The following are the outputs of the real-time captioning taken during the Eleventh Annual Meeting of the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) in Jalisco, Mexico, from 5 to 9 December 2016. Although it is largely accurate, in some cases it may be incomplete or inaccurate due to inaudible passages or transcription errors. It is posted as an aid to understanding the proceedings at the event, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> MODERATOR: We're starting in two minutes. Let me welcome everyone right now. I'll hand out a piece of paper now before we get started and I want to explain what it is. In the main session I coordinated on Monday, I provided copies of the sustainable development goals. What is on the back you should ignore because it is the agenda for Monday. Don't get confused. Don't even turn it over. I thought it be with nice, since I had all these extra copies, rather than killing another tree, if we just had this to look at.
>> MARILYN CADE: It is my pleasure to invite you all to the workshop on Civil Society and Private Sector -- excuse me just a minute. It is absolutely my privilege and honor to invite you to the workshop 271, Civil Society and the Private Sector, Building ICT Support for SDGs I'll give you two key tips as the moderator you remember when you're here. Be very close to the microphone when you speak. Two, when you are not speaking remember you are being videoed. We're both webcasting, a YouTube video and it is a great opportunity for you to just be aware that you will be making a YouTube video while you are in the room here. That's fantastic because already we're getting reports of the number of hits that some of the previous workshops have gotten. My name is Marilyn Cade. It is my honor to moderate this session. What I would like to do now is ask Garland to speak for three minutes about why this workshop and what this workshop is trying to cover. But before I do that, I'm going to lay out the guidance for how I moderate sessions.
Each speaker has four minutes and I will tell you I have a reputation for adhering to watching the clock. And the reason you have four minutes is so that all of you can speak. We also have two remote speakers and we are very privileged to have a significant delegation from Cuba who will be participating. And some of our Cuban speakers will be speaking in Spanish. While on the one hand we don't have translation in the room, the YouTube video will pick up their Spanish and that means bilingual speakers and Spanish speakers will be able to benefit from the information that they are providing. So I'll kick off. Garland kicks three minutes and I turn my clock on every time somebody new starts speaking. Our goal is to be through in time to allow 10 minutes to hear questions from the audience. That is the thing we will lose if we spend all of our time speaking ourselves. We're leaving here at 6:00 sharp.
>> Thank you. First off, I'm very privileged to work with a distinguished group of co-collaborators, including two who are speaking to us remotely today. We have with us the Union of Informatic Professionals of Cuba. I want to appreciate all the support they've given us to get this all organized. My task is to explain why we are organizing this workshop since some of you have a hard time remembering, as I do all the 17 U.N. sustainable development goals as mentioned, our moderator Marilyn was kind enough to donate these to remind everybody what we're focused on here.
I want to talk a little bit about why we're here, which is again how ICTs and the Internet particularly are examples of how they are supporting the U.N.'s sustainable development goals, including the aspirations across a wide range of issues spanning poverty, hunger, education, justice, economic growth, and infrastructure, to name a few. In all the IGFs have outlined many goals. The critical enabler of the Internet has taken on for both the developed and developing economy, Civil Society and private sector interests must build bridges with government officials and be as inclusive as possible in order to have any chance of achieving any of the SDG goals. If partnerships can be built and maintain robust infrastructure and ICTs and the Internet will be built and used leading to highlighting the enabling role of the Internet as a demonstrated as the following examples.
So we have as the goals we want to focus on, no poverty and decent working and economic growth. We also want to talk about industry, innovation and infrastructure, and that which leads to responsible consumption and production. We want to work -- focus on zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, these are some of the areas we want to focus on. The workshop will identify successful strategies from speakers and participants and develop a set of message for further action to business, Civil Society, NGOs in particular that will be published in the workshop report. Particular attention will be paid to cross-cutting applications targeting sustainable U.N. development goals. With that I'll send it back to our moderator who I extend a great appreciation for taking up the challenge for bringing all this together. Thanks.
>> MARILYN CADE: I am going to introduce now our setting the scene speaker and then just to refresh everybody on Garland has sent out to all the speakers a short version of the timeline. I'll call on speakers by name. I told all of them what the speaking order is and remember I have this horrible time clock but to help out at three minutes when you are speaking I will be waving at you. Yesterday I was doing this to the speakers. I'm trying to be friendlier today. Let me introduce our setting the scenes speaker. In 2014, the MAG, IGF MAG challenged the community to focus on intercessional work on connecting the next billion. At the IGF USA. I'm new as a member of the steering group. We took up the challenge by creating a separate group that was multi-stakeholder by drawn from those interested to develop comments and submit into connecting the next billion on. Manu was the co-chair of that group and went on to take the concepts and turn it into something that has become a global program. Global Connect. He is particularly, I think, well-informed and position to help to talk about setting the stage about this particular workshop and I turn to you now, Manu. Let me just ask you to introduce yourself and your title and then your opening remarks.
>> MANU BHARDWAJ: Thank you, Marilyn. I'm the senior advisor to the under Secretary of State, U.S. government. I'm so honored to be here today. As we all feel the Internet's power is its universality and we all know and recognize that there is so much to do to make sure that everyone benefits from that. The digital divide is a very significant obstacle and barrier and to try to help catalyze and mobilize multi-stakeholder action, especially some of the stakeholders represented here today, with we launched the Global Connect Initiative. The initiative has two major aims. One is to try to bring 1.5 billion people online by 2020. The second is to highlight the connection between the Internet and the sustainable development agenda. We launched the initiative actually when the 2030 sustainable development agenda was agreed upon in New York and we have taken a great measures to highlight to all stakeholders, all government actors the critical role the Internet can provide in really kind of providing gender equality, quality education, good health, zero hunger.
Since the launch of the initiative, we have put together a number of principles along these lines and I'm very pleased to tell you that over 40 countries now are supporting this international endeavor. As we kind of think about how to really help countries, we've taken a listening first approach where we're looking to kind of really partner with stakeholders, Civil Society groups, industry members, governments, anyone who can benefit, whether it's more technical assistance from our U.S. agencies like the federal communications commission or NTIA, development assistance from bodies like U.S. trade and development authority or even try to secure financing for governments through the multi-lateral development banks and development finance institutions.
And as a result of this effort, which, you know, has been led by Secretary Kerry and also President Kim of the World Bank I'm pleased to tell you we've been able to identify and mobilize and catalyze 65 global actions valued at over $20 billion. This is quite I think an achievement in terms of at least both being able to identify global programs that aren't just government programs, but industry programs or NGO programs and by doing that also give them more visibility and financial support and I'm very excited that a number of the companies and stakeholders here today were kind of included in that final document.
As we think about how we can maybe work together moving forward, I think it would be very critical for us to identify specific policies or practices that Civil Society and stakeholders would really like us to champion as part of this initiative. We come to the IGF every year because we know the stakeholder community here can help us strengthen our outreach and strengthen our efforts and we're looking the try to meet local needs, particularly those in Cuba and elsewhere. And I'm just looking forward to the discussion and also available to talk afterwards to anybody who is interested in learning more about the Global Connect Initiative. Thank you so much to Marilyn and to also Garland.
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you, Manu. Now I really want -- I'll check with Garland who is checking in with our first speaker, Salam. If he is not ready to go right now we'll move to the next speaker. Let me introduce Salam Al Waeli, the Deputy Director of the Arab ICT Association, and also a fellow board member of mine in an NGO called WAVE, the Women's Alliance for Virtual Exchange founded by Arab women to advance ICT access for women and girls in the region, and he is co-located in both Lebanon and in Washington, D.C. And we're ready to go.
>> SALAM AL WAELI: Thank you very much, Marilyn. Allow me to first welcome the speakers and participants on behalf of the organizer for this workshop. Just wanted to quickly shed the light on a few initiatives that we have implemented in the Middle East and North Africa, and particularly in Lebanon. In Lebanon as we know, in rural areas of Lebanon, national Internet service providers are the big Internet service providers usually do not operate in the rural areas, that's because of the relatively poor economic situation and the low income of families. So as a result of that, young entrepreneurs and small businesses usually leave these areas and move to larger cities where they have better access to Internet infrastructure and where they can more efficiently operate their business. That again results in even worse economic situations in these rural areas. And the vicious circle continues.
Our intervention was to work together with the national Internet service providers and try to find a way out of this vicious circle. And the initiative we implemented involved leveraging contribution and in-kind contribution from international hardware and telecom manufacturing hardware companies and providing the needed infrastructure equipments for establishing infrastructure in these rural areas, and that covers basically most of the capital expenses or the cap ex for the Internet service providers leaving them with only the operational expenses to cover and that makes more business sense for these Internet service providers. So as a result of this initiative, we have implemented this initiative in two different areas in Lebanon and the model was very successful. And very replicate-able where we reached out to more than 1,000 subscribers, including households and small businesses and schools and other beneficiaries.
The other initiative I wanted to very quickly -- I know we don't have much time but I wanted to very quickly share as a success story for using technology for sustainable development is the creation of the women's alliance for virtual exchange. This is a network of more than 40 women associations and Civil Society organizations from the Middle East, North Africa and central Asia that work together through a virtual exchange and collaboration platform that enables them to share their own success stories and best practices and resources. And also to work together on jointly advocating for regional and local women issues. As a success story, this very group of women's alliance for virtual exchange, wave, has been very active in touch important issues as Internet governance and in 2014 in Istanbul they have organized an IGF workshop and the focus was about gender balance and gender equality in Internet governance. Bringing women Civil Society organizations together from the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia and getting them through the use of technology to work together as one voice and one force to advocate towards gender balance and equality within Internet governance multi-stakeholderism. We think this is a beautiful story to share. Thank you.
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you very much.
(Applause)
And now I'm going to turn please, if I may, to you, Gonzalo.
>> GONZALO LOPEZ-BARAJAS HUDER: This is Gonzalo. My company is Telephonica and financial Spanish institution like ISA. The project is targeting Latino America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. The objective is to provide high quality elementary education so that boys and girls have equal opportunities. And the project is based on three pillars. One is the technological platform, it is a suitcase including a laptop, 25 tablets, and mini projector which has not to be connected to the Internet so that the platform can be used anywhere. But that thanks to connecting to the Internet can update all the contents. So the second pillar of the platform is the educational content which basically includes three parts, one is languages -- language capabilities, the other one is science, digital and math and the third one is issues to help the lives and to improve the lives of the kids and health related issues. The third pillar of the platform is based on educating the teachers. We cannot just leave the platform and leave, so basically what we are also doing is educating the teachers in the use of the platform in the digital skills, educating also some local coordinators that will help these teachers to provide all the education.
And the project has been first launched in Angola. We have been providing education to nine schools and reaching over 2,700 students. And the project will be extended to farther 60 schools in early February 2017. And as I said, one of the things of this project is we are aiming to expand the project not in the areas where Telephonica has operations but mainly in Latino America, Sub-Saharan Africa and southeast Asia.
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: That's fantastic and very interesting. I'll turn to Ellen Blackler from Walt Disney. You're on.
>> HELEN BLACKLER: Thank you, I'm Ellen Blackler. I failed on the task of turning on my -- I'll talk about consent creation and the role it plays in the landscape. I think it's -- there is a lot of discussion about how ICTs underpin all of the SDGs and our ability to meet them. I think we see locally relevant content creation underpinning ICTs. People adopt the technology when they think there is something relevant to do with the technology. We've focused on the question of how to improve the amount of locally relevant content that is available. I can talk about two projects that we've done and what we think the lessons learned with from those.
One project is in Latin America. We have really followed the lead of a wonderful NGO called CHICOS.net that has developed a whole range of programs to engage kids in technology, teach parents what they need to know to help their kids use technology safely. And not just safely, but really take advantage of all that the technology has to offer. So they have really developed a program that focuses on enabling children and empowering children to take advantage of the technology. I encourage you to go to their website and see everything they have available there.
Secondly, they provide training to children, parents and teachers throughout Latin American. Secondly, we in Africa -- I can talk a bit about the program we have conducted on the other end of the spectrum, which is developing professional content such as movies and television from local voices. We work with a company there called trigger fish animation, which had identified the barrier to these programs being developed as the script development, that these are artistic endeavors that take a lot of support and there wasn't the support and infrastructure really available in Africa that was having people have the resources to develop scripts that they could make into movies. They ran a script contest on the continent, got 1400 ideas and then spent a lot of time mentoring and helping the winners of that contest develop their ideas and they are now shopping them around to major networks for some programming.
The lessons learned that I want to impart for these kind of projects are from a commercial standpoint a company like ours who really is not in the business of doing these things directly, the importance is following the lead of a local partner. Both these projects were things that the local partners were doing and we found a way to be supportive of them as opposed to being led by us. Secondly, these things really take a long-term commitment, script takes about three years to go from an idea to on your television or on your Internet connection. So it is not the case that you can do this in a one-off kind of way and lastly, I've gotten the hook from Marilyn, it's really important to understand the piece of the problem that is the barrier and focus on that piece. In the script example, they had identified this really one piece of the value chain that was getting in the way and focused on that as opposed to other pieces where there was more financing available.
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: Ellen, thank you very much. I particularly like this lessons learned suggestion about a global company really making themselves local by partnering with local partners is a really great hint that I think we'll want to try to capture in our summary. I am going to go down, Deputy Minister, to you. I'm particularly pleased to welcome you as this is, I believe, your first IGF. So welcome.
>> H.E. AIMAL MARJAN: Thank you very much, Marilyn. It's my pleasure to be in this workshop. My name is H. E. Aimal Marjan, Deputy Minister for the Ministry of Communication of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. Let me tell you what the Government of Afghanistan is doing for the sake of sustainable development goals. First of all, we have a holistic approach to the sustainable development goals. I would be very happy to share with you that one of our success stories in Afghanistan is national solidarity program which is actually focusing more on rural areas and the uniqueness of this program is to get priorities from the people and through community development councils. This has been going on for the last 10 to 12 years and significant changes have been brought in the lives of people in the rural areas. Recently a modified version of this program has been launched by the president of Afghanistan, which is actually addressing the challenges faced in the cities as well. Simultaneously on gender equality. A very unique program has been launched called promote. This program is targeting people. It is 260 million dollar program which is for five years. And I would say it's the largest program in the country in terms of women's involvement. It has four main components of women in economy, women in leadership, women in government and women coalitions. In the telecom sector I would like to mention on how ministry of communication technology is dealing with the issues we have. First of all, the ministry of communication has been actively involved in terms of ensuring a sustainable and enabling environment for businesses to grow and innovations to happen. By crafting policy and legal framework in the related areas. Some -- despite different policy papers, the ministry was able to craft policy, each transaction policy, each signature policy which is ratified. In the telecom sector I am pleased to share with you we have been successful around 200,000 jobs have been created and investment of 2.3 billion since the last two years have been invested. Which is a second revenue generating sector after the customs and finances revenues. And it is growing.
At the same time, in terms of uniqueness of the business opportunities and a business incubator program has been launched. Purpose of this program was to develop businesses by providing capacity building so that they can run their own and create jobs, wealth and technology. In terms of telecom infrastructure, installation of fiber-optics network around the country was launched in 2011 and will finish in 2017 with the worth of $50 million connecting all cities of Afghanistan with high-speed data and wire services. Digital CASA, a regional connectivity component is another major program which is launched by supported by the World Bank. It has $90 million funding and the purpose is to link Afghanistan, which is a mainly landlocked country, to the other states to be able to do more communication. And this is going to change Afghanistan into a communication hub. On education and health services, support for quality education and health services and also cultural pride of Afghanistan government. This is financed by a telecom fund. And it is actually helping schools and services in terms of health to be able to provide better services to our people.
I am sorry to be able to -- was not able to complete it but thank you very much for your attention. My time I think is over.
>> MARILYN CADE: For now.
(Applause)
But we are really -- it's Marilyn again speaking. We will try to capture this and be able to come back to you and make sure we capture the rest of it. Fascinating update and I also welcome you to your first IGF. I'm going to turn now to Iffat Gill. If not we'll move to the next speaker. Let's try Iffat first.
>> IFFAT GILL: Hi.
>> MARILYN CADE: Yes, it's Marilyn. Welcome.
>> IFFAT GILL: Hi. Good evening to everyone from Amsterdam. It is midnight here. One second, I just lost my documents. I know we are limited as far as time is concerned so I will just get straight to the point. My name is Iffat Gill, the founder of an initiative called the Code to Change. We are working on economically empowering women through the additional skills gap. We know the Internet is acting as a great tool for development in many people's lives around the globe. But it also comes with a lot of challenges. I'm going to focus here on the digital skills gap. We've been working on this initiative for the last two to three years and what we focus on is that we work with professional women and young graduates to empower them to join the tech force. We try our best to include special groups like refugees, survivors of domestic violence and women from village backgrounds in addition to our regular applicants who come and join our program. Now, in this program what we focus on specifically is the -- how you can get back into -- get reintegrated into the workforce if you have not joined it yet, or if you had left it as a woman for a brief period of time for whatsoever reason. We work through mentorship and we pair our people with mentors so that they can help them in their learning journey.
What we noticed throughout our work is while there is a lot of learning resources available online, but when you are starting -- when you are thinking of starting a new career, for example, or starting to think of okay, I want to change my direction now in life, there is a lot of content available online but it is so overwhelming that if you are a newcomer people often don't know where the start. So for our projects in Europe, this is exactly what we do. We give people a starting point where they can start learning to access the jobs that are available right now especially in the technology sector. To give you two examples of what are some of our mentees are doing. One who came from a marketing sector. She was in our boot camp. She worked with her mentor for five months and learned how to code and metering all the water taps in the City of Amsterdam and built a web-based application on that. And this is somebody who had absolutely no background whatsoever in coding and she managed to make this great app in a matter of months.
Second story I would like to share here is a story from our mentee who built an app also from scratch with the help of her mentor on how to locate schools that are suitable to your needs close to -- that are close to your neighborhood. These are some examples that came out of our program. I would also like to share a little bit about our work in the developing world.
For our work in the developing world, what we noticed is the challenges are slightly different. Of course, there is the major lack of spaces issue, there is the social and cultural issues. There is the online harassment issue. There is a local content issue. But of course at the same time there are a lot of women who still want to build their capacity to be able to join the workforce. Skills gap is again shows repeatedly that this is again an issue because these were women working within the developing world, they do not have the safe spaces to go and learn those skills. The issue that they have is also somewhat similar. They also don't know where they can go, where they can start learning. So I think this is very important that we are trying to do is that we are giving these women a starting point and saying okay, if you want to go in certain direction, this is where you can start. And it really helps to have the collaboration of different stakeholders especially the technology industry and have professionals from the industry mentor these women so they can really take the necessary steps to succeed in the job market.
I would like to add we really need to start highlighting role models from these underrepresented groups that are around us. So that we can enable these communities to include their voices as well. I would say we need to continue working together with all stakeholders for inclusion of these groups and I would like to end by saying I think we need, of course, we need all the different stakeholders to work together but we need more and more involvement from the I.T. sector to give back to the underprivileged and underrepresented local communities. Thank you.
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you. In particular thank you so much for being with us at midnight. I was privileged to be able to work with her at the forum as we were high level track facilitators and learned a lot about the work she was doing in a workshop that she had organized. I look forward to seeing you at the forum and thank you for being with us so late. I'll move on now to two of our Cuban speakers. Let me say what an absolute pleasure it is for me, who I spent so much of my life recently working in the Internet governance area but also in the IGOs, the intergovernmental organizations and I've been very privileged to have been able to work with a wonderful colleague from Cuba, Juan Fernandez who has been extremely helpful in the process in engaging the Cuban ambassador and your government in helping us. All to be attentive. Let me welcome you if I met. Please, four minutes. Let me just remind that YouTube will capture the Spanish.
(No Spanish interpretation)
>> MARILYN CADE: You get the award for speaking not only brilliantly, but fast. This is a fabulous.
>> Four minutes.
>> MARILYN CADE: I gave you 30 extra seconds. Four minutes for a professor. She needs a round of applause.
(Applause)
Tatiana, I am so envious because I was the one that wanted to come to Cuba but Garland got to go to Cuba for your fabulous event. Welcome and I turn to you for four minutes.
>> TATIANA DELGADO: Thank you. My name is Tatiana Delgado.
(No Spanish interpretation)
>> This is a capacity building experience, a joint capacity building experience from Mexico and Cuba. And the objective is to develop a course with two characteristics. The first one you have seen the -- as the strategy and the innovation as a method, okay? And we could weigh the performance of the students in goals. And in our experience, the professionals of Cuba is preparing a new course into a program of innovative -- digitally innovation in Cuba in order to contribute to the achievement of the goals. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: I'm just going to say, Marilyn speaking, I was earlier in a workshop that was talking about the need to rethink our educational approach because of what is happening in technology but also the need to better understand water, electricity, all of those things. And we must we think how education works. What a fabulous, fabulous -- look forward to learning more. I'll go to Sarah from Facebook now. And I'm going to give you guys a little time check. We will get all the speakers in but we are going to only have 10 minutes at the end. So you are fine if you stay with your four minutes we'll get all the speakers in and have 10 minutes for summing up.
>> SARAH WILLIAMS: Hi, I'm Sarah Williams, Director of Global Policy at Facebook. I want to return the conversation back to the SDGs to give you some of Facebook's experience with the SDGs. So about two years before the SDGs were finalized we started to pay attention because we were very focused as a company on connectivity. It is the lifeblood of Facebook and where we see one of our biggest challenges. So we went to the United Nations secretariat and secretary general and said everything we're seeing suggests there is nothing on connectivity in the SDGs. We haven't been involved in the conversation, you aren't engaging Civil Society on connectivity issues and basically what we were told is do you really think connectivity is more important than ending hunger? Do you really thing connectivity is more important than access to clean water? Do you really think connectivity is more important than well-being? And it was sobering meeting because we couldn't honestly say in a hierarchy where connectivity sits. We were aiming for an 18th box that said connectivity. This is something we should all aim for.
I have to admit we were pleasantly surprised when we saw goal 91C. The goal that says we should be aiming for universal connectivity by 2020. Hands up who in here thinks we'll meet universal connectivity by 2020? It's nice to have one optimist. I think the fact that that's the goal is indicative of the lack of engagement with this community in formulating that goal. Because I think it's clearly an unrealistic goal. Our response to this was to identify that there is a lack of awareness of connectivity and to really engage. When I say engage, we went to the top. We sent our CEO to the summit where the SDGs were finalized. I was lucky enough to accompany him to New York. He gave a speech and he said the missing element here is connectivity. We didn't need the 18th box. Connectivity is essential to every single one of the SDGs here.
If you really want to improve access to education you have to improv connectivity. If you are going to reduce inequality you'll bridge the digital divide. If you get to a place of sustainable cities you'll need to harness connectivity and increase access. The challenge for us is keeping up the awareness and building out exactly what this session is supposed to be about. Partnerships. Partnerships with Civil Society. Partnerships with government. One of the ways we've tried to do this is we've joined forces with one and we've started a campaign called the connectivity declaration. It has been signed by pop stars, everyone. If you haven't signed it please sign it. We've continued an education campaign around this. Two weeks ago Zuckerberg flew to Peru. We were lucky enough to have an opportunity to have a round table with all the heads of state and you know what we talked about? We talked about the importance of connectivity and the importance of connectivity in achieving is SDGs and the responsibility of all of us to work together to do it. How we can improve and I would love you to join us in trying to raise awareness of the importance of connectivity within the sustainable development goals. Thank you.
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you for that. We are going to move to Ivan now and you will speak in Spanish I believe, right? Thank you so much for coming.
IVAN BARRETO: (No Spanish translation)
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you so much. And one of the things I'm really looking forward to is for those of you who spoke in Spanish to also share your written notes so that we'll be able to get those translated and include more detail for the non-Spanish speakers in our summary report. But I really want to thank you for coming and I want to compliment Cuba as well for -- I'm on the MAG. I tell you, it was quite impressive the number of workshop and flash session proposals and to see Cuba so well represented here at the IGF this year. Now I'll go to our last Cuban speaker and we'll go to our final speaker before we take some questions and answers. And may I please introduce yourself and then –
>> (No Spanish translation)
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you so much. I am now going to introduce someone -- yes? I'm now going to introduce our last speaker, and I want to share with you actually I have two more speakers, first of all I'll introduce Sam Paltridge our next to the last speaker and I'll turn to Jimson. How many years ago I met Sam when he was at the OECD and I was the vice president for Internet policy and e-commerce at AT&T and I was very privileged -- I was of AT&T computer systems and privileged to be able to represent AT&T at the OECD on all of the very early e-commerce days back in the days when as far as I could tell Sam and I knew what it meant and most of the rest of the world didn't care. I was three and he was five. It has been a long time ago. Maybe it was the other way around, Sam. Let me ask you to introduce yourself and we welcome your comment.
>> SAM PALTRIDGE: Thank you very much, Marilyn. And thank you for the invitation to speak on this panel. I think I'll pick up a couple of minutes because Sarah made quite of few of the points I was going to make. I will hold up an OECD publication for the camera. This is the broadband policy for Latin America and the Caribbean we did. It is available in Spanish and English and free to download online. And the reason I'm holding it up is the first table in there is exactly the same as the table that Marilyn passed around on the SDGs. But what we tried to do in that table was see -- really address Sarah's point about communications and how communications helps with each of those. I haven't got time to go through 17 of them. I will just mention three. Probably only have time for two actually. So the first one is health and wellness. What we did in this publication was to look for both good practices and examples from the region on how we were using communications to meet their goals in the health area, for example, Columbia and Chile, there is examples described in here for both addressing dungy fever and diabetics. A case from Peru which looks at maternal care and how that's saving the lives of many women by improving the information that's available to them using simple technologies like SMS but making the information available to them.
The second example is quality education, which I think is number four. Again, there are some wonderful examples in here from Costa Rica and Uruguay how they're using online and Chile where they use tax credits for I.T. training. I'll stop there because I think I've made the points I wanted to make. I encourage you to download the publication. It is free and it has many more examples than I've had time to talk about today. Thank you very much.
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you, Sam. One of the things that I want to reference before I turn to Jimson is the acknowledgement that I think we're all seeing as we hear about really exciting examples and illustrations. And yet we have no really single place to go or even a hub to go to, a portal which would help us find these fantastic examples and illustrations. And when we get to the summing up I will talk a little bit about some of the observatories and ask your feedback about how you think we could do a better job of sharing information. I'm going to introduce Jimson. He made the mistake of speaking to me at a world IT Services Alliance meeting a number of years ago when he was on the board, and I invited him to become involved in the Internet Governance Forum and to become a MAG member and to be appointed to the Commission on -- the U.N. Commission for Science and Development. And he was very, very active in some of the global fora representing the voice of African business. As a result of his engagement in these global forums he decided to make a change within his own region on how the voice on SDGs and other businesses can be engaging with their governments and also in the global forum to really I say this very sincerely, change the face of business who speaks in some of these forums and to make sure the voices of business from the developing countries in particular, Africa to you. Jimson, kudos to you for that and to you, please.
>> JIMSON OLUFUYE: Thank you very much. I don't need to introduce myself anymore since you did a fantastic job. Well, my day job is as CEO of contemporary consult ants, an IT firm where we work on basic Internet space. We -- as she said we -- private sector has not been engaging effectively in the multi-stakeholder model in Africa. And so in 2012, along with my colleagues, six of my colleagues from six countries, we got together and formed Africa ITA alliance and between then and now we have grown to membership from 27 African countries. The vision is to fulfill the problems of the digital age for everyone in Africa. That is true mission of using all technology available to get people connected, to get people informed, and aware and to be a partnership among businesses. We believe strongly that if people are not properly informed, you can be -- because lack of information and knowledge is also directly responsible for poverty. And many of the goals that United Nations wants to really achieve.
So one of the ways we go about that is by having summits in different countries. We use that opportunity to engage with the government, to engage the associations and also to bring good practices, good government practices. And so we've had so many meeting in Nigeria, we've had in Egypt. We also had to South Africa and two months ago we had the latest edition in Namibia. We came out with some declarations like the win hope declaration. Something came out of that event. The private sector were actually got to deploy connectivity services to the interior and they've been trying to meddle with government but they couldn't get through. There has been a gap. With that summit the minister was around and the private sector was around so that brought them together. And I checked with my colleague in Namibia last night and he said yes, they are really making progress with their discussion because the private sector has the funding. They just need government approval to get it going. These kind of things we are committed to doing. Bridging the gap.
The gap is really wide in Africa. Very, very wide. And we believe again that policies, laws, and regulations need to be updated. In fact, it was in Namibia, their declaration that they just have to review all their policy frameworks so that they can align with the goals, the SDGs, too, is realizing these objectives. I think that applies to every developing nation because many policies are outdated. Need to review your national strategies. Some strategies are outdated. They need to be reviewed to set priorities again. And also we are committed to creating about a million jobs by 2020. Many of our members are into service provision and we feel we can put some packages together to make it possible.
Finally, I would like to use the opportunity to appreciate Marilyn. She is always there when we have summit and she adds tremendous value to our discussion. Thank you very much.
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: Well, I'm going to Jimson, thank you. I'm going to speak to one of the tangible outcomes that came from the meeting in Namibia. The model that you are using -- I want to comment on it before we go to the open mic. The model that you are using, it is a model of bringing business to government to influence government. And then to also include the other stakeholders. Because very often -- and you shared this with me -- if -- your idea was if you cannot change the policies, the investment, help to create jobs, then you can't change the other policies effectively. I will just say that we have been trying for some time from the national and regional IGF to get Namibia launching a national project. I met the Namibia -- I convinced him if I came to Namibia, that he would agree to commit someone from his staff to work with Civil Society and the local ICT Association and Alliance for Affordable Internet to stand up a planning group and Namibia will hold its first national IGF initiative in June of next year. I like to say very often apparently it's true that showing up is 90% of the job.
I want to go to taking questions from those participating and we have about 10 minutes because I'm really going to speed up the summary. Can I see a show of hands of anyone who wants to ask a question? We already have a first volunteer from Pakistan who is going the make a quick statement.
>> I have been to other issues we have taken but one of the things that with reference to gender equality.
>> MARILYN CADE: Sorry.
>> With reference to gender equality, we have two -- the one thing is very important that our minister is also a lady, female minister, and secondly that she is a member of the commission United Nations, so she is very dynamic and fortunately we have a chairman also. Everything is -- you know, things are on a track towards development. The main project, number one, there is a better model in Pakistan that they have offices, all their centers all over Pakistan. The government Pakistan has taken the initiative and developed ICT for project. These centers, the young girls are trained on different, you know, tools so that they may work in the -- in their offices or you will say that enhancing employment potential for the young girls. That is one thing.
Second we have also launched a projects that trained female specialists and what we conducted trainings and augmented reality. These two all women have been trained from all over Pakistan and with the aim that they would train other females in their regions. So train the training program. Those are the two projects with reference to gender equality I want to bring in the notice of this forum. Thank you.
(Applause)
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you so much. And thank you for coming. I'm already seeing a trend here that we are getting a lot of really good illustrations of projects that really should be called solutions. Because they are beginning to make a difference. Can I see a show of hands? I have one -- let me do a little queue here. Anyone else that is standing in line to speak as the second speaker? If not, perhaps we'll start with you before I assign Mark a question.
>> Thank you, my name is Tony. I come from Uganda. I work for an organization called BOSCO Uganda. It is a system for community outreach. This was an ICT platform that we developed nine years ago in 2007. This platform started when our people were isolated in the camps. Many of the people in northern Uganda were displaced. So we decided to come up with an idea of trying to help people reach out to one another who are not within the -- this platform worked well. Up to now as I talk we have deployed about 32 community ICT centers. In the community ICT centers we have different activities that we do. We have computer-based training for trainers of trainer who are from the community itself. We have entrepreneurship training that I embedded into the computer trainings. We have energy and solar training because our project uses battery and solar. So we want community to be aware of the benefits of the batteries and the solar. Not only to run the computer center, but also to use it to do other activities like running their businesses, generating for them income. Because the computers were only being used to enhance their literacy level. So this has been one of the key things that we see as part of the gap that was there.
My mother was talking about the gaps that are there in Africa, I think they are real and also my sister Sarah was also talking about confirmation of some of those things that we need to do to enhance connectivity in the community. I think our benefits to the community as some of the not for profit and service providers, I think there is a need to help the rural community much more than that. But as we talk now, there are actually limitations to some extent. There are some policies that don't favor the implementation of program in rural communities. Enhancement of policies is one of the things. Policies need to be revised. Policies online need to be revised and cost enhancement, especially to the rural communities who are not enriched by many of these services. Many in our community aren't benefiting, those not connected to fiber, and then those who are off grid. So the benefit is actually -- we need to enhance some of the policies that help our communities benefit these kind of services. Thank you so much.
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you.
(Applause)
>> Thank you very much. I manage trade and economic issues in Asia Pacific for Google. I want to pick up on the point raised by Sarah and Sam around connectivity being a driver behind all the sustainable development goals and I fully agree with that. To think that through a bit I would love to understand from those in the development community what is that understood and brought into in that community. Are there areas that are a focus and what could technology companies do more to bring that awareness through into the development side of things?
>> MARILYN CADE: Thank you, Andrew. As this is not actually a development community I'll park that question as one of the questions that comes out of our discussion. Marilyn speaking again. One of the things that I'm hearing -- I just want to go back to the purpose of this -- of organizing this workshop and why the MAG approved it. And it's, of course, the great write-up and proposal is online but one of the things that happened is the MAG asked Cuba, who had a great proposal and the other proposal to merge, because they recognized the value of trying to bring the stories together. I think that's something that I am really hearing here. I've heard great illustrations. I've heard some commonalities and one commonality that I keep hearing is digital capacity, digital skills that connectivity may be a building block but mere connectivity is not enough. We know that but then we have to think about even if we are able to get the devices affordable or we are able to address the ability to access the Worldwide Web, we really must address the kind of meaningful applications. Some of you have described the meaningful application side of it, E-agriculture, E-training, etc.
So I'll try to do a bit of a summary and circulate it to the speakers. Here is the question that comes most to my mind as someone who is also aware of the work that is going on in developing observatories. There is a lot of conversation about how to capture examples and put them into a useful format or useful space. We all know that we can use a search engine. I never use a trademark name for the generic term. We can all use a search engine. We get a list there. That is not a curated -- it is fantastic but today I think we need to start looking ahead and say how can we do something that would gather more of these great examples so if I'm a development person or interested in a particular topic like E-agriculture I would quickly be able to find examples of how, CTs are addressing the SDGs from different countries and with different approaches. I think that's something we should all be thinking about. Just having a workshop here where we think eight or nine great examples needs to catalyze our thinking about well, if we have eight or nine examples here, there must be hundreds to thousands of useful illustrations of Civil Society, of the private sector, of the public sector, working together to address the SDG goals.
My call to action for all of us is to think what would we recommend about how we do more to bring the development community, Andrew, to your point, together with this community and begin to talk then about how we take the information and take it local? We can talk about public policy at a global level, and we are here at the IGF and elsewhere. But we can't implement it at a global level. We have to be able to implement it at a national level and a local level so that it fits and reflects, but also has some congruency with the goals of the SDG. I really appreciate all of you coming and speaking. I am going to wrap us up now and I am going to thank you again. Garland will be circulating to the speakers a summary helped by his cohort on the phone with us Anders Halvorson. For any of you with other inputs you want to share, please see Garland. I am now going to close the workshop and ask you to provide a round of applause in addition to thanking our great staff, our great local staff and our Mexican host and our remote -- Anders is participating remotely. Our remote speakers. All of you as well.
(Applause)
Now the workshop is closed.
(Session ended at 6:00 PM CT)