Thinking Big on Digital Inclusion | Davos 2024 | World Economic Forum

okay welcome everybody to this panel discussion entitled thinking big on digital inclusion if you're following us on social media and posting it's hash w24 to begin I want to ask a quick question just think of your household so your children your partner and how many connected devices you have amongst you and raise your hand if it's more than three yeah and keep your hand uper fits more than four more than five more than six more than seven more than eight okay I'm going to let you put your hands down now not embarrass you any further um I think it's clear um that a lot of us would struggle to live life quite frankly without them whether it's assessing our finances uh Healthcare communicating getting around traveling studying working um digital access is integral to our lives yet two 2.6 billion people almost a third of the world's population still lack internet connectivity now we understand the power that the access to the internet unlocks yet two billion people have no access to healthcare 1.4 billion remain unbanked 244 million children have no access to education yet technology can change those numbers but getting it to people means connecting them at a price they can afford and that Society can sustain worse still this access or lack of it is not down to availability would you believe today 95% of the world's population is covered in some way by Broadband 95% but when data only Broadband access in a loow income Nation costs the equivalent of 20 times that of a high income nation and I've run the numbers we're talking around a fifth of average monthly income it's easy to see see why connectivity remains Out Of Reach for so many and that's assuming they can afford a connected device a smartphone for example however there's good news there are movements that are working to tackle these fundamental issues and some of the people that are driving them are sitting right here with us three actually of our fantastic panelists are on the board of the Edison Alliance it's a group that was formed in W 2021 with the aim of accelerating access to digital solutions for 1 billion people in underserved communities by next year now over the next 45 minutes you'll hear more about that work what we need to do to level the digital playing field digital Equity let's call it that and transform lives and Societies in the process let me introduce our panel The Honorable Paula inabi minister of information communication technology and innovation of Randa welcome Robert Smith founder chairman and chief executive officer at Vista Equity partners nulco NY the chairperson at Standard Bank group and Hans vestberg CEO of Verizon H I'm going to start with you thank you um there's clearly progress love that your enthusiasm is great I was just going to be a great 45 minutes um enough of me um I think there's clearly progress people are working hard but the numbers speak for themselves what do we need to be thinking about and keep it solution based so just first with good news we were gathered here 2020 roughly and then half of the world's population were connected so in but we all saw what happened in covid you needed digital Education Health Care and financi inclusion because that it was a necessity and when we started discussing setting up the Edison Alliance we also decided those are the three areas going to focus on because as we all know I mean it's great to have Broadband but that's not enough you you need also to have applications that actually are meaningful for you to be a citizen of the world uh that was the start of Edison Alliance we took a year to discuss the target we decided we're going to connect one billion people but only if they're part of the Education Health Care or financial inclusion and U we had our board meeting yesterday and we met all our Champions we were going to talk about how it work because it's a very different model we have we have re reached 7 84 million people in two years uh it's 127 countries 320 different commitment we have done uh to drive this and it's basically in the the model we have is roughly 167 Champions half of them governments and NOS half of them are private sector and that was a decision we made from the beginning we need both because I build networks I mean I can do the broadband that's sort of me uh um then affordability we need a combination of me doing it cheaper we need also work with devices ultimately we probably need subsidize uh Broadband models in some countries and then finally governments definitely work with doing application for healthcare education and that was the whole thinking we had from the beginning and I was fortunate enough to have both Paul and Robert on the board uh and that movement is a very special mov and I'm going to finalize by saying that I don't think that anyone wherever you're born wherever you come from whoever you are should not be excluded for our society because they're not having dig inclusion and for me the 21st centur infrastructure is to have mobility and broadband and the services that are required but it's very different challenges and I think some of us will talk about it because it's different challenges there's challenges in us there are challenges in Rwanda Togo they're different in every country and that's how you need to work in order to do that and that's why we have have a movement rather than a program or a project there's so much in there and we're going to talk about it all affordability no no no don't worry never apologize affordability accessibility but I think your point was vital that this is not just a low-income Nation or Community problem no as I mentioned this is everywhere and it needs to be tackled as such um Minister inabber actually when I was prepping uh for Rwanda I saw that the government plans to digitize all services by 2024 imagine that in America even the UK my own country I won't pick on America um talk to me about the government's role in this in particular and what you see right thank you very much and yes correct by uh meid this year the plan is to digitize all government services and I must say that we already have um at least uh 5 years ago we had the most critical 100 Services already online and how we defined criticality was the most demanded for services by our citizens uh we we could look at the data and see uh where do we see lots of volumes of services that are being requested for and so we had to prioritize those and it's been you know uh largely a success and seeing citizens you know even give feedback on how we can improve on some of these services and how they're being delivered and today um we have about um you know more than 120 services online by June we hope to have all the 300 services online and and and and we on track to do exactly that why was this important for us um one we had invested for the last U you know couple of years in making sure and we talk about access usability and affordability um access for us was a big priority from uh um from 2000 and what we were focused on was how do we ensure that we have a national fiber optic backbone that is covering all the 30 districts of the country and the Border points but very quickly we realized that you know having access to connectivity the way you define it is important you did um you know mention the statistic of 95% population coverage we have 97% 4G population coverage does that mean that 97% of our population is directly benefiting and accessing I think the answer is clear it's no how many are by the way sorry how many are connected what percent today today we have so for when we look at devices so we we track different metrics yeah we have about 78% of the population that has a device but of those 78% 23% have a smartphone okay what does that truly mean it means that yes can have a phone they'll use the phone to maybe text and call but these services that we're putting online they may have to find other forms of accessing these Services whether it's through third parties and agents that we've been able to deploy across the country yet our philosophy around Service delivery is making sure that people can selfs serve you don't need to travel we call it zero trip zero paper we don't want anyone to travel any distance to get a service from government we don't want you to use any Peppers so everything should be done seamlessly end to end on online you request for a service you pay online you get it delivered in in an e certificate form and so because we had already deployed the infrastructure we needed to then tackle the barriers on making sure that everyone can benefit from that and that's why we had to digitize all our services and now have to address affordability Bingo we'll come back to that but your biggest point I think there is that you have full access basically but you have less than a fifth of people I was trying to do the maass there I think it's about 177% of people actually that are connected in the way that we see it today Robert talk about this because you have vast experience in fighting for digital equity in in communities in the United States you've started initiatives I think one that sticks in my mind the student Freedom initiative just talk about your work and how you view this challenge sure I think it's interesting and in paa you know raises really the the the the issue around utility who uses it and why uh we view things uh in Edison Alliance from a few angles one is of course access and then education welfare Health financial literacy financial enablement and in the United States there are certain communities that don't actually have certain of those elements relative to the rest of a connected uh country so it isn't the country it's the communities that that we focus on um one of the communities I care deeply about are the historically black colleges and universities because they produce over 50% of the uh African-American Engineers they produce over 75% of our doctors that serve our community they produce over 80% of the federal judges judges that that look to dispense and deliver uh uh call it equal justice throughout throughout our country and those institutions are critical well 82% of those are actually live in Broadband deserts and when I say deserts doesn't mean they don't have connectivity but they don't have Broadband connectivity and if they don't have that it is very difficult for them to use education applications or other applications in the community to enable their businesses to be successful so we can talk about some of the initiatives and I will in a second I think one of the important elements was we recognize those issues and it is Partnerships it is public private philanthropic Partnerships which the Edison Alliance the stands for how we bring things together to come up with solution-based systems that are sustainable and scalable one of which actually formed here was with one of our good partners at Cisco and you know my good friend Chuck we were actually sitting just down the block you know three years ago I said Chuck we've got a problem uh in in some of the HBCU we got to go solve that with broadband and one of the issues came up the Department of Education had come out with a program that said listen if you do not have the right to a cybercity protection you lose what's called title for funding 80% of African-American students utilize that through these HBCU we are end of job now where we have now actually put that infrastructure around which basically saves $ 1.4 billion dollar a year for these universities which these students now go to next part of the job is of course enabling the Broadband uh access we have bead funding Etc which we are building that capacity across these or organization so they may have the ability to actually get that Broadband funding that hits the rural communities many of these colleges are in rural communities and the underserved communities the African-American communities Beyond just the universities there's the community of the businesses so this is a utility okay if you think about it we own 80 so or so uh uh uh software companies and we measure what is the return on investment from the utilization of application software by our customers for the small for our average customer it's 64% Roi for a small business it's 900% so if you have a small business and you start using uh applications for scheduling for compliance some of the government services Etc when you start using it for things like you know managing payments processing having broadband and utilizing these applications demonstrably increases their capacity to create sustainable businesses employment in in the US small businesses are the largest group of businesses and they employ the most people and if you can grow those businesses and make them effective the one area we talked about was Financial infrastructure one of the things we've done is we' built with one of our partners Microsoft units where we can digitize call it banking in a box these community development financial institutions which are small that's what serves the African-American Community 70% of our communities don't have branch banks the the the community I group in didn't have a branch Bank when I grew up there is one now I've never seen it open okay just give you a sense we dig ized one of those those cdfis is a credit union in the Delta prior to that they were doing 50 loans a year they now have done over 2900 loans on an average of $30,000 and the repayment rate is over 99% wow the theault rate is less than the FDIC levels okay that's the power of enabling communities with infrastructure digital infrastructure KN knoow education and ultimately capital and as those companies can those those communities then can hire more people in the companies uh that those small to medium businesses it's stabilizes the communities it creates a a you know increases the value of the houses and starts to create what we call the this the sort of economy that America believes it to be and enables them to become that on their own and actually that can be replicated anywhere in the world ABS you know that that's not just a specific thing that you're doing I love that that's basically covered every aspect of the panel already in one worry I've got a plan we'll dig deeper um nul talk about from your perspective too set the scene for you thank you Julia but before I do that I just want to give some numbers um to just round off some of the stuff that Paula was talking about after all I represent a bank um according to our research today mobile penetration on the subsaharan African continent is 75% that is anybody who's got any level of Technology from 2G onwards but if you take that number down in the way that she was describing and say well actually if you have a 2G phone um there's not much you can do in today's world you need 3G and above and you start to do that arithmetic well the number then of Africans that actually can do that drops to just half of the 1.26 billion people that live in the African continent today in fact correct number is 45% so you could look at that as a huge huge gap uh and deficit or a huge opportunity and I like the way that you're looking at this because it means where Verizon and the likes of Verizon actually have maxed out the opportunities elsewhere in the world this is the one area and the one continent where there is still massive massive growth I got it yeah I think I need to talk my shers first we take that later going to exchange numbers just one other data point to bear in mind in all of this so so clearly laying the fiber in the ground is critically important right this minute there are seven new Fiber Optic Cables being built somewhere around the African continent built with private sector money no doubt there could be more if African governments found it in their hearts and Minds to put in place the right kind of regulatory infrastructure to incentivize data centers to have the right sort of regulations around data governance data sovereignties wearing its head and therefore stying the effort to actually do this but we can do it there is not actually in this area a shortage of money or appetite or interest so when we meet at Davos again in three years time I think these numbers are going to be very very different because Banks stand ready to support this kind of investment uh you know at at at scale and at speed so so those are the figures so let's take the conversation down a little bit to uh can I just ask a quick question are governments asking for the money are are they coming to you and saying hey we've got a big idea we want to digitize to your point you said you stand ready to provide the financing we Finance well a lot I mean Telos are some of our biggest clients and but not Telos I'm talking governments governments don't have to do much actually uh that's good well look I come from a South African perspective where the sort of thing I mean we would like to borrow your minister of of of Home Affairs just for a few months just we can work them out so so governments actually uh in my mind don't have a very big role other than to give us the right policy framework and the private sector will do the rest this is the one area in Africa that did not get to be like this because of government action yeah this it government was busy laying um fixed line infrastructure badly and this lip frogged it completely and rendered it obsolete so this has been a very very much private sector driven uh campaign and effort and I think it will continue to be so and in my mind it needs to be so where government comes in right as I said his policy the right regulatory uh environment and then the applications on top to provide services the kind of thing that she describes is exactly the sort of thing that we all dream about and that therefore becomes government's sole real uh uh money spend and no they don't need banks for that they've got enough money for that so there's two things in this for me there's the ability to get hold of a smartphone and finance that somehow and then there's the speeds and at what cost you can get them Hans you can talk certainly about the latter we do do you want to make another another point I just want to talk about what a private sector company actually can do solo without going to collaboration with any other and I just want to pick up the three areas that you spoke about right okay so for example stab bank has a mobile app um it interests us very much to not have to employ more people to be at a branch to give services but for people to get Services digitally at any time at any place so but then data costs are an issue so what we do in fact is we absorb the data cost of our app we do not expect people to have data in order to bank with us so we spend any amount of dollars with mobile network operators every year in order to deliver this service so that's the first way that we can start to make the cost of data be reasonable to access our services secondly in South Africa certainly we have the opportunity to get a mobile virtual Network operator license where we work with an M but essentially we can then sell the data or make the data available to our client set at a very reasonable rate if you are accessing a standard Bank uh Standard Bank service so all of those who move around the African continent don't want to pay for data but want to bank please talk to me afterwards we do also Finance smartphones um do so in South Africa much more readily because we have a reach Credit Data set on that on that population we also Finance in Nigeria where it has been a real real struggle to get data it's just the data and we effectively have had to work with a fintech that goes out to Source Credit worthy data for us to be able to land off so now we are in 19 countries on the African continent are you going to do that country by country so we need to think of a smarter way of doing that but without doing something about the cost of the handset we're not going to get very far right except to provide services to rich people which is not not very interesting the third element um of it is is the literacy um and also the design of the actual digital interfaces so you have to start with this design with the end user in mind we design these things as if everybody who uses them is 17 years old well some of them are 17 one so we effectively have had to put up a brand new team to go through our entire Suite of digital interfaces and with the land that says how usable is this is it really accessible for a certain demographic it's not just the font size it's actually just how complex it is to navigate some of these things I sometimes have to call and say well on Earth do I make an international payment on this app and if that happens it means it's not welld designed so so so banks are starting to look at these sorts of services with the eye of their own consumers in order to make it much much more usable and then because we spend so much money with the likes of Microsoft we went to Microsoft and said we got a problem of literacy admittedly for now the pilot is in South Africa and since 2021 we've asked them to um to advance digital literacy on our products so again there's another reason to bank our and up to now we've actually trained 33,000 people uh on on on the on the sort of things that Microsoft does and they're doing it for free we can scale this up in all the markets in which in which we uh we operate so there's a whole lot going on because digital inclusion I mean Financial inclusion can't really happen without digital inclusion but to the extent that we can find the conducive uh environment we can take it away um and and do things with it and we don't need any government yeah but you're also saying that Financial inclusion doesn't happen if you don't have the data to back it up to provide the credit that you're talking about as well okay there's two really important things there the digital um education the digital literacy I think which is vitally important because it's a barrier for people if they they're overwhelmed even if they have the access and they have affordability so if you solve that problem it's a crucial part of it h but the other thing and I think it goes back to the point that you said when you gave the offer to Hans to to come and talk about um sort of accessibility and the coverage that people can get there it's that it's the speeds and it's bringing costs down yeah you're absolutely right I think on the accessibility part I mean I think you articulated perfect it's basically private money in the word bilding networks because it makes sense and also start with fiber because ultimately even though you have a mobile phone it's a lot of data that has to be transported so fiber has to be in the ground or see cables to go where you need data so that infrastru structure is so important but that's basically private money doing that all around the world uh I think that second part when it comes to affability there are two pieces there and it's very different in different countries uh in your countries that you're you talking about basically zero rating when the user service you are not charging for it that doesn't really work in the US because everything is unlimited on data so you don't need to do it so there's different models in different markets when it comes to affordability and then you add on that the device is many times actually the biggest blocker because sometimes you can have a mobile phone of course but if you're going to do digital education you need a wider screen or if you do a digital health care so the device becomes important and I think that we see many countries now starting to subsidize that piece for lowincome communities uh and that could be any type of country uh in order for see them but then you have the last piece that you talk so brilliantly about you need application you need the literacy that might be there need to be and then you use it so you scale it all the way but if you look at from The Challenge the smaller challenge is actually networks it's to get them to the people with the right type of affordability and the right type of application and the whole Edison Alliance is just about that go to those communities scale those solution we heard Solutions here scaling many markets and the movement we have in Edison Alliance is to move that to different countries different solutions we need to be local in the solutions but as a group we can actually solve it together Minister inab your take I wanted to reflect on a couple of things and I'll try to do it very quickly um one um we have a number of Lighthouse countries under the Edison Alliance and through the lighthouse countries we see examples of what different countries are doing uh I'll take an example of a new country that is joining Edison Alliance which is South Africa I was speaking to the minister and he mentioned they have 70% smartphone penetration um then you look at a case like Ronda where we've digitized almost all government services right then you have Nigeria that is very big on building digital literacy skills are thriving a fentech ecosystem I think what is clear for all of us is that well in the three strands of things that we are discussing access usability and affordability you may be doing well in one area it's not enough to really achieve fully digital inclusion so for one country you could have solved the handset problem but you still need to solve for the value why should a citizen for example buy a smartphone if they can afford to get a future phone and you know leave happily you need to create a value proposition for this smartphone now coming back to some of the things raised I don't think governments can only do policies and regulations when we box ourselves in policies and and regulations alone we thought the speed of progress and in many ways let's take Services you want to digitize government services do you need to go to the bank to borrow money maybe maybe not I think context really matters for the case of Ronda we had to create a PPP model where we digitized all services and a certain percentage went to the person who built the platform right um when it comes to digital literacy do you leave it to the industry or is it an area where both the government and the private sector work together to build these digital literacy skills because whether it's the industry or the government you're all providing services to the citizen and you want a digitally literate citizen that can that can consume these Services infrastructure as well I think government has a role to play the government of Ronda had to ball from the World Bank to build the fiber optic backbone as a catalytic investment to get the operators to build the last mile connectivity that was required today we talk about the universal access fund It's never enough for the gaps that we have and so we're getting to a point where we're saying what contrib rtion can government make into the universal access fund because I don't want to spend the next 20 years trying to build towers to achieve 100% connectivity maybe if I put some skin in the game we can do this in five years and then you can then focus on the issues around access and and and and digital literacy the final one uh back to what Hans is saying it's really when you talk about handset affordability it's not just the handset itself the handset alone doesn't have value how do we create bundled services in communities or countries where there's no credit rating system yeah because what happens and we've experimented with a couple of models and I'll end on this is the reality that when you don't have this credit history for Citizens the device financing models that come into play will end up the total cost of owning is between 160% to 180% from someone who was able to pay upfront the full value of the smartphone for example and so what we've experimented with is bundled Services how do I give you device with the service and recently we're discussing what we've done in Ronda it's a deal that we've launched with Airtel where citizens can buy a smartphone for $16 it's an oneof fee but they pay $1 per month for one GB of 4G data per day unlimited calls and unlimited SMS and this has really changed the competition and brought down prices in terms of 50% driving the affordability Angle now the reality is that even with such a scheme we're not tackling everyone there are people who live in households that don't have electricity so the bundled package will have to include some solar home system that allows them to be able to have electricity to even charge that device that they have so are youing on we're working on that and these are things that you need to experiment with because you'll never find a one-sized fits all solution to the challenge of digital inclusion I think there are many nations around the world that could use a ministering Gabi quite frankly just listening to all of that um Robert give me your perspective because again you've got a lot of experience whether it's you know helping States raise money and Access Federal money in order to be able to um help with digital inclusion just give me your perspective I think what you hear is it takes an ecosystem and each e ecosystem has certain advantages disadvantages uh opportunity sets and it it it takes alliances and knowhow and sharing of information sharing of of of of workflows uh in terms of how to make it happen getting best practices and I think that's one of the things I think we formed quite effectively in with the Edison Alliance uh I always like to say selfishly all the value ultimately ends up in the software these services are all software driven and the derivative of course of that is data right and you know thank you all for providing the infrastructure for us to C that value but but I I say that in in in in all seriousness uh this next wave this next generation of utilization of gen on the data the data sets the software uh should enhance the enablement of opportunity for private sector uh for public uh for philanthropic you know part of the ecosystem we work in the United States involves philanthropies like the WK kog Foundation who's a partner with ours with the southern communities initiative where we're driving the digitization of these the banking infrastructure cdfis and MD for these communities we couldn't do that with that without that sort of partnership they have Decades of history and understanding who are the local Partners who can Implement these Solutions create the visibility the transparency the accountability that is so required forun ERS for governments who actually say this makes sense and it enables those communities to become self-sustainable communities that's the goal at the end of the day no one wants to go and borrow money and get money and hand outs they really want to create self-sustainable uh solution sets in our last board meeting we talked about and one of the ideas was let's make sure that as the application software is built it's built locally through the local eyes through the local lenses of what is it that the people need for the farming for the banking for the community you know for for trading that works for them and that's where digital literacy again is an important part of that ecosystem so it is an ecosystem you know the light bu moment for me was what you said didn't know it was sort of coming to me as you were talking in that certain countries are doing certain things and they're going in depth in the literacy or in depth in the connectivity or affordability whatever it is but no one or very few are putting all three together is that part of the discussion that you have to sort of say to a country liouse con that are sharing with others ministers is sharing between them as well and then we have a database with more than one 1,000 different actions you can take which is called the digital inclusion Navigator uh so we have tools we have cones but we take the ones that are scaling of course Rwanda is the lighthouse country given what they're doing and many want to look at them how can we do it but remember what everyone has said here is different challenge different place but we can take from each other we can scale it and that's the whole idea cuz I think think if you're also learning from each other's mistakes it's really great too because to your earlier point and to to Roberts too you don't want to be borrowing money for the sake of it you want something that's sustainable so um if you can learn and not do things that have not worked for other nations and ones that very similarly mirror what you have in your nation and copy it's far more efficient um two things have been mentioned and it would be remiss of me not to mention it Davos so forgive me Ai and the impact of emerging Technologies and the dangers I think is we and perhaps it's the first class problem as you increase the size of networks and you get more and more people um online and connected um the risks that come with that data breaches cyber attacks the the data soaring um particularly in the last year how are you incorporating their thinking on this and the benefits of AI I think are very clear that the danger perhaps that at a time when we're talking about a digital divide it exacerbates it does good for the most connected and perhaps educated and for the lower income Nations they don't have time to worry about it how are you thinking about that as a as a community who'd like to tackle that first I just like yeah let me let me share with you what the banks are are doing so um we clearly are a magnet for um for cyber security attacks so information security has been the way that all banks or everywhere have had to grow up and in the last five years perhaps more but very much exasperated by by covid given how much digital infrastructure became the first Port of coal the banks then built more and more firewalls and uh belts and braces and suits of armor around the system so that we could always catch or most of the time catch the threat actor in fact you haven't heard very many banks being breached you've had breaches uh that were public and the global not few not many banks because banks have thrown money huge tons of money at the problem and unfortunately when the Bad actors couldn't access the bank systems they went for the bank customers and so what we have seen is an explosion in fishing and vising and all of these things that you know about and it has been incredibly easy to actually come in that way and they target the 60-year-old plus by first intent and so the question we are asking ourselves in our boardroom is what is our responsibility here because banks will tell you story you you gave out your password or your PIN we're not we're not going to be uh responsible for that you can't actually leave it at that because we part of uh either part of the problem here or part of the solution so so the the the thing to just stress and I was at another panel where the JP Morgan women are saying the same thing we spend so much money on technology but that is to protect ours not yours so we back again to literacy to detal literacy the South African regulator simply has made it now is making it a license requirement that every Bank demonstrates that they spend X percentage of their revenue on literacy it started off being just financial literacy it has to expand to digital literacy because the the government can't be everywhere at the same time and so to have the people who actually benefit from all of this also takes take responsibility I think is the right way to go yeah and if you are everywhere all the time as a government you're um you're accused of spying and and and encroaching upon people's privacy and and their rights too how about you quickly maybe what I can share on this is um one even the experience for Ronda is that we were able to um you can imagine after digitizing all the services we had a lot of data right and so one of the things that we had to put in in place uh through a very heavily consultative process was a data protection and Privacy Law and what that also means is that government institutions that are collecting and processing data also have to be certified because they also uh you know need to you know go by the rules uh that are really set out in our data protection and Privacy Law that's one now when it comes to risks obviously talking about AI I think one of the biggest risks is around privacy and so you have such an instrument that is able to C for who owns data who owns the data and for us within our data protection and Privacy Law we've given ownership of data to this to the citizen yeah and so what needs to be in place now is tools that allow the citizen to know when and how their data is being used and if they consented to that uh being their data being used the second issue uh challenge risk around AI is bias and how do you deal with it in a you know in a world where a lot of the large language models the way they are built the data that is fed into them is data that maybe is far removed from the local context to which you want to apply them and so some of the things that we're doing is creating um you know large language models in the local language to start and and we've already mapped out use cases we because we already have our national AI policy in place we've also looked at different areas where we can apply AI including early warning um systems for Farmers uh building an large language model for community health workers who are the first line of support for health care services for our citizens and so with that we're using that to use in our local language Kenya Randa build the llm around that today we've tested it to about 70% and continue to test it because it's important that it's in the local language and something that can resonate with the citizens and lastly is education and awareness if you don't educate citizens and give them comfort about what you're doing build strengthen the social contract that we already have with them then trust in many ways will negate the efforts that you're putting in place to really be at the Forefront of the AI Revolution yeah trust and again it comes back to digital literacy I'm very conscious of the time so H you can you can give me your perspective on this or you can tell me why we have to be enthusiastic or both actually about bringing those 2.6 billion people um online as soon as possible I'm of course I'm born Optimist I've seen the movements we have done um the last 24 months in this group for example I know that every one of the 167 Champions that are part of these which are the largest corporations in the world and uh countries from all around the world all of them have the same view it shouldn't matter where you're born where you come from in which Community you are you should be part of our uh digital inclusion uh that gives me hope um and it gives me hope that of 24 months we have reached what we have reached right now that doesn't mean we're down I mean as you said 2.6 billion still are not connected even though we have progress 784 million in in two years um so we will not rest I I think I've taken that personally as a as a life mission uh to move it forward so I hope you are equally optimistic as me but uh with Partners like the people sitting on this stage and all around the the world I I'm optimistic there are many people wanting to do this but we do it for business we do it we grow business we sell more this is our business so sometimes people oh is it philanthropy no this is business this what I do every day so this is great for my stakeholders but share all is for everyone so and that's when you get sustainable when you and I think Robert is always coming back to that it's going to be more software for me but you do it for the right cost for good so important there has to be return on investment that's what I mean return on inclusion it all has to be quantifiable and measurable and then it grows in Scales it is important again to think about the the the ecosystem we all live in and how do you make everyone look this way yeah yeah how do you make how do you how do you make that virtuous that virtuous cycle works okay and The Virtuous cycle uh requires understanding you know digital inclusion to be we're going to go from digital connectivity as a mission to digital enablement as the true Mission the enablement is going to come from uh digital literacy and understanding and part of you know efforts we do in the US for instance is uh we understand that HBCU have not had access to AI tools systems Solutions Etc so we built the first you know AI software uh uh course that we've now delivered at morouse right and so now these students are using you know gen and AI for for sports uh uh part of one of our platforms one our companies over subscribed in terms of number of students creting internships and actually inviting them to be part of our corporate hackathons where we have our best scientists from you know 87 companies 400 of these scientists fueled by Microsoft AWS Google their AI scientists working together to think about and work on applications two of those students were actually part of the winning teams right those are the ways that you you create the enablement the understanding of what is this tool how do you how do you ensure bias doesn't get written in as opposed to trying to write it out you have to have diversity in the context of the writing and the way our society is structured we have to create those opportunities and guess what the data has proven it's those diverse boards that have lower risk diverse management companies that have higher returns those are the things that you know as a fiduciary we think about and as a fiduciary we want to ensure that we're doing the best for our stakeholders by ensuring that we are doing our work to to make in an inclusive environment that creates high returns lower risk lower losses that's why we're doing it yeah I think that works for all and more house was where you paid the student debt of the 2019 class they smiling faces I think I will remember for the rest of my life um your panel amazing quite frankly I learned lot today I appreciate you thank you and made what

Channel: World Economic Forum

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Keywords: World Economic Forum, WEF, Davos, politics, finance, economy, news, leadership, democracy, education, technology, tech, AI, automation, work, future, world news, economist, world, forum, economic, world news today, worldeconomicforum, switzerland, external affairs minister, globalization, robotics, bloomberg, Davos 2024, Davos Agenda, WEF 2024, wef24, Davos 24

Id: AJ5fq9POzLw

Length: 43min 5sec (2585 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 15 2024