The following are the outputs of the captioning taken during an IGF intervention. 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, but should not be treated as an authoritative record.
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>> Hi, everyone. Thank you for coming. My name is Amrita, and I will be the moderator for this session, and I hope you can hear me.
We have to make due with this. So this discussion is primarily to it's an interactive open discussion, which we are having today, and we have a few donor organizations and regulators here. What we want to do is have a discussion on the kind of projects they are doing, why they are investing in these kind of projects, what challenges they see, and if there could be a way ahead in how there could be some synergies between the different entities oh, sorry. if there could be information and gaps of what could be done better and explore collaborations if possible.
So with us today and this is going to be open. We'll have some questions, and I'll throw to all the speakers here, and then you can ask questions or even give comments. You can raise your hand. We have with us Franz from GIZ. Then we have David, who is from the Australian Department of Foreign affairs. We have Zhang Xiao, CNNIC, we have we have supposed to have Samia, but I think she's not here from the world bank. We have Katrina, the Commissioner from Georgia. Yes, that's about it for now. We may have one or two more colleagues who may be joining for this discussion.
So, without much ado oh, sorry. I forgot the organizers, Raj Singh is here, the president of APNIC Foundation. Sorry, Raj. I don't want to waste much time. We have 60 minutes. I think five minutes is already gone.
My first question to all the panelists would be, are you supporting projects to improve internet access and inclusion? If yes, what do you perceive from your perspective are the two main issues that need to be addressed? Since David is just next to me, David, you're the first one.
>> DAVID HEVEY: Thank you very much for that. Actually, to be honest, I said on the sorry about that. Thank you for the question. I've got some notes that I've been told to read off as we, so bear with me. Thank you. Is that there? Australia is working with the INDO Pacific partners to achieve greater connectivity and achieve inclusive internet access.
For example, Austrian Infrastructure Financing Facility, we've been partnering with Pacific Island Countries and investing to support all Pacific Island Countries or PICs, as we call it, having primary communications, cable connectivity by the end of 2025. That's been a big focus.
Since 2018 we've committed $350 million Australian dollars on that.
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Apologies. Facilities also made more investments for end connectivity to build out a secure and resilient, reliable digital ecosystem. This is actually there's been investment in terrestrial infrastructure in B&G and also in other Pacific Island Countries as well.
I would say that's the infrastructure aspect covered, but in terms of the work that we're supporting for securing inclusive internet access, we have our 2023 to 2030 cybersecurity (inaudible) in Australia. We also have our capacity building program across the Pacific Region. We've been focused on cybersecurity (inaudible).
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Improving resilience in cyber crime and online scam response. That's what we've been focused on there, and the program is also supported the Australia safety work. Having been at a booth here today with the Australian brief, it's a Koala photo time soon, but we've also got a fix on online safety work as well for digital inclusion.
I think also another important thing and then I'm finished. Please bear with me. I'm sorry. Digital trade has been a key part as well. We recognize that as an important inclusionary tool. What we try and do is we try and we've been advocating digital trade rules to achieve trust in the online environment, including online consumer protection, but also facilitating cooperation so that training partners can actually make the most of digital trade. I'll leave it at that there, and thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Challenges.
>> DAVID HEVEY: Challenges. Okay. I suppose the two main issues or challenges that we think need to be addressed, again, I kind of touched upon it before, but it's the cyber resilience piece. We thought that, again, as a rapid response that we've got and set up and deploying incident response. We set that up after Tsonga had trouble, and we deployed assistance in 2022, 2023. We saw there was a genuine need for working with our regional partners to assist with incident responses. That's why we set up that facility under the last years federal budget a couple of years ago.
What we've also done, I think, we've also sort of, again, on the cyber crime, and the reason why we focus on cyber crime in terms of the two priorities, cyber crime or cyber enabled crime, it's increasing. Because it can impact individuals and enterprises, it can have a more profound impact as well. That's some of the challenges that we see there.
For example, where we're putting rubber to hit the road there, so to speak, we've partnered with New Zealand and also Identity Care Australia, which for some funding over this year, where we've got a support service for them to work with impacted individuals and businesses in P&G and Fiji for online scam response assistance. That gives a measure in terms of what we're trying to prioritize as a key challenge.
I suppose, just covering off I realize I'm running out of time but the second maybe issue we see addressing is prioritizing regional coordination. We have so many actors and donors out there as well. Look at us all sitting occupy the stage here. Thank you for joining me. You know, I used to work on some capacity building assistance programs in the Pacific with DFAT. You would have one person that might have three or four different roles that would also then have to go to four or five different trainings as well. So there's always a challenge in terms of ensuring that we're not overloading the people that we're actually trying to help in country there as well.
So that's why Australia is working with the partners with the Blue Pacific U.S., U.K., U.S., Canada, Japan, and Germany as well, and Korea. That's why we set up through that partners of the Blue Pacific. I'll take a breath after that. Apologies.
That's one of the key outcomes of the initial and the Intercessional meetings was around ensuring that people have better coordination. I'll leave it at that. Thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you so much. Raj, you will come last. I'm not going to give you to speak right now. I'll go to Franz. Franz, over to you. GIZ has been doing a lot of work. They're working a lot on cybersecurity, and he also mentioned something like region coordination between donors, et cetera. But overall to you.
>> FRANZ VON WEIZSACKER: Definitely. I would be speaking for a very long time if I was going to go through all the project lists that we're having. We're having over 1,000 projects of whom 30 percent has some relevance in digital transformation. But maybe the focus on the region, Asia. You could look at the inclusion, digital inclusion, access to internet, access to affordable internet at different levels. We don't obviously invest in telecommunications industry. That's the private sector job. In some cases we have advisor projects to regulatory bodies. Also, at the regional level, at the ASEAN level in Jakarta.
Mainly what we focus is on a different level of inclusion. We have a big program in Cambodia as well as in Indonesia on digital inclusion for social safety and security, and that forms the very basis of inclusivity also in the less developed parts of the country where the internet affordability is lower because generally we have in many parts of Asia pretty large coverage, a high percentage of the population isn't principally reached, but affordability is the issue.
Maybe India is the best possible example of having a very capable regulator and a competitive telecommunications industry that allows the prices per gigabyte to drop lower than anybody else in the world. Then there are some negative examples. We have, I think especially central Africa, has the highest price per gigabyte around the world, and the reason for that is it's not a good investment environment. It's not safe. There's no good rule of law. There is no good regulatory environment, no good competition and so on. That's the very basis of affordable and inclusive internet connectivity, but then in GIZ we are also addressing the more like a few of the soften ablers that come on top of that. One is the general inclusivity of society. That's why social insurance programs in Indonesia and Cambodia.
A lot of the other programs focus on the institutions for education. That is both at the level of general education as well as vocational training, technical training institutes, and those focusing also on the digital skills in that area. There's a few regional projects that we also are focused on in Asia. That is the GIZ focus.
When we come to talk to challenges, well, the challenges are at many different levels. If we focus on the core of internet connectivity, the usual challenge, it's a very political landscape, the regulations of telecommunications. This is a billion dollar business, and of course, a lot of interest is involved in there. The form, how the regulation is shaped, influences whether companies can be profitable or not, so that is maybe the key challenge.
In many cases we have seen that the rural access funds (inaudible).
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other purposes and in some cases they're not resulting in actual (inaudible). That is in any public sector funding. You always have as many silos as you have funding streams. That's a very typical situation, and that's why maybe we should look at the there was a big meta study done by I think U.S. Aide who looked into aide effectiveness and who noticed that aide is much, much more effective when it's funded, it's channelled into local organizations. Those projects are the most effective ones that have a large part of the budget being allocated to local organizations rather than having the big international implementers implementing all by themselves. So that is maybe one approach in terms of coordination.
It's not only the big donors talking with each other, but also the funding lines being disbursed to local organizations.
Thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you for bringing in even the regulatory environment. The use of access funds rural access funds. Like India has good things, but the Rural Access Fund has not been used. The U.S. who has used everywhere but not giving success. Xiao, over to you.
>> ZHANG XIAO: In 1994 internet introduced into China. For 30 years we see from internet users amount is huge. Actually we also do policy research and statistics for the internet coverage reach. The reach is 78 percent, but if we include the children under 10 years old, if we exclude this group according to internationally, the rate would be over 91 percent. Actually, it's 1.1 billion. It's going to be 1.1 billion at the end of the month.
Nearly the mobile penetration rate is 100 percent. So everyone I just take my cell phone to go anywhere. I don't need to take a card. I don't need my key. I don't need to take something else, and I can just take a phone, my smartphone.
So we see it's huge. The internet penetration rate is huge. Actually we recorded data from data. We can see a lot of things going on. From my view I think there are two challenges for inclusion of the internet. The first thing is elderly people because the penetration rate is good, and we have 1.1 billion already, a huge amount of people, but usage rates fall because we're entering elderly society.
Normally it's 18.7 percent of China's people over 60 and above is going to be 20 percent. Following in more than 20 years, it's going to be 35 percent that's going to be 60 and above. Like my father, he couldn't use a smartphone well, and a lot of smart appliances he couldn't use that well, so he has access, but he couldn't use that well, so that's a big problem for the elderly society.
It's not a problem just in China. I think in Europe, in Japan, and other countries as well. Second question I think for us is while still there are some 2.6 billion people have no access to the internet. How could we help them? I think we have best practice. We have a lot of cases to share, and we can call on investments to help them. Also in China we still have 10 percent of them have no access, but really if you look at the reason why they have no access, it's not just investment in the telecom. It's because you have no digital literacy. We don't recognize the factors. They can't read or write and have no awareness. It's nothing to do with my life. We have a long way to go. Thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: What is CNNIC doing? Do you have a role?
>> ZHANG XIAO: We have 20 million users, and we are also, we do research policy for the usage rates of the internet. So with our data and our research, we support policymaking.
Like, for example, you know how many women are using internet? If you look at the gender, it's quite balanced in China. 49 percent of users are women, and 51 of men. As we can see (inaudible). With these results we can support policymaking and what we should do next. It seems all the governments have an interest in that.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you so much. Sarah, ISOC Foundation is investing a lot in projects. What is it you are investing in projects? Primarily that's where your focus is, and what do you see as the main challenges at this point?
>> SARAH ARMSTRONG: Okay. So the Internet Society Foundation is a supporting foundation for The Internet Society, and we are responsible for giving grants, and we do this throughout the world. In fact, we were started in the first operational year in 2020, and since that time up until now our fifth operational year, we have distributed over $63 million in funding.
We've issued more than 1,000 grants, and we are working or have worked 121 countries. Specifically when it relates to the impact region, we've done nearly $5 million right now at this current time, and we have 37 active grants in the APAC region.
Now, these are some overall statistics about the Internet Society Foundation, but I would like to give you some specific examples to answer your question of some of the things that we are funding.
So we are, again, the funding organization. We work with organizations throughout the world, and we are definitely interested in the issue of connectivity access and then we also care a lot about how people can benefit from the internet and how they can be upskilled in order to learn what the things are that they need to do to increase their economic education or economic opportunities and their education.
So an example in Indonesia, we have a project called COTAKEETA (phonetic). We have 11 different programs. I won't go into them all, but I will say this is a skilled program. It's about promoting digital literacy. They are working actually with women with disabilities to help them with social enterprises. So that is a growth opportunity there that's focused on training that we think is really important, and we have many training programs, but that's an example in the APAC region.
We have another grantee, Digital Empowerment Fund, that works in India. (Inaudible).
This program right now is aiming to bring 50,000 people across 100 communities worldwide, and they are working with T tribes throughout an area of India.
They're also doing a resiliency grant. This is a program where we help communities prepare for disasters that we know will come so that they are better equipped to deal and be ready to get back up online and communicate. The small island states are certainly an area that we believe in targeting, and we will be doing more of that in 2025 and going forward.
We also are, excuse me, funding an organization called the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, IEEE. This is another grant to help people prepare for the inevitable disasters that will come and be ready, and this is working right now aiming to impact directly 20,000 people.
So the final project in the APAC region, this is not the only set of the grants that we have, but I wanted to give you an idea to answer the question of what it is we are funding to help with the situation, and this is beyond the net large grant where we're providing literacy skilling and allowing people to participate in E government services provided by the government of Kyrgyzstan. It's not just getting access. It's knowing what to do once you have that access.
There's also a research grant where they are creating an open and secure IOP infrastructure for monitoring and preventing emergencies in landlocked mountain communities. So we're doing a lot in APAC. We're doing a lot throughout the world. We don't do the work ourselves. We fund the work, so we are a funder.
I think, to talk about the biggest issues, affordable, meaningful (inaudible). How we can do that we find to be extremely important. And also to ensure the training is part of a lot of the programs that we do so we can ensure people are benefitting to the fullest.
Those are the areas. I guess the biggest challenge too, quite frankly, is the need to (inaudible). We have still 2.6 billion people who are not connected.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Some places have been getting the grants. Like in India (inaudible) I will first talk to the donors. We have Samia here. Thank you for joining. If you can share. World bank is has done a lot of things, but (inaudible).
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>> SAMIA MELHEM: It's so good to be here with all our partners and friends from the U.N. system. The World Bank has been doing a lot on digital, and we are scaling up our products and services. As you know, the World Bank provides financing support either through loans or grants, and for the low and really low income countries, most of the assistance is through what we call IDA grants.
We're seeing an unprecedented increase in IDA grants. We have around 100 billion mobilized for that round. Unlike the last ten years, digital has become a big priority at the World Bank. We've been reorganized, and digital became one big vice presidential unit at par with human capital, sustainable development, and infrastructure. So it's really big for us in terms of both the attention, the mandate, and resources that are being made available to support digital acceleration.
For one reason we are worried about that big digital divide. We are seeing the impact it's causing on attaining the SDGs. You know very well that countries are adopting digital are much more likely 45 percent more likely, in fact, to achieve the SDGs on time.
We are also seeing the big gap in the job markets. How all the jobs are kind of almost monopolized in countries where you have high end, high value jobs pretty much because you have strong capacity in STEM and digital skills. These never happen without a strong digital public infrastructure. If these kids grow up with no connection and by the time they're connected, they're 50, they would have missed out on a lot of job opportunities.
So we're seeing that. We're seeing that more now with AI. AI, which needs really a lot of data, a lot of good data if we want it to be useful, if we want it to be ethical. It needs data in all the spoken languages. We are talking about specifically as we mention here, Asia in general or South Asia.
So really a lot to do, and we are pushing to accelerate. Our focus is, as all my colleagues said, affordable broadband for all. The second one is financing with government and private sector. Not only telecom, but also the digital public infrastructure, the government networks, the digital ID, the shared services, the authentication and security. And then the sectoral applications for health, education, transport, security, so on, so forth.
The last one, you brought it so well, digital skills. What is the use if we're putting millions and billions if people cannot use it or if they depend on the north or the west or the south or whatever we call it to provide that? Here what everybody said is really music to my ears, and I completely agree with all the focus on digital skills, building local capacity, investing in NGOs.
Look, as you transfer capacity to a local entity, whether it's a government or the private sector, are they going to be as great in the beginning than the top consulting firms? No, but they know the local context. They know who does what. They have the local Intel that many times these big firms don't have, and they fail just because of that. They have the know how. They don't know the context.
I think I outlined the challenges. If I can just focus on one thing, which is very dear to me, which is what you all mentioned, really cooperation at the country level, at the regional level. Making sure that we put all the good know how and financing in coherent pieces so that one day we'll be sitting here and the 2.6 billion people would have been connected with meaningful access.
Thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: So well said. Raj, I'll come to you, and then you know, APNIC Foundation, and what you are doing, and what do you see as challenges?
>> RAJNESH SINGH: Thank you, Amrita. It's nice to have all of you join this session. So thank you for making time for it. In terms of what the APNIC Foundation does, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say no one knows the Asia Pacific as well as we do. We've been around for over 30 years. We've built most of the internet infrastructure in some way or form. We've helped with training, capacity building and so on.
The foundation itself, of course, is the development arm of APNIC, which is the regional internet registry. We have the longest running innovation fund in the region. It's been running for over 16 years now. We have funded programs across inclusion, knowledge, and infrastructure, which are the three pillars of the program.
Whether it's citizens or upskilling women or improving gender diversity in the workforce, we do all of that. We are a small organization, but we do a lot of work. So one of the things we like to say is that we are more about action rather than words. So action not words.
I'll get to some of the issues and challenges I see. One is and this has concerned me for quite a while, so if any much you have heard me speak before, I keep on repeating the same thing because hopefully someone is going to listen. Samia, you mentioned some of this. It's the widening digital divides we're creating. It's not just the digital divides. It's the widening digital divides, and that's got to do with infrastructure, it's got to do with the devices people use, and digital literacy. We can go down through the layers and show where the divides are widening.
It also goes down to a simple thing, very technical, whether an economy or a country, or an organization is using IPV6 or IPV4. There are so many layers of the widening digital divides because depending on what they have access to and what they can leverage, that is will determine what they can do with the connectivity they have, right?
We talk about how (inaudible) are changing the landscape. There's legislative issues or regulatory issues at play and an affordability angle to that. We shouldn't just look at one form of technology as the solution to fix everything. It has to be multi modal in nature.
The second problem in fact, I'm going to mention three problems. The second problem is just the level of prioritization that exists between governments, within governments, within regions. Unfortunately, even within the government, you know, very few have the whole of government of digital transformation. Time and again this keeps coming up. We have got IT ministry, someone said about digital mindset and then finance ministry and foreign affairs. Not having a shot at you.
But the thing is that if you don't have a whole of government approach, you are going to be working in silos, as Franz said. Then, of course, the third thing is just the coordination between donors. There's so much duplication of work. It distresses me when I see multiple organizations giving funding to do the same thing that someone else has already done.
Yes, you've got to take off some KPIs or tick some box on your delivery or whatever it is that you need to do, but if you want to bring about holistic transformative change, you have to consider what's already out there and where do I go and plug the gaps? That's what the APNIC Foundation does. We're more interested in plugging the gaps.
So if any of you want to come and help plug gaps with us, please come talk to us. Thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thanks, Raj. Coordination is something I'm hearing everywhere. Over to you.
>> Thank you very much. I think my job has been he easier by Raj and by Samia. We do a combination of what has been said, but comparing ourselves, it could be seen as a smaller version of what the World Bank does. We do financing of digital development. Our main objective, of course, we are more on the digital inclusion side, and we have digital inclusion strategy that was launched last year.
We have four key areas that we focus on. First focus is basically on smart policy (inaudible).
(Silence).
So without sector intervention there cannot be either bridging the digital divide or we talk about widening the digital (inaudible). Now we are hearing in this conference we are having the AI divide pretty soon. That we will be able to monitor and capture and see.
The other aspect that we cover is, of course, the capacity building, which is digital literacy of not only policymakers, but end users as well. So that once they have the internet connectivity provided, how (inaudible) the use of these services. Then, of course, we have one of the aspects that we have is traditional (inaudible). We've been financing enable digital infrastructure so that the country has the capacity so that we do work on the upstream side, the financing submarine cables, fiberoptic backbone. We have done several of them in Southeast Asia, East Africa, West Africa.
Last but not least, what we have been focusing very recently is mainstreaming of technology into developed sectors, like smart education, how we can use technology in education, telemedicine, health services, E agriculture, smart cities. The idea is that we make our development operations more effective, more impactful. Last but not least, more sustainable. With more resources, this is the challenge we face. We don't have the luxury of a lot of grants that the World Bank has, so we have very limited amount of grants. We have limited amount of financing.
Of course P, our member countries, which are the Global South, so they also have challenges in borrowing. We have to come up with innovative financing instruments of finance so the country can absorb. That's why we insist on developing a business case so that it's even commercially viable, so it is self sustainable, and then basically once we have an exit policy once we finish the funding, what is the model that it will sustain the whole operation of this intervention that we do? Sorry for taking a bit longer.
We recently came up with just three weeks ago we did a policy digital (inaudible) for Africa region partnership with ITU. This program was never done before. We co designed it. What we are trying to promote is we are promoting a concept of government entrepreneurship. That and international financing institution could finance to help bridge the digital divide.
Otherwise, these innovative solutions we expect from SMEs, but what we are trying to support is government entrepreneurship so you have the right capacity so you think out of the box and come up with programs that will help us bridge the digital divide correctly. We are doing a program with UNDP. We call it digital stewardship community. We are coming up with a community of policymakers who have the digital capacity so they are basically not only do capacity building programs. We do programs for them, and then they encourage their other policymakers and their ministries to come up with projects to help them to brush up and ultimately when we do the MCP, which is member country partnership strategy, country engagement framework, then those policymakers are invited to share their experiences what they have learned.
So what we are doing is we are not only doing capacity building programs, but we are hand holding them to come up with larger projects, and then ultimately either us or help our partners to come and finance those interventions. We are working with the ministry of religions. We are financing their AI tool that will basically help develop them to have the capacity to do their infrastructure service delivery planning.
So Indonesia, if you are aware, that the village have their community engagement to set up a yearly plan. So initially it was manual, but now they converted into service innovation platform, they call it SIP. Now we are financing the AI embedded tool of that platform that would utilize information available so that every participatory stakeholder is involved so that they can give their input and we can come up with a better infrastructure services, be it water, be it road, be it energy supply, in the villages.
These are a couple of examples that I wanted to share that we are working on, and we are happy to collaborate with others because we will be replicating in other countries and in the cult to scale in the country as well. Thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you. I'll go to Katrina. You've been hearing the donor communities speaking a lot. From a government perspective, what do you see are the gaps which you find when there are projects being held in a country? From your percent, what are the other side of the gaps?
>> KATRINA: I think this is the perfect moment for me because after I will give you another perspective from the implementation side, how it evolved, and also take you to other part of the world, which is South Caucuses, but still working closely with World Bank and other donor organizations, like ISOC, GIZ, also European Investment Bank. Let me mention the major state program, which was supported by world bank, which is the state broadband development program, which was bringing the high speed broadband to villages of Georgia. We are small, but mountainous country, and we still have the rural open gap. We all agree that today's economy and sustainable economic development is absolutely unthinkable without having your cities having your citizens to have access to affordable high speed, high quality internet.
So we were supported to bring the middle connectivity. It's 5,000 kilometers of the broadband and up to 1,000 villages will be covered. It's very important when we speak about the challenges. The challenge for the regulator in state is that support to the funded project should also still maintain competitiveness of the markets. So the players might tell you that if you have enough funds to just give the funded internet to all the villages, we might step back and leave the market. So this is one of the challenges to ensure to be very precise where those spots where you definitely need this funding, and this will not breach the competitiveness overall for the country, and it will evolve to more competitive digital ecosystem for the country and not to scare investors, for example, for the innovative technologies.
Most important for the state is to make your citizens protected and give them access and affordable access to high speed internet. Another important step were the role of the regulator was also broader and another second component of the project. First was the infrastructure and the second was supporting the component that will support the literacy component, which is bringing awareness, how to use the internet, which is another challenge because you need to really come to each small village and find community and make people confident that it's really interested to listen how you can use internet for economic to grow up your business or your household and for economic benefit.
Also, to reach out to people from the different groups. We are small country, but we have different ethnic groups (inaudible).
(Silence).
programs, so it was our role to find proper communities in the regions and villages to reach out to start this literacy trainings. They've been given the nationwide role of developing digital literacy in the country, so with this broader state defined role, we were empowered. We were supported by Ministry of Education to work with schools, with universities, and also to also reach out to the people with disabilities for whom it is most important to have access to the digital technologies nowadays. It is a big enabler I would say for the people with disabilities to be reached out and to learn how to turn this access into the benefit for their life, for improving their next day or improving. It's very popular in Georgia, for example, for micro businesses, small businesses, to really understand how they can digitize their services and how they can use this high speed broadband for their day to day activities. I think it's very similar challenges around the world.
Yeah, let's keep doing. Let's keep going with this strategy. Thank you so much.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you so much. We'll take some questions from the ground also. Yeah, I'm coming to you. One question which I would like you to respond later is two areas where you would be focusing from 2025 and beyond, but we have some questions. We'll take two or three together, and then you can respond.
>> This is more of a comment than question. I'm from the Internet Society Foundation, and I just wanted to say going back to your point, your comment about not being able to fund India, and Raj's point about the need for cooperation and peer dialogue among funders. One thing working at the foundation that I think is another challenge is not being able to find a lot of people you want to fund. This is something we recently experienced with Georgia.
I would just ask or put out if there are ways as funders or organizations to think of ways to work within legal frameworks, but also just find ways to support people in countries where they might not be able to receive funding legally from other sources. Just being able to share ideas or maybe partners that you work with that you know are good in the region.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you so much. It's, again, coordination, better coordination, how you can use. Yes, please.
>> I'm curious about the innovation and the interventions that you have made and the funding that you are providing. If you have any good examples of innovative approaches, whether centralized or decentralized because that is the title of today's talk. Not what has been done or standardly done, but what is innovative about it.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you so much. Any other questions from the room? If want any of the speakers want to speak. Innovatively using approaches of funding and can there be more exchange between community. Since you are here, I would say the community here to share best practices of how you can reach out to more communities who need fund where you currently because of regulatory challenges are not able to reach? Anyone wants to take a stab?
>> SAMIA MELHEM: I'll be very quick. Very good question. Innovation. I think the first innovation is in the approach and how do you really get to those that are not accessed because there's no way to reach them if you can't call them. Many don't even have an idea. The idea of using local NGOs, we have ambassadors in most of our projects. These are hand picked, thousands of them, that we empower, train, compensate in different ways, and they are from the areas that are newly connected. We have that in Congo, in Zambia. We have that in Bangladesh, in Pakistan. So really using the youth on the ground, which we didn't in the past.
The other element is to really have more participation, crowdsourcing in the design of projects. These projects are getting bigger, and they really need to have participation of the stakeholder, so more design planning in the particular project.
Last but not least, but working more amongst one another in the private sector to understand where the jobs are and help universities, academic institutes, learning institutions reform the supply of programs to really align with the job market.
>> RAJNESH SINGH: Samia covered some of the approaches they take, which we take some of those as well. One thing I do want to bring up, and it's pointing out the elephant in the room, a lot of the reasons we can't deploy funds in certain economies is due to sanctions and due to another thing called geopolitics. That I think has to be taken into account because what we find is where the greatest intervention required, where we could have the most impact, are those economies and peoples in those economies who are suffering. Not because of their doing. It may be the political system or whatever else that exists in that economy.
So how do you try and ensure that we can help the people who need the most help? That I think has been one of the challenges we've had to face. So we've done, our approach has been to find partners that can go in and actually work in those economies. Sometimes we can ourselves. Sometimes we are limited by government sanctions and legislation that we can't.
But there are ways that that can be addressed as well. So, however, what sort of concerns me is that we don't seem to talk about that as enough because we want to do things here and there and everywhere else, but the people who can have the most benefit from digital technologies and all the benefits that the internet can provide, sometimes we just don't go there because we can't even send money there or we can't send people because there's a security issue, for example.
I think there is some scope to work together to find approaches how we can address that issue. I'm happy to discuss that further. I know we are out of time.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you. Raj won't say it. Afghanistan is where we are putting in money. It's difficult, but they need it the most, women, et cetera. Sarah, you and then
>> SARAH ARMSTRONG: Some of the examples I mentioned here we feel are really putting forth real innovative solutions. The organization I mentioned earlier that is doing the IOT to help with the detection of emergencies, that's our Kyrgyzstan chapter. I think that's a really good example of what's going on in being innovative, and we have also the IEEE that's working in India, and they are working with (inaudible).
seeing elements of that, and we also would say that in order to continue to find innovative solutions, we are encouraging our grantees to learn from one another and to experience what others are doing and how they're doing it and how it can be more innovative and responsive to the cultures in which they're working. So that's a very important part of the type of foundation that we are, and we would like to continue to be.
>> One thing that I wanted to share, traditionally the method that became very recently traditionally the bank has been operating in a way that we receive a request from our member country and then we address the needs. So when we were developing our digital inclusion strategy, which was launched here in Riyadh last year, we actually went through a very detailed consultative process for one and a half years which involved policymakers from 14 countries, 14 member countries, and international organizations. I can see Mr. Sharif standing here, and he was part of that discussion. We had something called ISDB, digital inclusion technical working group.
We have reached out to different policymakers from countries for in person and hybrid workshops in different part of our member country constituency. Out of that fast forward one year when we came up with the strategy, we said, okay, we have a strategy, but what would be a catalyst to embark on certain programs that would kick start on the ground?
We came up with this digital inclusion strategic partnership program where we encouraged all those partners that were with us throughout the journey in terms of the developing the strategy to come up with pilot programs that would have some sort of scaleability criteria or appetite for that that would encourage more people or more international organizations even in private sector to come in and finance the scaleability part. We are financing for programs in villages in Indonesia in Maldives so we derisk for the government so that if we can have some sort of immediate results, we know a certain amount that we are looking at in terms of financing. Some immediate results that would encourage potential financiers or investors to come in and fill in these gaps.
These are some of the innovative mechanisms other than the one that I already mentioned is blended finance, so we come up with the grant portion with some sort of soft landing, especially for low income countries that otherwise would not be able to afford the financing for the immediate needs that they would like to have some sort of impact in the country. So this is what I wanted to share. Thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: I do have one question, and I see five minutes. There is one question I had to give it to her. She's from Myanmar. I would take back the last question. I would think what can we do next? One minute for each or even half a minute. Real quick.
>> Yeah, I just wanted to agree with Raj, and thank you for raising about the community that we are so far in internet issue. That is also another challenge of the community like Myanmar, Afghanistan to receive funding in our community. Really thanks, and I would like to think I would like to request the grantor to think about sometimes to break through to see the community. Not see the sanction or geopolitical situation. Thank you very much.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you. Very relevant point. My question to all of you would be, what do we do next? We've discussed it. We say coordination is important, but what should be our next steps if we really want to take this discussion ahead? Anyone wants to take a jab first?
>> So what we have done in addition to what I've just mentioned is what we are now coming up is that we have already whole list of 72 programs in our pipeline. That has a potential to have 1 billion worth of digital development projects. We cannot finance all of it ourselves. We encourage partners to come in and chip with the development of these programs so the idea is that over the next three years we will help not only do the capacity building for the policymakers and the countries itself, but we will help them come up with basically from a concept note to a bankable project that would ultimately be available for financing for either the private sector any NDB. There are a certain number of programs that we need to do the seed funding for. We look forward to those kind of interventions and happy to collaborate and work together towards achieving collective goals. Thank you.
>> RAJNESH SINGH: Oh, sorry.
>> KATRINA: I'll try to be very, very quick. I want to mention one step that will be still ongoing is implementing digital literacy to formal education. This is one of the components that is crucial for the country, and I think this will somehow make the circle of the success story of the whole broadband development with the component of literacy and with the component of safe use of internet. We will make it even broader in schools and universities.
Second topic that is on our agenda as far as the digital, is cross cutting stream. So make involve more sectors into this. When you bring the broadband infrastructure and literacy, you need to bring also other economic stakeholders to make real success story out of your investment. Thank you.
>> FRANZ VON WEIZSACKER: On what to do next for GIZ, as a big organization, our answer is we take our decision very decentrally. Probably 90 percent of our budgets are being decided by people who live and reside in the country where it's being implemented, and that is one of the answers towards innovation because when you want to source on the clickable innovations, it needs to happen locally.
So that's where also most of the coordination shall happen going forward. Another recommendation for all the granting mechanisms and proposals, I mean, one big important feedback that we got and what the grantees very much appreciated is keeping all these processes very simple. Have the pitch done on one sheet of paper, and then have a subsequent pitching session and do not overburden grantees with bureaucracy. That's the best way to become effective and good value for money and sourcing the real innovations and not just those organizations that are very good at checking all the boxes of all the donors.
So don't put too many strings attached, but rather, make it simple and make it fit for purpose.
>> RAJNESH SINGH: So I'll say don't duplicate. Come and talk to us, come and talk to me. Thank you.
>> SARAH ARMSTRONG: Just to add on, absolutely. We are continually looking for ways to improve the foundation and the way in which it works. It's 5 years old, and we are just launching our next five year strategy, so we are full of new ideas. More simplicity with our grantees we know is extremely important, so we're finding ways to do that. We think that's important.
Looking too for more gender focus. We think that the digital gender divide is an important thing for us to be addressing, so that's another area that we'll be focusing on going into the future in terms of that.
Then also continuing to find innovative ways because some of the environments in which we're working are very difficult as we've talked about and seeing if we can identify grantees that are able to come up with solutions where they can address some of the problems that we've encountered. We are going to move forward with a lot of enthusiasm and possibly a fair amount of changes.
>> DAVID HEVEY: Thank you. Beyond what I've said on cybersecurity and cyber crime, I think also what we're as an honorable mention with my colleague from world bank said before, with the data being critical and a number of things, one thing that we are looking forward to is actually supporting Cloud transformation for countries. Particularly in P&G and that's one thing we are focused on there too.
Also, taking stock of things. That's really important. The monitoring and evaluation piece is actually is really important. It's all well and good that we have these approaches which have worked or where we're continuing to innovate, but ensuring that what we're doing actually is hitting the mark and is doing what we need it to do.
Also, having worked with foreign affairs and the APNIC Foundation, I support Raj's plug to partner with APNIC Foundation. There we are.
>> ZHANG XIAO: Personally I would like to focus on AI governance because digitalization is a process. Internet is a foundation, but AI is going to change each field more or less. So I want this talk to continue because as a group of people we are going to make sense. Thank you.
>> SAMIA MELHEM: If I can complement two actions. The first one is for big organization (inaudible).
(Silence).
the Saudi government wants to fund a lot of these projects. How to make sure it is done it is approved and it's not too complicated. NGOs, et cetera. So make partnership much easier. Second, with the client side, with the government we oftentimes start big projects, but they're not completed. We do an ID system, and 10 percent of the people of that country are in it. What about the other 90 percent? Make it easy to have follow up projects to complete what we started and keep perfecting it. Thank you.
>> AMRITA CHOUDHURY: Thank you so much. We would be ending, but I think this dialogue, as Xiao mentioned, we need to extend it. If there could be a mailing list where like minded donors could share World Bank, et cetera, has tremendous knowledge like what you shared, but projects are not completed or make it easier for hosts, et cetera, and then the bank has some ideas, governments have some ideas. Could there be some kind of a mailing list where you can share the experiences, like Franz was saying? Someone was saying let's not duplicate projects. I think Franz said. Let's see how this knowledge, which is theirs can use, for example, if GIZ is making a simpler form, could others look at it as an inspiration. I'm not saying copy paste it, but perhaps if someone can think of having a mailing list, et cetera. I don't know. Raj, would APNIC foundation; want to have a mailing list. It could be informal way where you exchange so what discussion happens, you can continue, other people can also join it, or not join it. That's just a suggestion. You know, you can take it or leave it.
We would like to have a group photo. First of the speakers. Thank you so much. It was really good. We would love to have a 90 minute session actually, but we ran out of time. If we would get just three minutes to take a photograph of the speakers and then of the group. Right? Thank you.