 Welcome to WTIS 16, from Habaron in Botswana, and I'm very pleased to be joined in the studio right now by Dr Cosmos Zava Zava, who is the Chief of Department of Projects and Knowledge Management for ITU. Cosmos, thank you very much for being with us in the studio today. Thank you for inviting me. Now, I'd like to start off by talking a little bit about the main challenges and barriers faced by those who are not yet participating in the Information Society. Perhaps you could talk a little bit about that. Absolutely. There are many factors that are inhibiting uptake of I-Cities. One of them happens to be lack of capacity on the part of individual households to get the new gadgets and to embrace their cities. Second could be regulator as well, that does a stifle competition. And then thirdly, maybe I would say affordability. People want to use I-Cities and modern technologies, but they don't have the buying power and that inhibits. A literate level is also another factor because the lower the literate level, the less the individuals are able to use high value services. For example, financial inclusion or telemedicine or e-education or m-education. So those are some of the factors that are slowing down the process of creating a truly global information society. And what policies and regulatory steps do you think that governments can take to drive investment to foster public-private partnerships so as to expand I-Cities access to all their citizens, including those at the bottom of the pyramid? One of the factors is an issue of sovereign risk. When you do sovereign risk analysis, you are trying to see whether the government will backtrack on these policies and the predictability of the environment. So a pure pro I-City framework in terms of regulation has got to be predictable, it has to be fair, it has to be nondiscriminatory. And that's what the investor is looking for. Then at the same time, the investors go where the money is. They want to return on investment and behind them share holders who are crying to get their return and to get dividends in the end. So I think basically it is important for the government to create an enabling environment starting with appropriate policies and then coming down to an appropriate legal framework and also to a good pro I-City regulated framework. And then capacity building becomes also a good issue. So the general investment environment must be good and also I think there must be opportunities to expand the business. Now here we're pretty much looking at statistics. We're the launch of the MIS report here. I wanted to ask from you how can data statistics help to understand and address the changes brought about by I-CTs? I think statistics are the thing because if you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. So the most important thing is to be able to say I am putting my finger to check the pulse and you can do that by making sure that you have the figures to pick it up. So we take the national statistical offices and we take the regulatory authority who rely on the operators to submit data and they have to validate it but at the same time there is a kind of data which is household based which comes from the national statistical office. When they work together we have better results and it is important to do that because the government has to make sure that everybody is served. And that's why you find the regulator, most of them have got a universal service fund to make sure that people can go to the rural communities where they return on investment for the private sector is not granted so they give a subsidy. But at the same time when they are doing that it is also important to make sure that the regulators play their role, the investors play their role, the users play their role. So I think that is the key issue and the statistics helps because it shows you a roadmap, it shows you where the investment opportunities are, it is a self-correcting mechanism, it is a feedback. So if I go and I assess and I look at the figures and I see that there is a gap, I have to make sure that my policy is refined, my regulator framework is refined, the other measures like capacity building and so forth are refined so that everything is in tune. Find me, a question which would be interesting to hear your response on, should people be apprehensive about the impact of ICTs on their lives? Well I think some people use a very good example, a table knife can be a metal weapon, right? So I think everything people can be apprehensive of if a motor vehicle can hit you and kill you. So what I think is there are great opportunities in ICTs but naturally there is also the dark side of ICTs. This is why in ITU we make sure that we bring together all the elements of the Jigsaw puzzle, for example cyber security, so that we police the information highway. And by so doing we make people less apprehensive and what we then say is that make good use of the information society but making sure that you safeguard yourselves from the ills of it. Things like child pornography, things like money laundering, things like terrorism, there are many factors. I think governments are taking measures when we go across the world in the least developed countries even you see that they have got a national ICT policy and they take into account in the legal framework, the legal pieces of legislation that they have also addressing all those issues including the issues of privacy. Because privacy invasion is a big thing and then money laundering comes in and many other ills. So I think people need not to be apprehensive but the legal framework is good to be very strong if I give you an example of big data or when you go on the web and you are asked to read the agreement and it's 45 pages and then if you don't click there is a refusal of service and that should not happen. So I think there is no need to be apprehensive but what is important is to be prepared and to embrace and to know how to manage the environment. Some great advice there, thank you very much indeed and thanks for being in the studio today and we look forward to catching up with you again soon. Always a pleasure, thank you. Thank you. Cheers, thank you. Thanks very much again for viewing and please check out our other videos on the IT YouTube channel. Thank you.