To the first session this morning. Well, we're going to have two sessions.
So before coffee, we're going to get into the reporters report. They're going to present, they're going to walk us through what has been happening the past two days. Then we're going to get into one speech, and then we're going to have a Q and A session where we'll have a more general discussion, and based on that speech that's going to be given,
and we'll break for coffee, and when we come back, we'll have
the closing remarks, and we will finally have His Excellency, the state master of mint, will be here with us to close us with his message, as well as his excellency engineer, bah. Chara bah would be also delivering a closing remark. So
I trust this session is going to be great as well, and we do hope
he will stay until the end. Now, without further ado, I'm going to introduce our
that is La Bata. He's
the president of icte, and I will quickly go through his bio before he comes up to iqal. Is a technology and business professional and manager with over 20 years experience in development of it, solutions, software, application, mobile content, process in improvement, ERP, CRM and risk management, tools, digital skills management, private sector development, telecom and web technologies in the financial education, telecoms, Manufacturing, Service, mobile and consulting industries. He has experience working on four continents with companies and organizations with such as Liberty Mutual, AIG Richmond University, and sorry analysis International and trans net, as well as Nokia solutions and networks. Currently, he is serving as president of ICT et a private sector association for ICT companies in Ethiopia. He was also the founding curator of Addis Global Shapers hub. I'm sure you are very well aware of what they have been doing and amazing work they've been doing throughout Ethiopia. It's a World Economic Forum initiative, and he holds an MBA from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, and Bachelor's degree in Computer Engineering and Mathematics from Richmond, the American International University in London. And without further ado, please join me in welcoming to you like alabaster to the podium to take us through the session. Please welcome a round of applause. It's the first one. Let's do better than this. Thank you so much.
Thank you very much at otie, so
my job today is to introduce our first presenter, guide the questions and answer session after the presenter, and also invite and introduce the reporters who will summarize the exciting three day session that we have been having together in the past few days. So the first speaker
speak on the topic of changing people's lives
using the internet. His name is
Chris Locke. Chris Locke is the Executive Vice
President and Managing Director of the Internet Society Foundation, a role he assumed in June 2024 he oversees the strategic vision and provides leadership across programs, finances and operations focusing on initiatives that strengthen the internet and advance the internet society's vision of inclusive internet. There is experience spanning the public and private sector. Chris began his career as an academic studying the cultural impacts of web technologies. He has held leadership roles in major internet and mobile companies, including through UK, Virgin Group T Mobile free serve
across Europe, served as Managing Director of GSMA,
mobile for development, promoting mobile technology for socio economic benefits in developing countries. Chris founded Karibu digital, a consultancy dedicated to building ethical digital economies in emerging markets, working with clients like the MasterCard Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, he aims to leverage his expertise in digital technologies, technology societal impacts to enhance the Foundation's efforts in education, health care and economic opportunity. Please help me welcome Chris to the stage to make his remarks with a round of applause. You. Thank
you very much. That's such a lovely introduction.
One of the things you missed from the introduction, which shows how old I am. My academic post was sponsored by Xerox, so that gives you a sense of quite how old I am and how long I've been involved in the internet. Firstly, I have to say some thanks. This has been an absolutely fantastic first couple of days, and I'm looking forward to hearing the summaries and the reportage from the events in the next session, but we have to thank the people that have made this conference possible. So first of all, please again, give us a round of applause for the ministry and the ministers and his excellencies that have supported us in hosting this in Ethiopia. So thank you very much.
And we have been very ably supported by our
fantastic local host, wingu as well. I've had great conversations with them this week. We're hoping that this is a continuing relationship with wingu. I think we're both very closely aligned on how we want to change the infrastructure for the internet on this continent. But thank you again. Please win you for being our local sponsor and support
our other sponsors, not least meta and Ben, who has not
only provided support for the event, but also some fantastic comment in his presentation earlier on, and our other supporters, AFRICOM and links without the community of people that make this possible. There is no way we could all be in this room and having these great few days. So thank you to all of our supporters and sponsors,
and a very personal and heartfelt one to the Internet
Society team that makes this event happen. Anyone that's ever organized an event anywhere in the world knows how hard it is, and then you turn up and the room is ready, and people turn up, and the content happens, and all of the work feels worthwhile, but I have to say, thank you very, very much to the Internet Society team that are here on the ground and those that aren't here that have made this possible and have worked to make it such a great conference. So thank you to the Internet Society team
as well. It's quite interesting that we are here five years
after the last IDC. For those of you that were there as well, it was a difficult time. It was March 2020, and for a lot of people, it may well have been the last physical meeting they had in a room like this before COVID happened. It's very lovely to be back together again. And it reminds us that what these events do in bringing everybody together is they start connections. And I've seen this throughout the conference, not just the brilliant presentations and some of the way those ideas from the presentations will spark new ways of thinking and acting and working for you, but more importantly, during the coffee breaks and during lunch, I've seen people chatting around the tables, and people have come up and spoken to me. And the value of being in the room together is that we make those connections, because everything really starts with those connections. And what we've seen throughout the course of the program in the last two days is how we as a group are in the privileged position of making those connections for millions of other users. What we do when we build the internet out, what we do when we bring connectivity to communities is we create that power of connections and starting with humans talking to each other. And what I'd like to do in some of the examples of our work that I give is take us down a bit from some of those maps. We're seeing some phenomenal maps in the presentation over the last few days, talking about the submarine cable infrastructure, talking about the land infrastructure that we have in the cables, talking about where the CDNs and the ix Ps are. And sometimes that can make the real power of the internet feel a little bit abstract, because we see it as maps, we see it as technologies. We see it as deployments. But fundamentally, the power of the Internet is a human experience. We all know when we connected to the internet for the first time, I remember being a post grad in 1994 at Sussex University, and I was a humanities student, and the computer science department at Sussex University, even as a post grad, wouldn't let me anywhere near the computer terminals in the computer science department, so I had to use one of two connected internet terminals in the library at Sussex University, and I remember logging on for the first time and Seeing the world that was out there, and feeling that sense of the world being reachable and connectable. So we all individually, at a human level, what that connection feels like, and what that ability to have that connection feels like. And when we talk about the technology that we're deploying, and we talk about the amazing jobs everyone in this room is doing to improve the connectivity of the continent. What I want us to do is to Little pinch on the map again and zoom in and really focus on what the human stories of connectivity actually are. So if we could go to the next slide, because I don't have the clicker,
I can talk about the slide before it appears, because the slides
are just pictures. Don't worry, I haven't got any big data or maps for you all to try and screen grab with your phones. I've just got very nice pictures. But when we talk about the human story, really, what we're talking about is the power of what bringing the Internet to an individual does, and the impact it has. And the first story I'd like to tell you about is L echo, a girl who was at University near hannahsburg when her father unfortunately passed away.
What she saw
after she had the sad loss of her father was using the internet to try and occupy herself, using the internet in a way, for some sense of solace, and what she found useful, and actually palpably useful for her, was YouTube videos, bizarrely, that taught her how to crochet. So in using those videos and teaching herself a new skill, it helped take her mind a little bit off the passing of her father when she graduated from college, having been away from her family, and she then came home, what she found is the people in her community loved the clothes that she'd made, loved the things she'd done with this new skill that she found on YouTube in crocheting, and she realized that actually there was a market for her to sell some of those clothes. So soon, she started a business and was using social media to promote her crocheted clothing and to promote the things that she could sell to other people. So she trained herself via an internet connection, and she then started to use that interconnect internet connection to build a business and to build a livelihood in a way that previously she hadn't expected, but expensive data was holding her back, and she did feel that, you know, if there was cheaper internet, more available internet, she could do even more. So this is a brilliant example of how that connection, how coming online, is able to change someone's lives and improve their livelihood, and often in very, very unexpected ways, the accidental thing of coming across a YouTube video teaching you how to crochet gives you a skill that provides you solace at a very uncomfortable moment for you personally, but then it's something that can turn into a new livelihood and a way forward. And this is what I want us to try and focus on when we're thinking about how we connect people, those unexpected ways that humans interact with each other on the internet and the way that that builds out, and we've seen the opportunity that that will bring to Africa in some of these presentations. But we know that connectivity is still low here. We know there is more fiber to build. We know there are more IX, PS and peering infrastructure that needs to exist. We know that CDNs are important, not just to bring the cost down, so that more traffic is being held locally, so that people like lebecco can afford to use the internet to build out their livelihoods, but also so that what we can do is be in a situation where there is a resilience and an affordability and a safety to the way the internet works for populations on this continent,
we will hear in some of the reportage back the work
that has been done, but also the work that needs to be doing. And I would love to feel that if we will come back into this room in five years time, we will be able to see measurable, double digit increases in affordability and connectivity on this continent due to the work that the people in this room are doing, and I think that should be our aim, but it doesn't just affect individuals. The other thing that we're able to do with the kind of programs we support with the Internet Society, with our chapters, is training whole communities to build and manage the internet themselves. We saw fantastic presentations early on from Dr Carlos and others, about the power of community networks, about the power of education networks, run by Barrack and others. What these connectivity platforms do, and the way that we fund them and work with our chapters and community to deliver them is to make sure that connectivity works for the community, that it is something that comes out of and is built by the community and works in a way that delivers the things that they need. And we have a fantastic story from Marley to share with you there. Amanito studied computer engineering, but didn't have practical training in how to build and manage a network. Now we have a very successful and a very powerful course, ddcn, designing and deploying computer networks that we've managed to teach in many countries. I was fortunate enough to be in Bogota at the end of last year handing out graduate certificates to 50 young people who had passed our ddcn program. And as well as the certificate, we also give them a little lovely wallet with crimping tools and players and other things in it as well. These courses teach people how to physically connect themselves and their communities to the network. And what happened with Amanita after she'd done this course, she visited the Mali chapter of the Internet Society and asked, you know, how she could kind of bring her and other people onto this course. And as a result, her and a lot of other young women took the course learn the practical skills like configuring routers, handling network maintenance and all the things that go towards making an Internet work for a community. And then she then secured an internship with a tax and financial IT support organization using those practical skills she'd got from the Internet Society course delivered by the Mali chapter to immediately bring herself into a job. So we see at a very individual level, firstly, how the internet can provide a spark and a connection for an individual to change their lives. We see also how the amazing power in this room of the Internet Society and our chapters can support whole communities and whole groups of people to get that spark and get that connection and take control of their lives. And this is happening everywhere. We have 131 chapters around the world that are delivering and partnering with the Internet Society to support community networks, to work on policy programs, to deliver this training, and we are committed over the next five years to massively increase the amount of training programs that we can run, the amount of connectivity platforms that we can run. Because what we understand at the Internet Society, and I always say to people, the key to the working Internet Society is in the second part of the name, not the first part of the name, but we understand that the Internet Society is what the internet does, and what we as a community do is bring people together to make the power of the internet real palpable and changing in people's lives. So as we hear the reports in the next session, as we hear the closing remarks, and we hear the kind of summary of these last two days come together. I want you to remember that that what we do is a very, very human impact enabled by technology, and what everyone in this room does on their day jobs on a daily basis, is changes people's lives through connecting them to the internet. And sometimes that can feel abstract when you're just looking at maps of deployments and network infrastructure. Sometimes it can feel like a hard challenge, when sometimes the world feels like it's more divided and excluded and separated than it has been before. But actually, what we are showing in coming here today, and what we are showing in our work that the world is better connected together, regardless of race, gender, culture, country or whatever, what we do is make sure that connections can be made that improve human lives. So remember that not just as we go through the sessions towards the end of today, partner with us at the Internet Society. Become a member. Join a chapter, if you're a private sector company or a donor, work with us to increase the impact of what we do the Internet Society, but remember that fundamentally, the impact we have is human, and is felt at a very human level. As I said, the great thing about being in the room today is you're making connections with the people around the room. Fundamentally, everything starts with a connection, and everything we do wants To make those connections available for all very much. You
Thank you, Chris for that fantastic overview of
what the impact of the internet has been and can continue to be all over the world.
Like to first apologize for the technical issue of uploading the slides. It
will be loaded on the internet so you'll be able to access it, but with or without it, he has done a very
eloquent job of highlighting the human aspect of the internet, the importance of connections taking us beyond abstract the impact of being connected the internet. How connectivity working for the community that the core of what his organization and his team works at his for measurable double digit increasing connectivity and affordability in Africa, all very welcome comments he has also touched A little bit about the emerging trends
from the first few years, few days that you have heard,
how the Internet continues to be a force, a positive change. So I don't know. Dr dyed, if you would like me to
open for a few questions. If anybody has i
Okay, so,
okay, so the slide is up on the
screen. Let us go through it. Think of your questions, and I'm going to give you an opportunity for a few people to make
if you have a questions or a comment for which to respond to. Okay, these are some of the stories that he has been telling us so
any questions from the audience or comments?
So do I see someone? I can use this microphone. Okay?
Maybe I will start with a question.
So
you know this conference is about, is for the
IGAD region, which are countries around Ethiopia, and
think with the exception of Kenya, the others, are not really benefiting that much from support of the foundation. So what are the advices that can give them so that they have projects that will be supported the foundation? What are other things, the clues so that those who are interested, for example, morning work, we had a meeting with the people behind the ix, P, they know. So the big thing, not just for the foundation,
but for the Internet Society overall, in the coming years is going to be our ability to measure our impact, our ability to show that our programs, whether they're training programs or connectivity programs. And so in the foundation, I run four teams. I run our philanthropy team, who run our grant program and give grants out to chapters and other organizations to support our work. I run our empowerment team, which does all of our training programs and our fellowships and our alumni network, also our comms team, who do all of the brilliant support across the Internet Society to get our message out there. And also our revenue generation team that works with partners such as sponsors and other donors and individual donors to be able to increase the impact of what we do by increasing the amount we can spend on our programs and grants. So what we do in the foundation is try and push as much out as possible to external organizations like chapters and others to support that. But in return, what we ask is measurable impact. We do need to be able to see what impact we're having in the world and to be able to report that back to our community and our board and our network, but also to be able to see what works. So I think talking about how you apply for grants with the foundation, and talking about what we're looking for is we're looking for programs with impact. We're looking for things that can reach a lot of people, but that also can be measured in a meaningful way. So when you're looking at going for any one of our grant applications on the website, and there is a lot of support on our website and from our philanthropy team for anyone who wants to apply for a grant, look at that measurement aspect in particular, because we want to be able to say we have been able to spend this money and support these organizations. But here again, is the human impact that we're having with this work. So I think that would be a real but yes, very much,
very much, focused on training programs to improve
people's livelihoods, particularly in this region, and particularly in the sub Saharan African continent.
Thank you very much, Chris for the presentation.
Barrack Otieno from the association of community networks. Just following the presentation we've made, will the foundation consider an exchange program among
African actors? Yesterday, I was just having a discussion
with colleagues from the Ethiopian chapter about how we can move this forward. Of course, we have a lot of experience, and as I offered the welcome to join us and be embedded in any of our community networks, and we are also willing to come over, because that's really what we've been doing, the spirit of moving this forward. We've been having discussions with a few colleagues from the Ugandan chapter to see this work, because sometimes what you need is to be pushed off the cliff. So would the foundation consider that? And I also just want to comment that we also had the ddcn program in Kenya specifically targeting ladies, about 23 ladies, two, gentlemen, about 80% of them are actually employed with various networks, or tier three ISPs. So I want to confirm that it actually works. And even for the faculty, I happen to be one of the lead trainers for the faculty. Of them actually establishing community networks, one in a university in a rural setup. So I want to confirm that this is something that really works, and maybe we need to explore an exchange program between the chapter so that we can also transfer expertise across the region.
Thank you. Thank you Barrack, and firstly, actually a massive
thank you to you for the training work that you do and the support that you give to the programs. Again, we can support the chapters and we can support the organizations, but the work is done people like yourself and by the chapter members. I would absolutely love to have a conversation about how we can support chapters working more with each other. I'll be talking to the chapter engagement team throughout this quarter about how we can support chapters more. And one of the things we're also looking at is how we improve the strength of chapters through chapter training for the organizational aspects as well as the training that you do. So as I've been traveling around and meeting the chapters, and we spoke about it this morning with the president of the Ethiopia chapter and some other colleagues. What I'm interested in is, what training and support do you need to strengthen the chapters to enable you to run more programs like you've been running? And then also, yes, how can we learn across the chapters, both regionally and also on topics from each other, to understand what more you can do together? And how can we enable that from an Internet Society perspective, do we build a hub that allows better communication and a much better exchange? An example, when I was in India. Last week, I was in Bengaluru, I met and chatted to Adarsh and Rajan, who run the Bengaluru chapter. And Adarsh was one of the people who launched the rural connectivity seek, the specialist group he was working with architectures
to understand how that special interest group
can do that. So I think either through using existing structures like the special interest group, or looking how we can help convene meeting of chapters regionally to talk on lots of topics, I would really like to do that. For me, anything we can do that supports and strengthens the chapters will increase the impact of our work. You know, the impact of us as a society and as a community comes from the projects that are run by the community and the chapters, and comes from the work that people like you do on the ground. Yeah, I'd love to have a conversation about that. But also, more broadly, as I'm traveling around, I'm talking to chapters and trying to understand what we can do to support better strengthening of the power of those groups and better communication between those groups themselves.
Thank you. As a far from support education. Here in Ethiopia, we work on educational technology,
actually, as you know, and as we have discussed yesterday, most of course, are not connected to the internet, so that they are working,
collecting all the information or downloading information from the internet and
putting on the server made available the school to up and upgrade. We are using Internet, which is a purpose student in the school will have access to the resource, the offer and server name
that also helps to reach unreachable regions as rural areas and everywhere to make duty or to make full opportunity for the students to
access to this resource.
But how do you support, say, type of
activities that we are trying to reach. Everything is from internet, but we are working especially in the off land. We wait for the connectivity to reach these areas. It might take visits, and that will be
because of this is my question? No, absolutely. So we have done a lot of work
with education networks, and we will continue to so Dawit and also machuki and Kevin Chaga out of Nairobi have done a lot of work on working with regional education networks to support connectivity into universities and schools. And again, our friends from Kennett have worked with us on that as well. For me, those connections are really fundamental, because, as you heard in my examples, some of the most formative human change that comes from giving people access to the internet is through their ability to access education and is through their ability to improve their lives and create new opportunities for livelihoods. Sometimes that's formal in Singapore,
informal through social media and other platforms, but that
ability to educate and better yourselves. So we need to work with local ministries. But one of the things we're doing over the next five years as a foundation is we're very lucky. We have our own resources and we have our own money that we can run for our grant programs. We recognize that we can do more by partnering with other donors. And we know there are other donors, other private foundations, other country foundations that want to support connecting schools and connecting universities. And what I'm doing at the moment is talking to a couple of those foundations to see if we could partner to create a co fund to create mechanisms that put our money and expertise and community alongside their money and expertise, to see if we can try and resolve some of those issues. And one partner in particular is very, very focused on education in Sub Saharan Africa, and hopefully later in the year, maybe even, you know, in the next few months, we'll be able to talk a bit about what we're doing with them and whether we can build specific programs to try and improve that connectivity into schools. But for me, that's a really powerful initial step when we're looking at improving connectivity in a country, because every school can become a community network. Every university can extend its network out to the local community as well. So building out from those regional education networks, building out from connecting into schools and universities gives us, as it did in the very origins of the internet, a backbone from which we can then build a much bigger and more so we do
more of that, but we're also trying to bring other donor partners in to create
programs that could specifically look at how we connect universities And schools in this in this region and in the sub Saharan African continent. But I can't promise anything yet where the
conversations are still ongoing. Good morning. May only kashora from Kenneth. I just want to confirm Kenya Education Network, one of the recipients of the Internet Society Foundation under the they call the bolt grant, so probably can solve some of the problems that he's talking about is what what teaching entail for us, as you heard yesterday, we run a a broad band network, high capacity network, predominantly for universities that are spread around the country. We had always wanted University to then be able to reach out to the community around it, whether it's schools or public libraries or health centers, and the opportunity for bolt we are right now on phase two, leave it or not, it's generous. Want to just thank them. It has allowed us to connect some of these, especially in the remote, remote areas. Some of the institutions we shall be working with are very, now very close to Ethiopia in Maria to Kana, which is a Lord one is close to here. These are really remote areas. The connectivity, yes, Israel, affordable for them. What this has done has allowed us to do, to to do, to tell the human stories. I also just want to tell you that the Internet Society Foundation taught us how to tell stories in audio podcasts. We are not very good at it, because we tend to do things for the universities. We expect the universities to tell their stories. You know, us to tell the stories. And in the last one year, we compile broadcasts. They help us to compile podcasts of the impact, especially the human impact. That's what we are doing. Yes, we collect data. We collect statistics. They wanted the statistics also to have a human face, and that is that was something that has so we really do appreciate, yeah, we we are looking forward to even more support in the coming years. Thank you. And it sounds like I'm lining
people up to just say that the foundation is great. That's not the case, but it's a lovely intervention to have that story. And yeah, that thing you said there is also important when I talk about measuring the impact yet later,
also want those stories, because I think
that's when it becomes powerful for us, when we're talking ministries, when we're talking to the AU, when we're talking to The ITU, bringing people into our community, getting people to work with us at the Internet Society is a matter of the heart and the head. You know, it's important if someone's going to partner with us, if someone's going to give us their money and allow us to use that money to give out more grants and to support more programs. Really important. We have the data. It's really important we can show how we've spent that money well and had an impact with it, but really it's also the heart that comes into this as well. And when you see those stories and when you listen to the podcasts, you really do see the impact that people have at a very individual and human level, and that's where that connection is made. So doing both is really important, and hopefully we can support our partners to do more of this with their work going forward.
Okay. Very much. Thank you. Chris and I want to add one. I bore witness last week to the impact
of the support GSM may provides in southern Ethiopia, there's a group of pastoralist and farming communities that receive
information about
the weather pattern in
visual farmer pastoralists, and they've told me they Find they found it extremely useful
to navigate unpredictable weather conditions they were facing so they can What kind of plan to plant and how to adapt what they do around farming in that short period of time, and a lot of them have seen significant benefits compared to the ones that didn't receive in from this information and assumed the rains will be short and nothing can be done in that time, they're also
using the connectivity provided and the use cases
around parametric insurance to
buy insurance for the cattle they have. So when they experience this drought conditions, as often as recently, they often do let them bridge over to the other side before the
cattle die, they get insurance payment and then they use it to buy feed or to buy cattle after Dr passes,
most of them were telling us continue. This is come to us. They have two rainy seasons where they farm
around October, and one is coming in March. So it is
very impactful from what I have seen, and much of the people that were using it were also women. So I wanted to let you know that project is having a significant impact from what I have seen, Southern Ethiopia, not far from Kenya, as well. So we will move to the next session. We thank Chris for the question and answer and
the presentations.
So I'm going to introduce the reporter. Will take us through the summary of the last few days. So Johannes fasika Is the porter I'm having a small issue with my phone. So Johannes Asika has a BSc in electrical engineering