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.
***
RAW FILE
INTERNET GOVERNANCE FORUM 2016
ENABLING INCLUSIVE AND SUSTAINABLE GROWTH
JALISCO, MEXICO
8 DECEMBER 2016
WORKSHOP 16
CREATING AN ENABLING ENVIRONMENT FOR INCLUSIVE
ECONOMY USING
10:30
>> MODERATOR: Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I'm Nirvana Farrag, director general. On behalf of the cabinet information and decision support center, I would like to express my thanks to the organizers of the Internet Governance Forum for giving us the chance to organize our first open forum in this distinguished event. The IGF is considered one of those notable interactive and pro ductive for ra to provide.
In our attempt to support the decision‑makers with evidence‑based policy support, we would like to tackle the question of our forum, how to create an enabling environment. Address aspects of enabling ICT in achieving inclusive and its impact on sustainable development from a multistakeholder's perspective including representatives from international organizations, private sectors and policy make rs. To try to answer this question, we would like to shed the light on several areas to be tackled by the distinguished speakers. First, ICT accessibility and affordability has increased knowledge has been reachable to more than to more ever before in human history in living in a human society without ICT is unimaginable. It has been a critical factor in global economies impacting relationships between individuals, organizations and countries. Second, there is a great potential for improving the quality of life of citizens through using ICT. ICT tools offer effective solutions to address social economic issues for the provisions for better health, education, public services and including transportation and others. Hans transformed the landscape for development where ICT has become one of the most powerful enablers for achieving development. That's why we are glad to have speakers coming from different domains to highlight those opportunities for developments. Disparities between developed and developing countries in accessing ICT known as the digital divide, ICT provides opportunities to help developing countries to take advantage of new technologies such as the Internet of Things to address the social and economic problems, to ensure that developing countries including Egypt fully benefit from the emergence of the global information society to achieve real development. Citizens in most developing countries make awareness of the protection benefit and application of new technologies where governments are encouraged with all stakeholders to promote awareness of ICT through educating and facilitating ICT. Third we cannot talk about sustainable development without inclusion of society. The sustainability development goals through a road map built around the central idea of intergration and interlinking economic, social and environmental aspects of development to achieve the 17 goals require the involvement of widely deploying technologies to enable governments meet such goals. The Egyptian government strives to achieve the digital economy through the use of ICT tools through enabling the development of a knowledge‑based society and a digital economy relying on affordable access to acknowledge, digital rights and the development of a competitive, innovative, national ICT industry. The government of Egypt paid great attention to integrate the ICT into all public and private affairs where the Egyptian cabinet was one of the first organizations in ee yipt that introduced ICT to the Egyptian community. It placed the role for an incubator that's when we grow to maturity, adopting the idea that public services should be ICT‑enabled so that businesses and citizens can interact with the public and administration online. Its main vision is to support senior decision‑makers with public policy support and contribute to decision‑making process, manage to support the government of Egypt for creating smart solutions such as launching information portals, [ indiscernible ] and for the government and applications and establishment in development initiatives where one of the latest systems is Egypt's development map using to configure, display, analyze all development project in all social economic sector. Ladies and gentlemen, to finalize my words, encouraging businesses to fully embrace the powers of these technologies should be a priority of government to step efforts to invest innovative digital solutions to drive social economic impact. In addition ICT for development is not about computers and the Internet but about helping support and training people. Finally, partnerships along multiple players with different competencies are essential. No player can make a big impact. Thank you and now I would like to leave the floor to our moderator for our forum.
>> Thank you very much miss Nirvana. I would like to welcome you to this forum. I'm the head of monitoring and evaluation division at Egypt country office and I'm glad to be the moderator for this session and also a speaker. In fact, today we're going to discuss ‑‑ to achieve this purpose we are proposing a number of six questions that we would like our distinguished guests to help us in trying to find how we can tackle this from those questions. The first question is how to create an enabling environment for an inclusive economy using ICT. Also we need to know what are the roles of different governments in creating such enabling environments and what are the governments' initiatives in this regard. We also wanted to discuss the different policies needed to address the digital divide that is currently existing especially in developing countries. What are the policies that can be used in order to alleviate digital poverty as well which is also linked to digital divide. We also want to discuss how we can maximize the potential economic and social benefits of ICT, and finally, we want to discuss the best practices that are there in integrating ICT for economic and inclusive economies. And that's why we're very glad to have a distinguished panel of speakers bringing together the government of Egypt, bringing together the civil society, bringing international organizations, and also we're happy to hear their experiences and to share them. We would like to start the session with a distinguished speaker. He is our chairman of the Egyptian foundation from Egypt and we would like to remind that each speaker is given 5 minutes for intervention and then we will be opening the floor for questions and comments.
>> Thank you. ID and IG for inviting me here. It is a pleasure to be in Mexico. Very welcoming peoples. My first visit. I would like to pay tribute to the previous minister of communications in Egypt who actually all this project started, thank you sir for initiatives. And I would like to start by the goals for my talk, according to the direction, I'll try to [ indiscernible ] and what we did in Egypt. Our background is about 4 million doctors around the world and according to the WHO they are still we need another 4 million. So there is not enough doctors or nurses to support our patients. And more important is that the geographical distribution is mismatching. They should be 1‑250 but you can see in areas coded in red, they reach 150,000 so there is a disparity of distribution. Moreover, there is the complexity of medicine now. We need super specialists to deal with very delicate situations in the intensive care unit, a baby needs 178 interventions per day. If you have one mistake, it's not forgiving.
The solution ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] we started a few years back was just going to telehealth which really provides an unprecedented access for the patients that is transcending, geography and time and cost. The projects we are working with in Egypt are packaged. On the right side you see the partners, all the projects really need good partnership to have success. So we have three parts to the projects of medicine which is actually delivering health care and awareness to the general public so I'll go into more detail. Telemedicine means basically three mains factors. Transferring medical images across ICT, doing interactive ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] and the scopes which are really revolutionizing medicine. These are just some of the ‑‑ the end of the physician in the area. And you can see now that even these technologies have changed and they have become hand‑held machines that do much better work than that.
So the projects we're working on in the telemedicine part are three part. One is second opinion to remote clinics in remote areas in the desert and areas don't have expertise. The ICU present in the remote areas and teleemergency which we're still piloting. The main objective of the telemedicine is to help all these technologies is to help the physician in the remote area to establish, set a management plan, discuss a possibility of this plan at that area. If patient needs to be transferred, where, when and how. And at the same time there is on the job skills training for the physician. So he learns all the time as he's doing the telemedicine. And as I said in the beginning, we also add a structured learning program online for these physicians to tap into. These are the sites that are active now. They're about 15 sites across Egypt and we're adding for the first quarter of this year we add another 25 sites to be total of 40 sites working 24/7. I'm not going to go into details of the models, we can have so many different operation models. The ICU is different than outpatient so we have different models of working on that. We add awareness, we have similar ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] we choose two models like live streaming which enables interaction between the live audience and the on‑demand which presents the ledger of people tapping into it as many times as possible at the time that they ‑‑ we combine both techniques to establish learning. And of course to do that we have cooperation with the medical syndicate and the universities and to establish a curriculum for selection, creation how are we going to build this content and make it attractive and the funding of these programs.
Building telehealth several steps. You need to be able to move forward. You need to choose your service provider. Is it university or private sector. We're using a pioneer and it's very early ‑‑ and but now he is in charge of the group at Cairo University using the Internet. But also we need to see the technology set up ICUs different than emergency and different in remote areas. The cost in general is coming down, organizational structures. These things are not going to work by themselves. You need to have a good organization structure with program presentingers and it's not that difficult but it needs perseverance. And believe me, it is extremely cost‑effective. First, it delivers good health. And we, according to our research program that we are doing, we save 30% of the patients, we change the medical treatment all together during that. And the cost of travel between Cairo and remote areas about 1.15 billion a year. And setting up a site is around $10,000 plus or minus so it is a very cost effective and of course the most important thing is saving patients.
Now we're looking at Africa. Because once you're online and providing services, you can provide it within your country. And you're looking at a 2‑way Road because we can also learn from our African partners. They know about diseases which we don't know. So it's a two‑way education moving forward and I'm happy to say that we do have a fund particularly set for African partners. We are trying to find a channel. This was during the Africa meeting 2016 and we did have some contacts but nothing really materialized as of yet. And of course there is always the resistance to change. People red tape as I said it will take perseverance to achieve. People to be able to fulfill the second thing which was strengthen you is having a good partnership collaboration. So as you see now, I think ID is about collaborating with us. I added that at the end, but we have different technology, funding and different partners that really facilitate this very, very efficient technology that is revolutionizing health care and now we're going to be plugging in artificial intelligence and once you have the structure, things come as a new, you can plug them into the system and it will be ‑‑
Thank you. We had a very good time and I'm afraid I'm going to have to speed to the airport. But I thank all our friends. Thank you very much for this opportunity.
[ Applause ]
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Dr. Wael. That was an inspiring presentation. It gave us an idea of best practice of a cost‑effective model for using ICT in economic and inclusive economies. We now would like to move to our next speaker so I would like to invite the chair of Nigeria Internet Governance Forum. The floor is yours.
>> Thank you very much. As you introduce me. I'm excited to be here because of what this topic is all about. And as beginning I want to identify five basic needs in Africa, especially in Nigeria. One is education. The other one is foot, the other one is environment. So how can we leverage leverage the ICT in solving such problems. The other one is that some are excluded the youth, the women, the physically challenged and the rural communities. I'm excited about the presentation that's just been made but the truth is that we have the Internet, whether we have the political will to leverage on it and be able to solve some basic problems we have in our environment. Okay, he has to leave.
So I also want to look at the e‑government indexes in Africa. If we have it's been said that the higher your E‑government index the better it is to do business in your environment. Sometimes we don't give this information. So to evaluate a lot of indexes is always very difficult. But the ICT makes it very easy for us to do that. So the relationship between E‑government index, business in that environment. The leverage on that.
So I also want to look at the fact that young people quite able, very available, we have a lot of population of young people that are willing to learn. Are we taking advantage of that. So the environment is for the government to think out of the box. There is visualization, there is intelligence, there is globalization, there is mobilization, and everything going in, how can we, how can the government in our environment take advantage of that. We still have challenges. Challenges, especially the power challenge. The good thing is we're endowed with solar. Solar power. Can we take advantage of that and be able to utilize that.
The good thing also is that ICT is cross‑cutting. When I talk about education, food, health or environment, ICT is available. So we start with the basic making sure that our people know about ICT. Most times we do top‑bottom we develop our policies and we want to give to the communities our policies or our technology or our program or our projects, even when the community doesn't understand what the project is all about, and may not buy into it. So I think it's time for us to do the reverse. Start talking to communities first. Know there are issues. Know there are requirements. And then from there we know whether they were buy into our bringing ICT to them. I give you an example of what happens in my country. In Nigeria we have what we call the ICT development fund. There are two agencies managing those funds. What they are doing, they are doing intervention, they go to a community, they provide ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] for one year and then they will ask the community to continue from where they stop. Community wants food and you are talking about ICT and technology. And the community is not sustainable. Some of them are gathering dust somewhere. So they are not sustainable. So sustainability of interventions will be necessary for us to do bottom‑up and not top‑down. So policies that are being developed, issues we're trying to do, givenl to the community, we should have them buy into it and then they will ask first appreciate it and then help to bridge the digital divide as we said.
And in terms of alleviating poverty, yes. If we can use the Internet to teach people how to grow their food, it will help to alleviate poverty. Okay? If you can use the Internet to teach people how to be careful about your environment, it will alleviate poverty. If we can use the Internet, the E‑learning to teach people how to read and write. And instead of using the complicated programs and teaching method, can we use animation. So that they just press a button. So those are things that I think that in our own environment we should also be looking at. I don't know what time is it. Okay.
And what should be done for that unleashing this. I've already stated that we should do bottom‑up. We should also get communicate to the community what they will benefit, the food case and then they will accept our programs and decisions as we our institute is meant to do. Thank you, for now I will talk more when you come to the next round. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much for that interesting speech and we're glad that you brought a very important topic which is the need to reach more for communities and for people to know their needs, to know their requirements, instead of adopting the top to bottom approach which most of the time is not full filling the needs of the people. Now we have heard different perspectives, we need to hear another perspective, a perspective from the government and we are glad to have with us the advisor to the Egyptian minister of communications and information technology. The floor is yours.
>> Good morning, everyone. I'm glad to be here. To support the development of the facility. Can someone run the presentation please? It's not this presentation.
In my presentation I would like to highlight ICT responsibilities strategy speaking about the partners ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] and the strategy. And the most important project that we are working on with our partners.
Back in the year 2013 the ministry decided to launch a strategy to support social responsibility and before we start in this effort, I thought it would be ‑‑ not about the social responsibility projects or the activities of other stakeholders in the area of social responsibility. So with many multinational companies in the sector of ICT and it was obvious that there is a lock of coordination between the different entities where products were repeated, they were repetitive projects. There were focus on areas where other areas were deprived from being served. We changed our minds and looked to develop a strategy for the minute industry but to develop a strategy for the sector. And together with all those partners, we managed to develop one strategy for the ICT sector in the area of social responsibility, which meets the interest of the stakeholders.
For the strategy we decided or we agreed to serve groups as you can see on the screen [ indiscernible ] the poor, the elderly, the elderly.
And we have focused on seven themes but here I have only four because of time limitations so we decided to work on the environment ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] providing better training. And how we work in this very challenging approach to bring people who are somehow competitors to work together and you ask them to work together and collaborate in joint projects, this was not an easy task. It's working very well. How we work in this projects, we form committee where everybody is represented and we divided the project into components and ask each partner to work on their component that they think is their core competence and the role of the government is to organize between the different entities and facilitate the relationship, and make sure that each partner is implementing its component in a way that allows others to be a part of the project. And also sometimes we put contribution like developing training but this is not our main.
If you look at the themes, persons with disabilities, we wanted to equip more than 450 schools out of work as you can see.
This project is very challenging because it was very difficult to ask employers to insofar we managed in three years to have 35 technologies in the market. Very big project and Egypt is one of the few countries that teaching at all schools for the hearing impaired. Under the theme developing in sum areas, also training of course for the such areas. And now we are working to develop this.
In this two years we manage to provide 15,000 opportunities for youth in slum and rural areas. Along this theme we are working to computer the community schools and we manage to equip the schools with the required ICT and train the teachers on the Internet and ICT to improve the quality of education in those areas. Over 600 schools. And we are when they leave they are equipped.
Very challenging project is to work inside the ‑‑ to find training because the others were not able to.
Were not able to do Cisco training, we are giving them other ‑‑ to be citizens.
Last but not least, [ indiscernible ]. This kind of companies and it was I think it would be difficult to work in many project. Thank you.
[ Applause ]
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. In fact she touched upon a very important aspect of our forum which is leaving no one behind. And in fact one of the interesting initiatives of the government is not only developing a policy for ICT in Egypt, but more importantly development of policy for social responsibility. And this is one of the best practices that we are happy to have with us.
Now I would like to give the floor to the chair. I would like to give you the floor.
>> Thank you very much. I appreciate the Egypt for this panel and this workshop.
The point is this. It's high time in Africa to do the right thing. What are the right things? First and foremost strategies. National strategies in place. If we have it already in place, right now we need to because we just had the SDG whatever policy framework been in place or strategy in place, we need to adopt it. And once we have strategy in place as we just saw from the presenters, that is the way to go. These strategies different sectors responsibility. That is how it should be. Now where you start a project with that strategy. Computers in community center, there is no strategy for sustainability. There must be strategy for working place and getting buy‑in of community. So environment requires government stakeholders. I've been to Egypt quite a number of times and I'm impressed. Across Africa and I'm impressed. Not because you're here, but because talk about what we know. So we see that in Egypt, from what I would see, the government, the industry, they are working together. We need to increase that level of relationship. Even if you have a particular level, you need to increase that relationship. That level. So it's very important. Partnership and engagement is very key. The the government can do to create a level playing ground. Understanding strategy we need to of course different sector, we have to look at it, health sector, education sector, social sector. New jobs there are need to be created. How can we create new jobs. Lead by example. If you take the example of Nigeria, there are lot of jobs of opportunity. People are looking for information. They want to ‑‑ you go to the website but the response job opportunities levels. So there is great opportunity for BPU industry to really grow. For many African countries, Victor, have a plan to create job in Africa. An initiative and we like ‑‑ so we need to create jobs, new jobs. Create jobs first and foremost. Like on the project, the government has a project you can think the jobs can come. The jobs doesn't just come. There must be specific projects. And those projects will be able to have a strategy and they'll multiply in effect the jobs that have been created. The other point is cost of access. Countries that do have that. I think that is very important to have. And strategy when it got to using these phones. We are seen whereby the phones are being really mismanaged. True corruption. So ICT can come in to ensure transparency and accountability and get feedbacks. Also promotes what we do in Nigeria called people's parliament. People's parliament happens across different region in Nigeria. So in last point in regard to the competition. We may need to competition true light torch framework. Should not be heavy handed. Like in Nigeria an issue for what we do about the ICT. Well, new technology will come. So government need to recognize that. New technology will come, there's no regulate and since the Internet, the ICT we know is based on the packet system and packet system is expected to move freely across the network. So it comes in different forms. So we have to now find a creative way to getting or creating new jobs. Be creative and it's true continuous engagement. I'm happy the meetings, right up there, the opportunity for private sector to meet. All these big ISP players, all these the resources there, people are there, we need government to lead. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. I'm glad you touched on many interesting points, the without those our interventions will be like bits and pieces everywhere. Also the idea that we need to always promote and advocate that ICT should be used for transparency and accountability and also the concept of people's parliament, this is really interesting in the topic that we're talking. Now we would like to move into another prospective and I will remove my hat as moderator and will intervene as a speaker now. I'm going to discuss the role of my institution which is the United Nations program in support in the government of Egypt of using ICT for inclusive economies and sustainable development particularly for SDG2 which is related to fighting hunger.
Okay. So very briefly, the program is the largest humanitarian organization fighting hunger worldwide. And we are working in Egypt to support the enhancement of the security and the nutritional status in Egypt. Basically with the introduction of the SDGs, the main focus is to work under an SDG2 which is ending hunger in our lifetime. As you may imagine, hunger might seem to be a one perspective, but it's not true. Because fighting hunger is actually touching upon many aspects and other SDGs. Because it links strongly with providing quality education, elevating poverty, enhancing gender equality and enhancing also partnerships. And it's also linked with building resilience and enhancing the livelihoods of people.
So I would like to give like a special examples or pilot activities that we're working currently with the government of Egypt to use the IT or use the technologies in empowering the government.
We are actually using like ICT technologies, and we have in WFP some remote monitoring system for monitoring the security status of our beneficiaries. And I can give an example, for for example we monitor the security of the Syrian refugees. So we not only monitor the Syrians that we assist them, but we monitor those who are not assisted so we can make a comparison between our intervention through food assistance and those who do not receive our food assistance. And how we do that, we monitor some indicators like the food consumption scores, their diversity and their coping strategies. Here it's very important because in the previous sessions since the beginning of the forum, we have been talking about Internet accessibility. And Internet for everyone. But we have not been really tackling the issue of monitoring or building indicators that can monitor the outcome of the use of ICT or the impact of these ICT on our beneficiaries. So this is one example. Without ICT we will not be able to reach, for example, the Syrian refugees and to monitor some of the very complex indicators.
So we have, for example, a corporate system which is a geo‑reference system where we designed questionnaires and we sent out people to the field to collect data and this is real‑time. So when they collect the data, it appears for us on the server. They can do many questionnaires on the tablet. As you can see the interface. They can also do web‑based data entry for the data that they collect from the field. And the system provides us with reports. And here we must say that the ICT is very useful because in monitoring the evaluation, there is always the problem of data quality. But with the ICT, for example, I can trace the names of the field monitors or the enumerators who have conducted the data, I can check the quality of the data and I can see who did what. So basically ICT is allowing me to better monitor the beneficiaries and to better monitor the enumerators that collect the data.
Okay. So this is for like monitoring tools and how we are using them. And as you can see, those tools, if you're not using ICT, you would be basically monitoring outputs. Like our number of beneficiaries. And this is what we have been like challenging in our talks the previous sessions. The people are saying okay, how many people are using Internet. How many people ‑‑ how many communities are covered by Internet. But this not a key indicator, because you might not have a quality service. I need to see the impact of this Internet or the ICT on the people that we see.
So here, this example is allowing us to do outcome monitoring and to compare how our assistance is affecting our beneficiaries or not.
Of course, as we know the integration of ICT and M and E for any development assistance is crucial. So I would like to give a few examples of our support to the government on that area. We are working closely with IDSC on developing an Egyptian observatory for monitoring and also we're using ICT and a different models in order to create an early learning system.
We would also, as WFP, we are working now with the different ministries and also with IGST being the cabinet think tank on development and innovative model code community. So WFP is an actcy that provide food assistance. We work with community schools to provide food but we also try to provide families of the children we assist with income‑generating activities so they can promote their status and their income. We also try to combat ‑‑ by providing food to the families and the children. This also creates employment opportunities for the families of the children. So as you can see, it's a model, where the school is at the center of the assistance. But you can see the trickle‑down effect and the multiplier effect on different domain and different areas. And here we work with IGC, with the ministry of education, so this is using ICT. So if I'm not using technologies to link the activities, I wouldn't be having a complementary package of intervention that can serve our beneficiary.
Another recent project that we have worked with with the statistical office in Egypt, we have launched patient information porter for monitoring the food security and the indicators and this is also using ICT and dashboards. Because as we all know nowadays people are looking for more user friendly interfaces for information. So this is also the use of ICT in monitoring of the SDG indicators. We're also working with the ministry of social solidarity. As one of the speakers said earlier that we need to have a complementary and coordination of all the products because we see ministries working on stand‑alone projects but we do not see the linkage. So here is also the use of ICT in bringing all initiatives together.
And the final initiative that we are working on is auto mating fooding in school. In Egypt we have manual information for school feeding. So like in the school the teacher sends attendance records to the directate and to the governor and then. This is all using paper and the inaccuracies that you will be facing on all levels. So basically we cannot monitor if our assistance is reaching the right people or not. So what we are doing now is that we are offering an innovative system, electronic information management system whereby attendance can be taken using electronic cards by children. And this will automatically reflect at the government level and at the central level. So it's not only for us as WFP monitoring our assistance, but it's also helping the governments of Egypt to trace if this assistance is really reaching the beneficiaries or not.
At the end, in order to bring all those activities into one pool or umbrella, we have been working on creating a project management unit for all the previous initiatives that we have been talking about since IGFC is the interminutes teerl agency that coordinate these efforts together. Needless to say I would like to end my presentation, why do we need to work smart? Simply because we cannot afford to work other ways. SDG is everybody's business. We need to focus more on outcome and input monitoring rather than output monitoring and activities monitoring. We need to make sure no one is left behind. Give them the choice to make their lives better. This is my presentation and I would like now to ‑‑ I will not thank myself of course. But thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
I would like now to give the floor, last but not least, to the head of division of infrastructure and energy at the African union commission and we're glad to bring all those efforts together to see the African perspective and the continent's perspective on this forum.
>> Thank you very much, madam moderator. The good thing is I am speaking less the last one because I have nothing to say anymore because everybody said what I was going to say.
First of all I would like to thank all of you for very good presentations. And I do subscribe to whatever you have said to all of you. As we see it's not surprising to alls us. It has been the things you are doing until Africa.
Having said that, just touch on a few points that are actually very important. And the example that I've been provided here are actually the signal that Africa is actually using ICT ‑‑ the shoot for opportunity for Africa started. As you remember those are the ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] will end up terminated, colonized. And it is very important for our political leaders to wake up and to understand that the only opportunity offered to Africa in the 21st century, is to use ICT for the socioeconomic development and to use it to catch up in the field of security, education, and so on. And my point is only to say that thinking the definition of insanity is somebody who is keeping doing the same thing and expect different results. And if we keep on conceiving our development the same way we have been doing so far, and I'm seeing something. Let's see in education most of the time we see our target is to build a certain amount of school and a certain amount of teachers and that continue. In fact, if we if the solution why don't we think using ICT in develop our education. You don't have to have many classrooms. You don't even have to have classrooms. Unless you have focus ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] and how you can have education quickly and appropriately specifically. This is one of the things, the same thing you can do ‑‑ [ indiscernible ] because electronics and papers are checked every day. So the good thing that even the cost of communication is actually going ‑‑ today getting a set ‑‑ a few years ago was actually costing $10,000 actually today costs $500. Why don't we take this opportunity to catch up. So this is where the mind set has to change specifically in conceiving the economy doing things. For instance, you see in access for power, most of the time we say we need to develop and we need to have grades and it gets power. Think another way in Africa every single person to have these also upon it and sell it to work through. But we don't think that way. So enabling governments start with the political will and the political will start with a dream and the dream of impossible. And this is how we need to specifically to take African thinking and development. Thank you very much.
[ Applause ]
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. I think being the last allowed to give is the most important message which is without all those efforts, if there is no political will, then all those efforts will be in vain. So very much for that political message. I would like to open the floor for questions or comments from the audience. Any comments? Any questions before we wrap up or conclude the session?
I see people maybe they are hungry.
Okay, fine. If there are no comments from the audience ‑‑ okay. So can I give him first according to the order?
>> AUDIENCE: Thank you very much. I just want to use this to say some good things about Nigeria there are good things happening. We the ICT revolution transformed Nigeria from the bottom to the very top level in Africa, economic‑wise. The biggest economy in Africa right now. And I ICT more than 10% to that. And all this came through private funding, private investment and it's because government liberalization is very good. We are more than 55% ICT penetration. So right now we have implement system so a lot of tracked. So corruption has been killed by the current administration. So there are a lot of prospects. Political will is so important and to move to the very top level of application of ICT. A solution are ICT are not are not. And we need to realize that decision makers need to realize that and call for help. Feel free to call for help. Many times only Africa. Bring in in the need. If you have somebody outstanding, you have somebody in Singapore, bring them in once a year to review what you're doing like an external audit. Malaysia is doing that and it's been going for them and they're able to define their processes and check what's in the rest of the world. Thank you.
>> MODERATOR: Thank you for the idea of the external audit. We need to audit ourselves first.
>> I wanted to ask question on from the IDSA? IDSC. I doff my cap to you corporate responsibility committee. Have you had any resistance from the operators and business people ‑‑ okay. The fact that the impact salary or youth that you have trained, okay, have you had any resistance to that. Then in terms of the ‑‑ have you heard resistance from in our own environment we are the teaching hospital, when they wanted to digitalize the lap investigation and the radio graphy investigation, they didn't want to adopt it because they feel that they are losing their jobs.
>> I'm the ministry of communications. But yes we found a lot of resistance in the beginning and this is what we were expecting. Because the mind set is not written for business people to come together and work together. But actually what we did is that we work with who is willing to work and others jumped in because they see the work is going and there is achievement, there is success that is impact. So they try to join the successful group. If we have focus so much on resolving this resistance, we have not ever achieved anything. In any project there is resistance but you have to find solutions to overcome it.
[ Applause ]
>> MODERATOR: Thank you very much. So very quickly we're going to wrap up the discussion that we had in this interesting panel. So for tackling the questions related to the digital divide and the digital poverty, one of the key messages is we need to work using a bottom‑up approach to make sure that we cover the needs and the requirements of the community and create. We also talk about the important policies that the government should work on in order to enhance the use of ICT in inclusive economies and that have been very good example of the government policy on social responsibility in the sector of ICT. We also tackled the importance of partnerships and how we can work together in order to enhance our cooperation. We needles to focus on engagement and accessibility of all partners. We need to use ICT more for transparency and accountability. We need to focus on outcome and impact monitoring rather than output monitoring in order to achieve our SDGs. We needs also to make sure that ICD is used as good and solid way to better monitor the services and the assistance provided by governments and international organizations. And also we had best practices that we have been discussing like the telemedicine pilot which cost‑efficient pilot and above all to end this forum, it is important to have the political will so that all those initiatives can come to reality in life. Thank you very much for your participation in this forum.