of other initiative guided by ITU in the content education include the ITU Connected School Connected Community Initiative designed to promote broadband and Internet connectivity for school worldwide so that school can serve as community ICT centers for rural, marginal, urban and isolated areas where a particular focus on disadvantaged and vulnerable groups such as women and girls, indigenous people, persons with disability, youth and children. The other initiative we, BGT, partner with Telecenter.org and we are now trained 855,000 women and we intend to train by 2015 2 million women and get them at least a literacy in ICTs. Indeed, due to the impact of ICTs on work, digital literacy have effectively become a necessity for both employment and creating businesses. It is estimated that 95% of the decent work in the coming few years, I repeat 95% of the decent work in the coming few years will require ICT skills. ICT literacy and using ICT as a training tool is therefore a must for any competitive economy and any competitive nation. Since it is a must, we must make it happen. Let's do it. I thank you. Thank you very much, Brahima. We started on time. Can I just very briefly recognize the minister from Zambia, Rwanda, Algeria, Burundi, South Sudan and Côte d'Ivoire. Bonjour. Welcome to this panel. Anbu Tan here and Malaysia. Sorry, Brunei on the front as well. And Sudan. Okay, thank you, Brahima. Without any more ado, ladies and gentlemen, the six panelists have been instructed that they have three minutes and I have my cards back. For those of you who have arrived, we will use these to keep them under control. And this is really to catch a glimpse of some of their achievements, some of the things that they feel have been really important in the ways that they have used ICTs to transform education along the lines that Brahima has indicated. So without more ado, it's my enormous pleasure to introduce His Excellency Mr. Ivo Vivonovsky, the minister in the Ministry of Information Society and Administration in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. Ivo. Thank you very much. Mr. Enwin, dear friends, Excellencies. First of all, just a small remark. I feel like we're playing against Manchester United over here. Well, the referee is always favoring them versus us, but we'll stick to the three minutes limitation. It's a great honor to be here. Macedonia has been one of the leaders in setting up a project for education. We started back in 2006 when our prime minister decided to invest in a project computer for every student for every child. I had the honor to work on that project to start it from the beginning and I'm very pleased to share with you the challenges, the experience that we have had. Because from the beginning in 2006 till today, we have implemented almost one-to-one computers to students. We are at a ratio of 1.4 students to one computers in the classrooms. We started at first with laptops for everybody from 1st to 3rd grade. Then we went to desktops where there is a full client with a think line from 4th to 12th grade. We were able to find open sources content where we can localize them. Did the training for the teachers? Did the video training, classroom training, out of the classroom training in order to get to where we are today? One thing that we figured out at the beginning that Macedonia is a small country. We have 2.2 million people. We don't have a lot of natural resources. So we cannot compete with the world on the natural resources but we do have our people and we decided to invest in our people. We cannot compete with the quantity but we do compete with quality and education is something that matters. We are a candidate state for the European Union. We have a problem with our southern neighbor that we cannot be part of the European Union. But we continue to do education investments in order when we enter the European Union our students will be on the same level and even some on a much better level than the other European Union countries. I just have to have 30 seconds left but I really like to encourage everybody in the room to see if there is a potential in investing in education in their countries. I know I've followed a lot of countries how much they have done. It is a project that you invest for the long term. It's not a short term benefit. We all agree over here that we are all politicians on this table. A lot of politicians would like to have short wins but this is a long win. You cannot get anything done or you cannot see the results in 1 to 2 years. This is a long time 5 to 10 years where you actually see the results. Thank you very much. That's brilliant. Somebody is setting their own alarm clock to go off when it's time. Thank you Ivo. We have Mr Blaise Lombay, the Minister of the Digital Economy, the Minister of Communication and the post of Gabon. Mr Minister, thank you. Yes. Thank you. I think Africa must seize the opportunity to do unveritable under-quality thanks to the information technology and communication. We think that we can take advantage of this revolution to be able to move up all the Gabon people and not all the African people. We have a project about Gabon. We must do education and encourage investment in TICs in terms of digital infrastructure to vulgarize the Internet and 4G to spread in education a real culture of education. We think that from TICs, African countries must be able to teach and educate at a high level to be able to have a well-formed population and start to succeed with the technological revolution. We want, at the level of Gabon, to invest in the Internet and in the 4G and facilitate the rooms of digital classes, facilitate the tele-training services so that no matter which population, in the villages and cities, can access high-level education. We also have a programme, a program that allows us to view classroom rooms, boxes, valleys and containers to be able to do rural education. And we are taking advantage of Gabon's ability to teach teachers so that they can master all the classroom rooms that we are going to build. I think we are at a turning point where we can not miss the coach and every time there is a revolution, there are countries that come out of the ordinary. We think that Africa will choose the TIC to be able to get out of the ordinary. And we are counting on international organizations, specialists in the matter of technology, to invest in Africa and to be able to lead all Africa to developed countries so that we can have the same opportunities for development. Thank you very much. Short and very sweet. This session as I think everybody here knows is co-hosted by Intel and we are all very grateful for the work that they have done not only in supporting this event but also more widely across the world. So it is a great pleasure to introduce our third speaker who is John Davies, Vice President of the Intel World Ahead Program from Intel. John, your three to four minutes starts now. Your Excellencies, Ministers, Distinguished Guests, ladies and gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be with you this morning. In Intel we have two areas that come together in education, one of which is our product groups and our enabling groups. I am part of that and that group really is a vertical. It is the only vertical we have in Intel that focuses on a big market segment and it is actually a growing part of Intel. More and more focus is coming on this. The second one is the corporate affairs side, the philanthropy side that has lots of teacher training, science contests, many different areas for both the younger children and the youth and the job creation. So we bring them together and education really becomes a major, major focus for us. Now on the enabling side we work in four different areas and the first one is in platforms. We design computers that can be used for children. There is lots of software that goes with them. I think many of you have seen these. These are the kind of rugged ones that can be a laptop or a convertible. I can drop this on the floor. I can spill the liquid on the keyboard. That kind of area. We can do this with tablets, rounded edges, again past the drop test, past the impact test, many of those. And these kind of machines, there are many, many millions of these in deployment for about five or six years and people know how do they last. But what is really critical about these is don't treat them as a consumer device. Put the software on them. We call them internal learning solutions. And for theft deterrent, for classroom networking, for asset tracking, for the kind of things you'd want in governments, in banks, in healthcare, you actually need that in education too. So that's one area. The second area is to work on connectivity. You've got the devices, you have to connect them. So that area is really where we spend a tremendous amount of time with the ministers of education, the ministers of telecom and the IT. And that's your expertise. We spend time looking at caching in the rural so you can get fantastic performance in rural schools. We spend time looking at how the schools get connected. We've run about 10 different universal service fund conferences around the world. And these focus on how you can fund this in various different ways. And we do that with regulators, IT ministers, and it's really about sharing best practices. And I think you've got some of those around this table today. But I'll give you one. If Minister Ilderem was here from Turkey, what he would tell you is he's spending about half a billion dollars a year of universal service fund to equip every student in Turkey over the next five years and do it in such a way that they get built in Turkey with software in Turkey with enabling there. So while he's equipping the education, he's using his budgets and creating an incredible number of jobs in an industry there. So that's kind of the connection device where people in the room play. The third one is training. So we have a program called Intel Teach. It's in about 90 countries and it's trained about 12 million teachers in the last 10 years. Many of your countries have this. Many of them around the table do. And we're bringing this into more. The key of that is the teacher can do a lesson plan and run the areas in the classroom basically because the kids grow up with computers, maybe the teacher didn't. And they need the confidence. They need the training. And we train the trainers in your country and then you take the materials, the courses and end up training your teachers. And it's done 12 million. It's made the major difference. The last area is in content. We do a lot of work in content. Work across many different areas of enabling of software. We've actually just acquired an a company called K&O, first three letters of knowledge, K&O. And that company is working about ingesting of books and making hyperlinks to videos and the internet. So you get nice interactive books. There's assessment there. There's lots of capabilities. And look upon that as summits that's going to enable the publishers and the people that build content in your country. So all of those pieces come together. Now in three minutes, I can't tell you everything we do, but there are three more panels here this afternoon where we'll talk about solutions, the content and the funding. So please encourage some of your people to attend some of those. Thank you. Thank you very much, John. And our fourth distinguished speaker on the panel this morning is Excellency Ahmad Chabri, who's Minister in the Ministry of Communications and Multimedia from Malaysia. Word is yours. Well, thank you, Thien. I still remember what had been said by our senator from Thailand did before yesterday. It's about, ICT is not about only to be connected, but it's about functionality. And for me, education is one of those most significant functions when come to ICT. You make learning is fun. You bring students to be more globalized. You talk about how you build using ICT and computer and so on as learning tools for education. There's no doubt about that. But the main issue is everything requires substantial change in the existing system. And you talk about existing system, you talk about education system, how using the tools, but other than that in the infrastructure, you talk about how many countries are really being connected in terms of accessibility, in terms of broadband, to provide the devices and everything that related to the using of ICT in education. The problem of digital divide that we already mentioned before will widen the development divide if you cannot provide the access to broadband and development divide will further cause education divide. And the word that we always been said about education for all only can be realized if we have internet for all. These are the challenges that we have to face. And I'm sure that we have to find the solution, we have to find the right model to the system that required to be changed is not cheap. And that's the, I think the substantial thing that we have to come forward from here. Thank you. Thank you very much. You realize we're going so well that in a couple of minutes it'll be your turn to provide some feedback and comments. So be ready when I come. Our penultimate speaker is his Excellency, Dr. Fred Matiangi, who is Minister in the Ministry of Information, Communication and Technology in Kenya. Thank you, Tim. And in addition to what my colleagues have said, ladies and gentlemen, Kenya spends about 7% of its GDP on education. The greatest challenge has been since about 2005, 2006, coming up with a framework that introduces a very effective and comprehensive deployment of ICTs in the education sector as a whole. And in Kenya, we started with the National ICT for Education Strategy, which essentially brought about a comprehensive approach to deployment of ICTs and enabling educational institutions across the board to have access to internet and also to deploy ICTs effectively. In 2006, when we started this program, the ratio of students to a computer, especially in primary and secondary schools in Kenya, was 150 kids to one computer. And we worked on a framework of dealing with this situation, especially because educational content was also not available on the digital platform. So we developed a framework that addresses both the demand side and the supply side. In the case of the supply side, we worked on a very aggressive framework of digitizing the educational curriculum in the country. And by now, most of the primary school curriculum and content that's required for primary school has been digitized. And the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development is working very fast to ensure that within the next one to two years, we have comprehensively digitized all the content for primary education in terms of the textbooks that are used by primary schools and even in certain lower levels of secondary schools. We have now started the Computer for Schools program, which we hope to roll out next year with the aim of affording primary school kids a chance to own a laptop or to access a laptop. As you can accept or realize, this is not easy to achieve because I don't know about your experiences, but public sector resources are always constrained. It's difficult to imagine that the government can comprehensively do this. And therefore, we've come up with a framework that enables other players and even other sections of government to be involved in enabling school-going children access internet and of course access computers. One of those is working on a partnership framework with some of the civil society organizations, like the Computer for Schools program that's driven by parts of civil society. And we have allowed the banking sector in Kenya to help especially in assisting or coming up with products that assist teachers to purchase and own laptops. And this has been fairly successful indeed and we hope that going into the future in another one or two years, we will have achieved a better ratio than the one we started with in 2005-2006. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. And our sixth and final initial speaker is Tariji Pekko, who is Chief Executive of Botswana Communications Regulation Authority. Your Excellencies, Ministers and Ladies and Gentlemen, Botswana like any other countries, they have, we have the national ICT policy that obviously guides and monitor the activities of ICT policy in the country. But education is one of those that is key to development of Botswana. And we have the School Connect project, which ensures that each and every school is connected in one or the other. And of course, it is very important that one should realize that, you know, where you have peoples that cannot communicate with one another, ICT actually plays a major role in making sure that everyone can actually access the facilities as we see them. But one of the key things that one has to consider is the fact that ICT is predominantly for development and in order to ensure that we eradicate poverty or try to reduce as much as we can. But I can say that in the last few years or last few months, what we have decided is that we have completed the national broadband strategy so that we can ensure that the country can actually have a framework of trying to make sure that each and every single individual must understand that this is the path that needs to be taken. And we hope that by that strategy, it will ensure that every single citizen in the school is able to learn. And the curriculum also encourages students at the lower level to ensure that they use ICT in general. But I must say that one of the challenges that I think we do face from time to time, I mean, particularly as a regulator, is that of content and application. I think you can have all the gadgets that you have in the whole world. But as long as content is not there, then I think you are facing difficulties, as you may speak. But I would like to say that I think as a country, we are very much alive to the issues of ICT and ensuring that our citizen will benefit on the digital space. Thank you very much. We lost the sound. Thank you. I had a discussion very briefly with some of the ministers here present as to whether they wish to join the high table. Minister from Sudan, if you would like to join or if anybody else wishes a minister to be on the platform, please do use this opportunity to come up. Our speakers have been brilliant. I'm not only in what they've said, but as far as I'm concerned in keeping to time, which means we do have a couple of moments for no more than three interventions from the floor. At this stage, if you have any points of clarification that you would like to raise with any of the panelists, please do raise them now. And remember, only one point, keep it brief and say who you are at the beginning. One, two. Yes, please. Is there a microphone? Yes, coming from behind you. Thank you very much. Just shout. Do stand up, Mohammed. Ah, yes, we all have it. No. Yeah. Mohammed Ibrahim from Somalia. No. Sorry. You have to use a mic as a voice. Can I be translated? He is, we'll come to the, if that's... Can we get the roving mics to work, please? Thank you very much. And thanks for promoting me. I appreciate it. Mohammed Ibrahim from Somalia. I think, I think, first of all, I want to thank the panelists. This is a lot of good news. I'm so excited to hear all this positive information. So it seems everything's fine. We have the strategies, the policies. Everyone had five year plan or whatever it is. The industry seems to also have the solution. So what is the problem? How do we make it happen? Now I just want to quickly comment and also maybe add a question as well. And I'll be very short, very, very precise. As I travel from the 100 megabits in Australia to 10 megabits and I go home and where I have to use a modem. Maybe some of you forgot what modem is. So there is a challenge. There is a problem. So I guess my comment is, and before I finish up, first of all, I want to thank ITU and through the BDT we're getting a lot of help to actually solve this problem. But here's the issue. Where there's no 100 megabits or 10 megabits or no, even 640 and you have to deal with a modem. What do you do? This is really the challenge. So maybe I should suggest we shouldn't forget those who are way below the digital divide and perhaps CDs, DVDs, some other method might solve the problem. I'm sorry to leave you with a depression. But thank you very much. Brilliant. Thank you very much. And Minister from Brunei du Arsalaam. And if one more person wishes to make an intervention. Thank you very much. We had a workshop with the educators about the ICT. The issue I want to bring up is something else. The digital citizens or digital natives, the students are no doubt, or some of them, or most of them are. But we have complaints that some of the teachers are not. So can we, can somebody touch this issue? Thank you. Thank you. I have to say, if I was going to make an intervention, it was that I didn't hear enough from the panelists about teachers. We did have some comment, but I would like to have had more. And gentlemen here, sorry, I don't recognize. Again, thank you again. And we tried some of these experiments done by our briefest ministers of other countries. But till now we couldn't find it easy how to shift the emphasis in education using the digital means and ways and the multimedia to change structurally the traditional and classical methods in the classroom. Till now we couldn't find an ideal model to do that. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I will view a brief that I will give the other gentleman a point. And then if just one panelist could take one of these each, we will respond. Thank you. My name is Senator Kaguya from Kenya. I just wanted to get an idea, particularly from Macedonia. What is the costs? You know, we didn't hear much about costing. But what is the experience regarding the cost of past student when you installed computers for schools? Brilliant. Thank you, Eric. So I have four questions. The first was on connectivity. Who would like to take that? John? On the connectivity side, you have to plan this like it's an architecture. And we see all the time that cities are well connected. The rural can be very poorly connected. And when you implement, you can actually increase the digital divide. So what you have to do is look at standard internet techniques and apply them. An example is you can put a small caching server in any school. They can literally cost about the cost of one computer. And even with small bandwidth, they can deliver at land speed very, very fast content, a content delivery engine to everyone in the school on the wireless LAN. It's very, very simple. There's one in that booth. It's about this big and it's an appliance. It updates overnight. And those are the kind of techniques you can put in. But you have to plan it like it's an architecture, not just put lots of computers in the school. You lay it out like it's an enterprise, like you're doing government. Thank you very much. And I mean, I said we could recognize the work of the Broadband Commission. And for example, that was also the recently created alliance for affordable internet that is very much trying to drive that agenda forward. The second was on teachers. Who would like to take yet? Sorry, we'll have the minister from Kenya. Well, we haven't suddenly, of course, succeeded in the case of Kenya 100%. But I think the case of the teachers, and then it applies across the board. It's teaching an old dog new tricks. But I think there's going to be no option, but to invest in training the teachers and developing programs that consistently in service the teachers to make them ready to operate in the new digital environment. Something else that I think could help a great deal is to enhance the ICT ecosystem across the board. Because when people wake up in the morning and find that we're deploying ICTs in many other aspects of life, they have no choice but to ideologically migrate, culturally migrate. And in the way they do things, they have to not only acquire the new skills that they need to teach and to move their content to the digital classroom, but to also change their ways of life. They'll be forced to change their ways of life. But I think it's a problem that we are going to live with, a challenge we are going to live with for nearly a generation. Because we have so many teachers who are trained, brought up, and have been practicing for a very long time in the analog framework. And transitioning them to the digital framework is not easy. But I think, Mr. Chairman, we need to invest resources in training and equipping the teachers for the digital classroom. Thank you. And we've been saying that for more than a decade and it still hasn't happened. So I think that's something really to move forward. I think that takes pedagogy as well. Could we move to the fourth sort of final one, which was cost, and that was directed specifically to the minister from the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia? Yeah, thank you. In the case of Macedonia, when it comes to the cost, it's not just about the technology that you purchase. You have to keep in mind that you have to put in infrastructure. We have a broadband internet in every school, regardless if it's a rural or urban area school. You have the teachers, the training, and the content. So I'll be more than happy to share with you personally all the experience and how much it costs every one of these. But when you have the total picture, plus on top of the continuous support of it, because you have to have a system implemented, they will continue support of this equipment. You cannot just purchase it, put it in the schools, and leave it over there. You have to have either private sector or government sector. Somebody find a private public partnership where they can continue to be sustainable the system, because here's five years later, we're thinking of upgrading the equipment and going with tablets probably on some of the schools. And I think there was somebody quite famous who said words to the effect that, if you think education is expensive, try ignorance. So the minister from Zambia, I know, wanted to make an intervention. Sir, can I offer you the floor very briefly? Thanks, Tim. Don't share a few things about the Zambian system. Basically, the challenge is that we were two divides, the rural people and the town people. In rural areas, of course, we would restrict the problem. And also, there are a bit of teachers, as my brother from here said, it's a problem. What are the solutions? In Zambia, what we have done is that we've got the tablets where all the contents have been put in all the languages. They talk back to the students. So don't need connectivity or electricity. You can just tap on the button and you get the feedback. Secondly, we are a long-term solution. We are rolling out towers in all areas. By 2015, every area must have reached communication in order to connect to the system. And also, with what we call RIA, this is the rural restriction of authority, we're putting power to every single village more or less. So that would be an obstruction to our issues. Yes, we're dropping terms of expenses for the tablets, but we hope that through the Zikta, our authority will be able to start manifesting some of these components with all the help from other countries, but we're able to afford these things easily. Thank you very much indeed. And now, Mr. Prime Minister, I think you should say a few words in just one minute, please. In one minute, it's going to be a bit complicated. No, the others will do that. What I would like to say is that a strategy has succeeded in TIC, integrated in every way, a party that concerns men. That is to say, without men, we can't succeed in this strategy. Again, as you can see, we have this challenge, since at the level of the administration, when we started to deploy, we quickly realized that we couldn't go very far, simply because only 1% of the workers had TIC knowledge. So, we need at least 10% to really start doing oil task and start to penetrate. That's the first thing. The second thing is that a real strategy must understand human resources, but it must also understand other aspects. And all of this strategy must work at the same time. That is to say, the regulatory environment, the infrastructure, connectivity, accessibility, and then the content. So, we have a global strategic strategy that includes these five elements in which there are human resources. As far as human resources and education are concerned, we have three paliades. One is the primary school, one is the secondary school, and the other is the university. The primary school, the idea is to initiate, so that children can have a minimum of knowledge. As far as secondary school, we set up multimedia centers. And at the top level, we connect all universities. We try to interconnect all universities, and it's not only efficiency and investment, but it's cost, because by interconnecting all... We gather all the teachers, all the classrooms, all the content. All of this becomes accessible to all, and this allows us, from the cost point of view, at least to have a strategy, education that's successful. Thank you. Thank you. In the conversation, there's something else that I'm quite shocked by, actually. We only have three women here, and they have means of working. Human resources are about getting that gender balance mixed. And I do think there's an issue there that we should perhaps also address. But let me move on, your comments have begun to raise the challenges, and one of the things I wanted to ask each panelist, sort of very briefly, in sort of just a minute, if there was one... And the question for the six panelists is, if there was one thing that you wish you could overcome, what would it be? So this is the biggest challenge that you face in your roles, and perhaps I could begin with Minister from Malaysia, but one thing you would like to change? Well, accessibility is a big issue here, because you talk about most of the countries here, not simple city-state kind of things. You talk about vast areas, and sparsely populated, and lack of resources by the country. So of course you talk about the demand for education today. You talk about the infrastructure demand is huge. So you ask me what I want? One single thing is to meet this demand, but the demand is keep on changing. That's the problem. Those days, you talk about coverage and connectivity, coverage and you talk about penetration is good enough, how many percent of your population got connected. Then we can meet that one. But today you talk about one megabit per second is not enough. Four megabit per second is not enough. You talk about American broadband plan, for instance. They talk about by 2020, the data demand or the nation should be able to provide to 100 million households of 100 megabit per second, and to the institution like school and so on, one gigabit per second, for instance. How many of us can meet that kind of thing? How many of us really on track to be able to meet that kind of demand? So for me, that's very important. I take away accessibility and meeting the changing demands, increasing demands for the future. Ivo, your biggest challenge. Well, there are a lot of challenges in rolling out nationwide projects, as we did in Macedonia, but to my colleague from Bhutan, I mentioned the question about the teachers. I think teachers getting the support of the teachers is a challenge. Challenging for Kenya was challenging for Macedonia, but I'll recommend to anybody in the room, if you get the support from the parents, the teachers will know where to go. So the key people are the parents and the grandparents. We have had a lot of success with a lot of some teachers. We won the first prize on the Microsoft Partners in Learning last year, and we got second prize the year before that from teachers in Macedonia. Real areas or civil areas were the one in the world prize, but also we've had teachers who have been very obstructing the project since the beginning. Even though we've done multiple, multiple training, and we do have a challenge to put broadband internet in the rural areas, when the support came from the parents, where the parents were putting the pressure on the teachers, they're saying, my kid is complaining at home, and it won't mean to buy him a laptop because his best friend, he's always using the laptop at school. Why are you not using the equipment that was purchased for you to use? Every teacher has a laptop, every kid has a computer, we have content, we have internet, there is no excuse not to be used. When you get the parents and the grandparents, you will have a successful project. Thank you very much, and John, from the industry perspective, your biggest challenge? Well, there's two actually, but I have to address one that everyone's brought up, it's the teachers, and we found the very best successful programs, the teachers buy in, they embrace, they want to be trained, they use ICT to create lesson plans, and in this, we have Intel Teach, it's trained 12 million teachers in close to 100 countries around the world, but there's 70 million teachers in the world, so it's trained 15, 20%. Microsoft Partners in Learning, I think, is also trained about 12 million, so the industry programs exist out there, but what it needs is policies in countries that say I want my teachers trained, and design the program with the industry in the country so that it works for the teachers. In the end, it can't be our program that we push on the teachers, it's got to be their program that they love, that they want to do, that they're part of helping, so every country is a bit different, you all need to help create this, and I think if we can get policies and drive that bring this and make it teachers' programs and get teachers trained, it's going to make an absolutely major difference, and the industry does have the programs, it's literally reaching the countries. Thank you, Mr. Malini. Mr. Malini, yes, I believe that the challenge is very simple, it's important for all African countries. In Africa, we must learn from Europe, from Africa, but staying in Africa, and that is a challenge. We can stay in our countries and learn at the same level with the same level of competence as European countries and American countries, and for this, states, governments must be able to invest, invest in ICTs to allow for this connectivity between countries, but not only for universities and major schools in the cities, we must go to the most remote rural areas of the country to facilitate this interconnectivity. Gabon is rather particular because we are a small country of, we have 2,700 active mobile phones, and everyone has two or three telephones, and it's important to understand that their population is ready to have this interconnectivity and to make this technological giant leap. We must have an interconnection at the national level, amongst all states, and the states must be able to disseminate digital schools, e-schools, e-training, etc., but when we don't have enough funds, a digital school is difficult to create, but if we do have these funds, we can carry out these multimedia projects, videos connected to computers that can disseminate this information, this training, but we must also train the rural populations. We must go to the rural areas to allow farmers to be educated, to allow farmers to be connected with other farmers throughout the world, raw materials that they produce so they can see how they can benefit from this digital world and the information. When someone previously said, what do we need for certain countries, we have a program for the rural populations where there is no electricity, then we think of solar tablets. We can think of solar energy. Thank you. Thank you very much. There are many difficulties, many problems. Kenya, the one biggest challenge that you're still facing in your ambitious programs? Of course, the first is the question of cost. The cost of doing this is fairly high. And the fact that in most cases, we haven't addressed the question of deployment of ICTs in a comprehensive manner. I think if there's anything I would like us to change, or one challenge that I think we need to face, is ensuring that we reduce the level of digital illiteracy in our environment. In most cases, deployment of ICTs in education is looked at in an isolationist way, instead of looking at it as a comprehensive framework of introducing a new ecosystem, a transformative ecosystem in the way we live. And because of that, very many actors along the chain, including critical policy makers, people involved in financing, in budget work, in policy development, to not understand this in the comprehensive manner in which they should understand it. Because if they did, we would invest in other areas that would support the deployment of ICTs. For example, to enhance an infrastructure that will support the deployment of ICTs, we will need to invest in availability of power, for example, so that connectivity cannot happen without sufficient power and so on. We've been pushing, in the case of Kenya, a shared infrastructure framework. When we do our roads and we are doing cabling, we are always cutting roads, we are not ready in terms of policy to look at it from a very comprehensive point of view. So in my view, the deployment of ICTs in education would benefit a lot from a very comprehensive understanding that we are looking at the general area of transformative ecosystem of use of ICTs or deployment of ICTs across the board, so that the farmers understand how they will benefit. Those who are financing and providing resources to enable us to provide power, understand the importance of doing that, so that it supports the ICTs. So the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the transformative nature of ICTs deployment is what I would like to change. Thank you. Thank you very much. And Tari, perspective from Botswana. Thank you very much. I think for me, it's connectivity. I think if you can make sure that the country is connected and the last mile in terms of the broadband, that would be a good thing to happen. But I would say that I think in terms of the voice technology, in Botswana, we have actually done extremely well. The tele-density at the moment sits at about 170%. And I think then the next challenge now is to make sure that as we have done with the voice technology, we can do the same with data. But again, I still looking at this thing from the perspective of teaching, I think it is important for the student to be active participant in the knowledge economy and make sure that they actually promote the use of ICT. And again, the youth in terms of looking at ICT, they should look at ICT not just as an issue of gadgets, but I think it's business. I think content and application becomes more relevant. I think all being said and done in terms of connectivity, one has to look at one thing as a place of innovation. One could look at content. I think when you look at content, it is very important to look at the local circumstances and ensure that you actually have the solution that can actually go a long way. And this can only happen if the students at a very, very young age are actually encouraged to use ICT as a means of empowering themselves for the future. Thank you. Thank you very much. I want to just turn to the floor. We've heard some challenges remaining. We have about five or six minutes for an opportunity. I'd like the floor to respond to these challenges. I take them up as being the need for a holistic approach, the importance of teacher training, cost, accountability and connectivity and local content. Is there anyone from the floor who would like to get up? And I see a hand going up immediately in the back. I have the solution that's going to solve these problems. So, sir, over to you. I'd keep it three or four very, very brief one-minute interventions over to you. Actually, I'm not... Can you hear me with this? Yeah. I'm not... I don't have a solution, but I have another challenge which hasn't really been raised and which I think is pretty serious. I'm from Vanuatu, Prime Minister's Office in the ICT shop. In Vanuatu, we have over 120 languages and cultures, and we're a bit concerned that this wonderful tsunami of content, mostly in English, is going to swamp those cultures and drown out those languages. And I'm sure that many other countries have that. So I think it's more than just creating a little bit of local content. I think it's trying to use ICTs to celebrate, document, preserve and expand the use of those languages, especially in the schools. And I wonder if my question would be for the panel, is there any country which has really tackled that problem and thought about it and consciously tried to address that issue? Thank you. And I think your neighbour Papua New Guinea has something like 800 languages or so. This is a real, real issue. Okay, I want... Is this a solution, sir? Over to you with the solution. Could a microphone please to this gentleman here? My name is Derek Currie from Telosur and Surinam, from an operator. My suggestion is I'd like to hear the view of the panellists, public-private people partnership. What could, what can companies do in terms of partnering with governments to reduce the, especially having computers in schools, the part of education, but also improving the community's ICTs development. Thank you. And I think it was Ivo here who was saying the importance of parents. I mean, it's not just the public and the private. It's civil society as well. I think we have to move away from rather simplistic definitions of partnership to a much more complex understanding. Is there anyone else from the floor who'd like to just offer a solution? Okay, I'm moving to Zambia. You missed your chance, sorry. Zambia, very briefly, your solution. Thanks, Tim. What we have done in Zambia is we have partnered with the public, with the private public solution. We have put all our languages, digitized them into tablets. So they've gone all the country, all seven languages, they're all on the tablet. So you don't need to have a translator and don't need to have powers. So we've done it already and it's working very well with us. Can you just give us the URL what the people can get access to that? Yes, we'll do that. We'll do that. Say www.ischool.zm. Ischool. Ischool. www.ischool.zm. So try that out. Yes, Ivo, quickly. Yeah, quickly. I mentioned that we did localize about 100 open source applications. We are multinational speaking country and we localize a few languages. But also there is a project that we're doing with open data or in order the government to show transparency. We're opening all the registers and then we're inviting the private sector to create application web services and school applications. So there could be another route for the person in the back who asks of what do you do with the multilingual countries? Thank you very much. Just a couple of weeks ago in Abuja we held an ICT ministers conference as part of the CTO's annual forum and council meeting. And the one message that came away from that is the most important issue ministers faced was indeed ICT for education. And I remember the honorable minister from South Sudan making a very passionate statement then. And I wonder if she would be willing to just share with us some of the challenges that you face and in very, very different difficult circumstances that we may all be able to think of ways of helping you resolve those challenges. Minister. Thank you very much. And I would like to appreciate this opportunity. All the challenges that you have mentioned are the challenges I'm going through at the minister of telecommunications in a new country. That is the Republic of South Sudan. I think many of you here contributed to signing the birth certificate of the Republic of South Sudan in 2011. So if South Sudan was born in 2011 you can imagine all the challenges. But the most important bit is that we don't have to dwell on the complaints and the problems but how do we move forward on that? But it's good to say that talking about education in particular being access even within the towns what we call towns is a big problem. Eliteracy rate is still very, very high above 70 percent. Women are still in the rural all the traditional effects are still on them. Teachers, this has been mentioned here that is just to mention a few and especially those who were trained you know some time back. So now as a government, as a new government, we are working on the policies and I think we have already moved forward with regards to that. But one big challenge I would want to raise also is with regards to the regulatory body that we don't have it so far but we have moved forward and before I came here I made sure that we have moved three steps forward in terms of building our regulatory body and my appeal here is for those who are expertise in regulations please come to our support. We'll appreciate that very much. We believe in transformation yes as a way forward but I think the most important hope I want to leave here in the middle of so many problems and I'm happy the minister from Kenya is here I got his card the other day as a response without even meeting him thank you very much for that is to see the question is how do we make it happen? I think it can happen it's hope that I want to give here for a country like South Sudan that we can make it and it's from the partnership we have and the experiences you have and the expertise you have that's what we need for us to move from this percentage of 70 percent of illiteracy it's only through that partnership and through your support and your help there's one very important point that came up the issue of sensitizing and advocating and I think it came very glaring here in terms of how do we reach people for them to be part of the process is for them to be sensitized and educated and that's a positive one I want to say here that I have been in the office barely two months and a half going to three but I have started from the top leadership because of the political will and imagine appreciating our president and said I was happy to see you in Rwanda on the platform and that is a political will we would want so that we do two-way approach the political will and support and then our work from the grassroots on the people so that we have the rural access and we have that comprehensive education for a country like South Sudan to move in the mainstream so don't leave us behind but we are hopeful thank you thank you very much and it is on that positive looking to the future what next what single piece of advice our panelists would have to offer to those of us who are thinking of embarking on an ambitious new ICT in education initiative that will really transform learning amongst all of our peoples so in one minute each may I just ask the panelists and we'll go this way around this time what single piece of advice would you offer or the single thing that you're going to do next so Botswana I will still say that content and application is the way to go thank you Kenya let us be all inclusive and adopt a holistic approach to the deployment of ICTs otherwise at all times the divide is going to be there if we introduce ICTs as a new thing from the top especially from government it will always be looked at as a government project or as a project for a specific section of society ICTs are intended to transform our lives comprehensively let's adopt a holistic approach in engaging with the deployment of ICTs across the board we are likely to achieve more that way thank you thank you Mr. Lemme start with Gabon we must face up to this challenge face up to this challenge to be able to have a high level education in African countries so these African countries are at the same level as everyone else in the world we can no longer stay behind we must take advantage of this digital revolution to raise our population who must have the same education the same training as developed countries and we would ask that NGOs we hope that all of those who have funds available and can help African countries to reduce the literacy rate as we previously said could help our countries so that we can have a high level of development we must take advantage of ICTs that's true but also we must take advantages of the advantages that we can draw from the of going from the digital moving on to digital and the advantages that we can have so develop special television stations for education on demand and on demand that people can have all the education programs available today African countries have 60% of the population who are less than 30 years old these people were born in digital world and therefore they are receptive to this new technology we must take advantage of this receptiveness to give them the educational content available and necessary we would also hope that as far as Gabon goes we can help make Gabon a real hub of quality education thank you probably the most I think most significant thing that can happen is for countries to look at education and put together a comprehensive plan now that plan is going to span the ministries of ICT in telecom the people in the room it will also span the ministries of education on the government side and there needs to be partnership there because many of the assets you own and many of them the ministries of education own and by coming together all of those assets are there and then sit down with the industry many industry players your local ones the multinational ones and look at the pieces you want and see what's there define an architecture define a plan do it over multi-year and roll it out in steps and I think it's got to come together like a plan rather than pieces and along the way set the policies I want my teachers trained it's a policy I've seen countries that say I want electronic content the book people don't necessarily want to do it until you say I won't buy it two years from now unless it comes in electronic format and paper format all of a sudden the electronic format starts happening and so between that plan and the policies and working with the private industry I think that's where the focus needs to be thank you very much Evo yeah thank you I think everybody has to realize that this is a challenge that will continue and we have to think of a creating sustainable system that it's not here only for one year but it has to be system that will self-sustainable in the years to come one thing that I can recommend is that we mentioned some of these countries that have excellent telephony systems we just created a system where we inform the parents via SMS what are the grades of the students you have to skip classes if he is sick if he's coming to school or not come to school so you can embrace all the technologies in order to improve and to get the parents informed and to get them on board for the school system we also made the policy changes where 30 percent of the classroom activities must be performed on the computer well that's very challenging to track it because you have inspectors that have to go in the classroom so the next step that we're going is that we're using cloud computing where we are preparing a new legislation where every teacher will have a portfolio on cloud on the web and every student will have a portfolio where you can track it constantly and those portfolios will probably be open even for the parents so the parents can track if the teacher is really using the equipment how is his kid performing what are his grades has he been to school has he been obedient or not obedient and so forth so there's a lot of technology available I think we mentioned connectivity summer but with the connectivity you come to compete with video games and you compete with the YouTubes which creates another challenge to create a very expensive content in order to preserve the attention of your students thank you and let's remember the girl child as well and Malaysia the final minute to you yeah I think I go along with John you talk about education plan and for me education plan is part of overall development plan that we have to achieve by every nation every nation they have their own strategy every nation they have their own goal every nation they talk about different kind of nation building that they want and education plan you talk about education plan they have education strategy and ICT is only a part of the whole strategy that we have to do and then you talk about the whole thing that needs an architecture for that so you work on the architect that architecture that you want to achieve for the whole national development plan then we have to put in ICT as part of it thank you thank you very much indeed your excellencies distinguish members of the audience friends ladies and gentlemen that brings us towards the end of our session today we've been brought together here by the ITU and ITUD that Brahim Asanu has the honor to lead has made huge strides in moving this agenda forwards and I'm sure we're all very very grateful to you and the ITU more generally maybe I can just pass the penultimate word to you for one minute of your thoughts and reflections thank you very much team of course it's always very good to be in such audience to listen to all the specialists and also to learn because by itself this round table means a round table is a learning process from the discussion here I must say that I recap that infrastructure and access could be a challenge but more importantly I get from this discussion that even when technology is granted we the people are the problem we the people are the problem be it at a level of grandparents parents as raised by a evil from Macedonia or at the level of teacher or at the level of the kid we the people are the problem this way I think that we should be thinking rather about an ecosystem when we are we are approaching this item I would say ecosystem in the way that we should not be dealing with this issue only at a technical level or technical ministry I would love to see that in this kind of meeting if we could bring also other members of the ecosystem Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health if you could bring them more and more in our meetings this will also a way of raising awareness to those who really are the final I would say beneficiary of what you are doing I think that this link is still missing in our work we have to get to think ecosystem and bring others to to be part of our business last thing I would say the issue of cost was raised here and in my introduction introductory remark I said that in the few years to come 95% of decent work will require ICT skills so when you're talking about the cost maybe you have to ask the question in the other way what would be the cost today of not doing it not the cost of what would be the cost what and the economy today of not doing it so these are the few items I took and of course I thank you very much it gives us an opportunity as BDT to get your insight and that will guide our program I thank you thank you in my contribution to the plenary session on Monday I said the one thing that I wanted us to have was commitment and and listening to the Honourable Rebecca from South Sudan makes me think that our commitment as we walk out from this room has to be to the poorest and the most marginalized our societies making sure that they have access to the wonderful potential that ICTs have to transform education and also to the countries that face the greatest challenges there is no point in you having been here this morning unless when you go away when you leave that door now you commit to making something happen in your countries ministers that is to you but it's to every one of us let us do something different let us do what Brahima has suggested create those joined up policies ensure that teachers are equipped to deliver these powerful technologies and what they offer to our young people commitment to those with disabilities to the girl child let us go out now and make a difference thank you distinguished panelists thank you for being such a fantastic audience let's make a difference thank you