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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>> Good afternoon, and welcome to this special session that is the PNMA session, which is the policy network on Meaningful Access. Today we will discuss about the concepts portfolio, effectively contributing to the WSIS+20, and also the GDC implementation.
With me today is my cohost, Giancomo that we have over there. And then we have a series of wonderful panel this afternoon. And the first we have on the panel, I'm going to introduce to you is Mr. Fabio Senne, who is a coordinator and Regional Center for Studies for development of Information Society. Welcome, sir, to this special programme.
Now, the second part we have here is Ms. Onica Makwakwa, Executive Director, Global Digital Inclusion Partnership. That is GDIP. Welcome to this special panel.
And after that, we have Mr. Guilherme Canela de Souza Godoi, director for digital inclusion and policies and the digital transformation and secretary of the Information for All Programme, IFAP, the UNESCO. Welcome to this programme.
And next we have Madam Joyce Dogniez, vice president of empowerment and outreach Internet Society Foundation, ISOC foundation. Also welcome.
And there we have our two Moderators also, we have Ms. Margaret we have, welcome. And also we have one of our Moderators here, is Judith Hellerstein. Welcome.
Now we move on to the next on‑stage here, and we have Mr. Borre Gaup, Senior Engineer, Divvun/UiT the Arctic University of Norway. Welcome, sir.
And we have also one of my colleagues and one of my friends here, Poncelet Ileleji, from the Gambia.
And then, finally, we have Madam Josephine Miliza, that's policy regulator lead, APC. Welcome to this special session.
Now, before we continue, I would like to call our consultant and has been working with us over the past several months and over the past several years, digging into all aspects of Meaningful Access, and we have Madam Daphnee and she is going to give us a rundown of what this network is all about. That's the policy network on Meaningful Access. Welcome, Daphnee, to the floor.
>> DAPHNEE IGLESIAS: Good afternoon, good evening, and good morning. It is an honour to welcome you to the PNMA main session here in Norway and anywhere you are watching us from.
The policy network on Meaningful Access as an intersessional activity was created in response to the growing body of evidence that even when people have connectivity, they might not fully benefit from the Internet. How one gets connected is an equally important challenge to the experience that a person will have once they are online.
While access to infrastructure is critical, without this access being inclusive, useful, sustainable, and affordable or to summarize, meaningful, humanity cannot achieve its full potential.
Since 2021, the PNMA's expert lab multistakeholder network has consistently built knowledge and reached across communities to exchange policies and practices that have worked within our focus areas. But most importantly, to highlight what has not worked, while digital divides persist and which structural issues repeat themselves in different scenarios.
This analysis of stakeholders' experiences with implementation and problem‑solving is notably one of our main outcomes. We invite you to access our PNMA repository of good practices and also our endorsed list of literature on Meaningful Access, both available for community updates throughout the year. A community that you can also be part of and extends beyond the IGF ecosystem.
Advocacy for partnered implementation of this previously identified solutions, the monitoring of ongoing experiences, and the collation of new practices are additionally performed by our network. Our roadmap towards WSIS+20 process highlights our core activity as a benchmark for the implementation of Meaningful Access objectives as established by the Global Digital Compact.
Moreover, our upcoming output report is planned as a public portfolio of knowledge and practices that the PNMA can engage with and contribute to this pivotal milestones.
You are about to experience a small fraction of said portfolio. Let's keep the conversation flowing afterwards. We look forward to receiving your support and feedback. Thank you. And enjoy the panel.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you.
>> GIANCOMO PERSI PAOLI: Thank you. I have the computer on my knees. Thank you, Daphnee, for this introduction. The structure of the session will be as followed, as has been explained before. But let's say that we have discussion here and then we will have a remote Moderators taking questions from people on remote and other Moderators, moderating the debate here in the room. We hope that we have a lot of discussion with you.
Dikchya and Roberto are the Moderators online while Ndung'u and Judy are Moderators in the room.
The first is Vint Cerf, that is loyal to this meeting, but today is better than yesterday. Yesterday, the other meeting wake you up at 3:00 in the morning. Today is better for you, a little bit.
>> VINT CERF: Yes, this is much more manageable, but thank you very much for inviting me to both of them.
If I may take a moment just to remind the PNMA participants how important your work is. This is the most substantive intersessional activity that I think IGF undertakes. And the reason I consider it to be so important is that we can give concrete feedback to local and regional actors about how well the Internet is performing for those users in those locales. This concrete kind of feedback is exactly the sort of thing that one hopes for out of the IGF, and what is especially important is that the PNMA is an intersessional body which continues to carry out its work during the course of the year, not only in an annual meeting.
I had confessed that I don't know to what extent the PNMA measurements reflect the UNESCO ROAM‑X metrics, but I would draw those to your attention as yet another way of expressing how well or how not well Internet is performing for all of its users.
It's been my belief that the national and regional Internet Governance Fora are also potential partners to work with the PNMA in providing this concrete feedback. I also just want to briefly draw your attention to a new development which has been underway for quite some time now, and that's the interplanetary extension of the Internet. It's the so‑called solar system Internet. This work began in 1998. And the reason I am bringing it to your attention in 2025 is that the protocols for interplanetary communication have been standardized by the Consultive Committee on separate data systems and the Internet Engineering Task Force, and they have been exercised on the International Space Station, prototypes have been operating on Mars to serve the rover communications between Earth and Mars since 2004. Other experiments have been done with optical communications to orbiters around the moon and to other spacecraft that NASA has made available to the community that is developing these protocols.
This is actually should be and will become a topic for the PNMA, as we ask ourselves how do the cosmonauts and astronauts get access to Internet equivalent capabilities as they explore the rest of the solar system. And, of course, we also want the same capabilities to support robotic exploration.
So, I suspect that in 2026, if not 2025, this should become yet another work item for the PNMA as we think about interplanetary support or Internetlike capability.
Let me thank every single one of you for participating, not only in this annual IGF, but for the persistent work that you have been doing over the course of the last several years. I believe that this work is going to make a very big difference as the Global Digital Compact framework fills in with ‑‑ fleshed out with specific assets. You will be a key player in helping us understand how well that effort is going.
So, that's really as much as I have time to say. And I must go to another meeting. But thank you so much for allowing me to begin and congratulations again on putting this very successful panel together. So, back to you.
>> GIANCOMO PERSI PAOLI: Thank you, thank you, Vint. Thank you.
So, if I understand, you suggest that the next revision of the GDC we extend the rights of being connected also to extra terrestrial? That is your proposal.
>> VINT CERF: They haven't been very well represented so thank you for taking that into account.
>> GIANCOMO PERSI PAOLI: Thank you.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you very much, Vint, once again, for the support that you keep providing to this special network. We really appreciate all the support that you are giving to us.
Now, we move to first speaker that is on site, that's Mr. Poncelet Ileleji. And Mr. Ponce, we would like you to tell us about the importance of community networks, the follow‑up on this session, both online and on site can have a better understanding about the importance of the community networks.
>> PONCELET ILELEJI: Thank you very much, Honorable Ileleji, I think one of the things to be able to bridge this great digital divide we have in a situation whereby we have 2.6 billion of people like me that are not connected. It's true community networks and most of this 2.6 billion people worldwide that are not connected mainly live in the Global South. If I look at my continent of Africa, we have only ‑‑ in the population of 1.4 billion people, we have only about 37% on broadband connectivity. That is not good enough. We still have a lot of children that are not yet been able to access any digital device at all or seen anyone. We still have teachers that are struggling with having access to educational technologies that can aid learning outcomes. And that is where community networks come in.
Community networks have been the lifeline of a lot of communities in Africa, in South America, and in Asia in being able to provide last‑mile connectivity and, above all, improve social economic development through having access to digital tools. And in setting up a community network, I am not going to look at the technical aspect. I'm going to look at a situation whereby communities are involved in it, because using a reflective mode of citizen generated data, they know their needs. They know what they want to use that community network to do. Not just accessing things that are on social media, but to help maybe small‑scale farmers to be able to get resources on agriculture that they can use to improve their planting, to help teachers to be able to access materials, and women, especially in my beloved continent of Africa, who are in the informal sector to be able to use e‑commerce tools to sell their group.
And in setting up this community networks, in a lot of cases, our Internet services providers don't play a big role. So, you have the technical aspects that come in. And my new model would be implementation phase now, the Global Digital Compact to bridge this digital divide is have Internet services providers and our technical, our telecos, Mobile Network Operators, to be able to be involved with organizations like the Locknet that are involved in this setup to build robust and sustainable networks based on green energy that will serve remote communities. And in that way, we can be able to bridge the digital divide and give last‑mile access to communities that don't have. Thank you for now.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you very much, Ponce, for that wonderful intervention on the importance of these community networks. I'm aware it tends to bridge the gap in various countries. Particularly in Africa, in South America and also in Asia where we still globally have over a billion people that are still underconnected. Thank you.
Then we are going to move to the next speaker here, replies Josephine Miliza, to talk to us about the research for the G20 presidency on the replicability of the community network model.
>> JOSEPHINE MILIZA: We work in this partnership. And our role is to directly support the support and emergence of community networks in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. For us, this conversation is very pivotal because we know, especially post‑pandemic, there was quite an over‑reliance on the demand in terms of reliance on digital infrastructure has really grown.
And I remember when we started advocating for community networks back in 2016, 2017, the IGF was a pivotal platform, global platform that we used to be able to bring this conversation to global spaces.
And so this year South Africa holds the G20 presidency which started in December 2024 up to November 2025. We thought it will also be important to continue to drive the conversation around community‑centered connectivity initiatives so that it can be included in the global agenda that is being advocated at the G20 process.
So, within this, I would just like to mention, some of the key things that we think are important for us to be able to scale community‑centered connectivity initiatives. As Poncelet mentioned, they really operate in rural marginalized communities where traditional operators are not able to scale, not able to provide connectivity.
So, to be able to provide more support so that more of these initiatives come up, we recognize there's a need to be able to promote a diversified ecosystem, recognizing that there's no one size fits all telecom approaches. There are several opportunities for local communities to be able to self‑provision their infrastructure and so support is required for them where we have regulators having dialogue with local communities to bridge and to build up policies from the bottom up.
We are seeing a lot of these examples in countries such as Kenya, in Brazil, and in fact, Kenya has developed has developed community networks licensing ‑‑ a community network service license, provider license, and this has enabled quite a number of the local initiatives to be able to scale.
South Africa as well, we are seeing examples where initiatives can be able to operate under license exempt regulations but also there are developments in terms of reviewing so that they are more ‑‑ it's more integrated in its policy and innovation.
The second thing I would like to highlight the importance of innovative financing and investment mechanisms. As these are small‑scale operators, we need to be able to adapt the financing mechanism so that they also reflect the needs of those communities. Public funds such as the Universal Service Funds can actually be allocated to support these models. We are seeing examples in Argentina where the regulator was able to provide grants for quite a number of community networks to deploy and operate. Brazil and Kenya have also followed suit in terms of not only recognizing community networks in their licensing framework, but going a step further to be able to create spaces within the Universal Service Funds where they can be supported. Because CapEx is a key need, operational costs are a key need for them to be able to scale and grow.
The third advocacy issue is on access to end use and underlying spectrum. In the telecom ecosystem we hear about scarcity and spectrum. It's not just about scarcity but most of the time it's because of inaccessibility of that particular spectrum. And as Locknet, what we actually advocate for is the use it or share it model whereby existing licensee holders can be able to share with other operators where there are news frequencies and we are seeing great examples in countries such as Mexico and Brazil and South Africa also is following suit.
Lastly is on investment in terms of awareness raising and capacity building, and I know my colleague from Internet Society, Joyce, who will speak a bit about that on the importance of ensuring that communities are actually active contributors to the growth of digital infrastructure and not just users or consumers of the digital infrastructure. So, those are my interventions. And back to you.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you very much, Josephine Miliza, for that rundown did some of the issues that you guys are working on, particularly the promotion of community‑centered initiatives, and also the use of the Universal Service Fund to ensure that those that are not connected can also be connected and also capacity building.
Before I hand over to my colleague, Giancomo, we have one intervention from the floor. That is Mr. Julian Casasbuenas, the director of Colnodo in Colombia. You can take two minutes and then we can continue the conversation. Is the mic on? Can we have the mic on?
>> JULIAN CASASBUENAS: Try again.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Check the button on the mic. Yeah. Can you check?
>> JULIAN CASASBUENAS: It's open? Good. Thank you for the opportunity to comment about experience of Colnodo in community networks and also that we have been doing with the support of Locknet Project of the Association for Progressive Communications and Internet Society Foundation.
Based on Colnodo experience in supporting community networks, particularly those using model communications over IMT spectrum in rural areas in Colombia, it is clear that the sustainability and impact of these initiatives largely depend on the existence of clear public policies that recognize their social value and their importance in reducing the digital divide in remote rural areas.
Community networks have proven to be an effective and sustainable solution for bringing connectivity to historically access but also the strengthening of local capacities, technological autonomy, and community well‑being. We consider the support of the European Union within the framework of the global gateway strategy to be highly relevant for the implementation of community networks in Colombia through the project connecting the unconnected, community Internet networks as a vehicle to reduce the digital divide in rural areas in Colombia, implemented by Colnodo.
It is essential that national policies include specific mechanisms to facilitate access to spectrum under conditions aligned with the social nature of these initiatives, removing barriers, such actions are costly licenses fees. Additionally, resources from national universe service fund shall be made available to support the development of these networks, not only relying on the international donors promoting such initiatives and directed not just toward basic infrastructure, but also towards training and meaningful technology preparing processes.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you, thank you.
>> JULIAN CASASBUENAS: Connectivity should not be measured sole by technical availability, but it is a real capacity to transform lives. Ensuring Meaningful Access means enabling communities to use the Internet in ways that are relevant, safe and tailor it to their specific needs.
>> GIANCOMO PERSI PAOLI: Thank you very much, Julian for this contribution to integrate with what we have heard before.
When will be available the study, the complete study? This is an important information for us? You have a timeline?
>> DAPHNEE IGLESIAS: Tomorrow we will be launching the study on self‑sustaining financing mechanisms, but also within the T20 process, we hope that we will be able to publish this policy brief that we submitted.
>> GIANCOMO PERSI PAOLI: Okay. We will share the information so people can connect with it. Thank you very much.
Now we have seen the difficulties in reaching rural areas and various kind of communities, but we have a special kind of community with special needs, and this is, for instance, the indigenous population. And it looks like something exotic but in no way that where we have, we have exactly what this kind of a situation. And thanks to technology, these communities are now on the way to be integrated and not cut out from the digital revelation. Borre, can you talk, let us know better how you do it?
>> BORRE GAUP: Yeah. I work at the Arctic University, and we have made a structure for an NLP framework for making the native languages, make them survive, make them survive in a digital age.
So, the LLP framework, you have put in linguistic content and out of that you get apps. The apps are distributed on app store, Play Store and widely on the Internet and also as web apps.
And the infrastructure was made for Sami languages which have 500 to 20,000 speakers. And so the framework or the infrastructure is a good fit for low resource languages.
And the infrastructure is made such that you first make language model and then those are packaged into apps. And based on the maturity of your language model, then you get more and more advanced apps. They are listed here in front of you here.
So, what's in it for a new language? Many of the technical problems are solved, and also the problem with distribution for the major platforms, at least that means iOS, Android, Windows, MAC, Linux and also Chrome OS.
So, what you need to begin using this framework is just start adding content, linguistic content into the framework, and you need a native speaker which knows the language. You need a linguist, perhaps they are one and the same. And you need a programmer to adapt them, their source code into the framework.
And if you also happen to have a text corpus, that will be a bonus. It will ease your development of the language model. And we have sufficed with less than a million words. So, the south Sami corpus, text corpus is about a million words. The north Sami, which is the largest one, has a 40 million words in it, inside it.
So, how do you ‑‑ the development process starts with making a keyboard so that it's easy and convenient to input your language. And then you start working on the language data model. And the maturity of your data model decides which apps are available.
So, you start, of course, with the keyboard as an input. The next step is spell checker. And then you get onwards and onwards with more and more complicated apps.
For text to speech, you need 10 hours of transcribed material. You need a language model to process the speech, and then you need access to neural network training of that model.
And for automatic speech recognition, you need 100 hours of transcribed material, again. You need the language model. And you need resources for the network training, the neural network training.
So, that's it about our infrastructure. I can say that not only are the Sami languages used of this infrastructure. We also have Greenlandic, we have Ferees with 70,000 speakers. We also have various native and minority language in the Nordic hemisphere because we have work there and have connections within the million there. So, that's it.
We also had spurious contacts with South American native communities. So, there are reposters or development going on, but it's just begun.
>> GIANCOMO PERSI PAOLI: Thank you very much. The problem seems common across the world and across the communities and this is exactly what Onica now will tell us. Can you tell more about that? Thank you.
>> ONICA MAKWAKWA: Great. Good day, everyone. And thank you for this opportunity. Again, my name is Onica Makwakwa. I'm the Executive Director at the Global Digital Inclusion Partnership.
Our mission at GDIP is advancing meaningful connectivity for the global majority world. And this is largely motivated by the recognition that there is an even broader, larger emerging divide amongst those who are connected. So raising the standard to go beyond just basic access to begin to address meaningful connectivity is something that is at the core of the work that we are doing.
And what do we mean exactly by meaningful connectivity? There are at least four big areas that we look at when we are talking about meaningful connectivity. One is just use. It's actually quite interesting that in 2025, we are still sitting with an international standard that designates a person who is connected as someone who uses the Internet once every three months. And I'm sure all of us here will agree with me that that's quite an underwhelming standard. So daily use is a big part of being meaningfully connected.
Having an appropriate device, at minimum a Smartphone, a smart device to be able to access the Internet. And having access to unlimited data at affordable prices. And lastly, having a fast connection. So, the quality of the connection is actually a growing divide we are seeing amongst those who are already connected.
And without these, connectivity just becomes symbolic if it's just basic. It misses the point of the transformation that we have been promising people they can be able to achieve once they are connected.
In terms of how we implement this, we have focused on policy advocacy, data and evidence research, as well as knowledge sharing. So, let me talk a little bit about policy advocacy. It's important that we continue to help to shape national ICT policies, to use meaningful connectivity as the standard for measuring access and including gender responsive targets in that. We cannot afford to leave women behind. Figure that 2.6 billion, that Poncelet mentioned earlier, I think that if we actually looked at it from a meaningful connectivity lens, you will find that it's actually even more people who are not adequately connected the way they should be.
With regards to data and evidence, I am going to invite you to take a look at our connected resilience report that's on our website that really shows how important it is for us to understand and do the research so that we enable communities to be able to articulate how they are experiencing this connectivity. So connected resilience looks at the gendered experience of women through meaningful connectivity and takes an ethno graphic view of really looking at women where they are and the challenges that they face with connectivity after they have access to infrastructure, after they may or may not have access to devices. What is their experience, and let us inform policies that are based on that lived experience of women.
And lastly, creating knowledge‑sharing opportunities so that these communities are able to inform how policies are actually shaped and we can really have a global local kind of perspective in terms of bringing women along.
And lastly, I just want to conclude by saying that we have to commit to supporting and funding, as well as scaling community‑led digital initiatives that reach women where they are, community networks actually a very good example of that. We must push for gender targets in digital policy because if you can't measure it, then it just really doesn't exist. You are not going to even know whether you are making progress or not. It's really critical that we are intentional in putting women at the centre.
And lastly, we must recognize that the Internet is a public good, and, therefore, that access cannot afford to leave anyone behind. And it must be the kind of access that's empowering to communities, including women and girls. Thank you.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you very much, Onica for putting on the gender lens. When you look at the population in many countries, particularly on the African continent, you realize actually the other part which is women, they are really not connected. So we have to go in terms of policy advocacy and in terms of getting the infrastructure, but also making it accessible and affordable. Thank you so much, Onica.
Now we move to Mr. Guilherme Canela de Souza Godoi to talk to us about the programmes they have been doing. So you have the floor.
>> GUILHERME CANELA: Thank you very much. Good afternoon, everyone. Many decades ago there was a Minister of Economy in Brazil and he was frequently asked about meaningful economy. And his answer was always, "Well, first we need to let the cake grow, and then we distribute." As you can imagine, the distribution never arrived, right?
So, and people, because they are smart, they realized that they don't want only a share of this cake. They want different cakes, for Celiac, for people who doesn't eat milk or whatever it is. And not only that, they want to know what is in the cake, how the cake is made.
So, the question here of meaningful connectivity is really about debt. We need to stop this idea that first we connect and, of course, the rich ones are connected first and with more quality and so on and with more protection. And then we do the rest. We can't afford that.
This needs to be a part of the movement and an integrated movement and a comprehensive policy. That's why 20 years ago, when we were having the Tunis phase of the Summit on Information Society, UNESCO published a ground breaking report called towards knowledge societies. Until today, I said this earlier, sorry for the spoiler for those who were in the previous session, until today, this report is one of the most downloaded reports in the UNESCO website, and back then, 20 years ago, you are already saying those things, that we need to include multilingualism as was said here today, the gender component, information preservation, information ethics, information development, information literacy, all issues that are part of the Information for All Programme of UNESCO.
And Vint Cerf stole my thunder because he mentioned the UNESCO Internet universality indicators, this framework that I guess all of you know based on rights, openness, accessibility, access, multistakeholderism and all these cross‑cutting elements that we are discussing here today, that the previous speakers already mentioned, again, gender and multilingualism and people with disabilities and so on. And these, as you said, is an essential tool for measuring our success or our failures, where we are and where we must go.
40 countries from Brazil, that's a very complex country for its dimensions and so on, to small islands are using these kind of frameworks to understand how to build better policies based on evidence. Therefore, this network here, it's very much connected these key principles of UNESCO in developing the information and knowledge societies since this last 20 years. But if we want to go back, since the beginning of UNESCO. Because our unique mandate in the United Nations system of protecting and promoting the free flow of information is about debt. There is no free flow of information if we don't have multi‑linguism, if women and girls are not included. If people with disabilities, they don't have the means for doing that. If people that are far away for different technological reasons, they can't be connected and included with quality.
Let me finish. Maybe I am being too chauvinistic today, with another Brazilian, a very important sociologist called Betinho. And this fantastic man used to say that we need to stop to make poor policies for poor people. Everyone deserves high‑quality policies. And we need to be adamant about that. Because if this is not our starting point, then we always be lagging behind. Well, well, those there, they can wait a little bit, right? After all, we are giving them zero rating, whatever, right?
So, that needs to be our commitment. Everyone deserves high‑quality policies and this is meaningful connectivity. Thank you.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you very much, Guilherme, for that wonderful statement. We want a cake that everybody can have a part of. We all have to enjoy that cake, and that's why I want to have everybody connected, but also for the connection to be meaningful. Thank you so much.
And we move to Mr. Fabio Senne to talk to us about employment of ROAM‑X indicators in Brazil. So that we can have a clear idea about what's actually happening in that area. Thank you. You are welcome.
>> FABIO SENNE: Thank you, Mr. Chair. It's a pleasure to be here in this session. So, if I can summarize my intervention in one single message, it will be more or less what my colleagues already said. That to address the complex challenges that we are facing nowadays, we need reliable and disaggregating indicators and sound monitoring strategies, and in particular, work that the UNESCO ROAM‑X indicators have proven to be a useful tool to do that, to monitor the environment from a multistakeholder perspective, and instead of just ranking countries, I think it's useful because it allows for creating a roadmap for action. So it's not just a matter of saying who is better in the situation, but what can we do from the indicators and the data that we have.
So, I'm a research coordinator at Cetic.BR, which is a think tank linked to the Brazilian standard of care interdependence model. And Cetic is also a UNESCO category to centre that are working along with Latin America and Portuguese‑speaking countries in Africa to support this type of process of building international comparable indicators.
So because of that, Brazil was the first country to pilot the implementation of the ROAM‑X indicators back in 2018, and in 2019 the first report at the IGF in Berlin. And apart from collaborating with several other countries in implementing the framework, we also support the UNESCO in updating the five years' revision of the ROAM‑X indicators that was launched last year in the IGF in Saudi Arabia.
This year, in 2025, we are updating the Brazilian assessment with the new version of the indicators. So, Cetic and Nic.br, they are responsible for collecting the data and providing the data, and CGI.PR is our multistakeholder advisory board that supports the whole process.
So, I will take some time to mention a few preliminary results of what we found in the second generation indicators. So, from the right perspective, although Brazil has a legal and consistent international standards legislation, the enforcement is still inconsistent, and we have major gaps in access to information and user protection when it comes to enforcement of those rights.
And although we have a very lively debate on platform regulation and information integrity that we don't used to have five years ago, this has not yet ‑‑ we have not yet a consensus on how to regulate this and how to implement these topics.
On the field of openness, we have significantly expanded digital public services online, including the idea of DPIs as Goff.BR platform, but still we have not equitable access to the services because we have usability and accessibility issues to solve.
When it comes to access, it's interesting because nowadays, universal and meaningful connectivity is adding traction in the policy debate, so now you see the government and the whole society using this term meaningful connectivity. But still you have lots of inequalities to face. I can mention we have one indicator on meaningful connectivity in Brazil that shows that black women, for instance, have much less meaningful connectivity than white men and we can show this in the report.
From the multistakeholder participation, Brazil is recognized and we have an institutional architecture that provides a solid foundation for multistakeholder participation. I think CGI is one of these good examples.
But when it comes in the details of the policies, of the digital policies, you see that there is still vulnerable population that don't participate well in the discussions.
And finally, the new IOI ROAM‑X indicators included new indicators on topics such as AI environmental issues. And we saw that in Brazil although we have advanced having AI plan, for instance, we still don't have any model for governance of this topic in the country. And environmental issues are overlooked in the whole digital policy discussion.
So, this, just to conclude, I think that those indicators are very useful for monitoring and for having good tools for multistakeholder participation. And also for the the ‑‑ if you see, lots of these topics are in the GDC, in the discussion of WSIS+20 agenda, so they are very useful for monitoring this whole discussion that we are having today. So, thank you very much. This is my comments for today.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you very much, Fabio, for taking us through the ROAM‑X and where we can actually generate some indicators to also still assist in bridging that gap.
Now, I would like to move to Joyce. Here we have a brand‑new car, but I cannot drive. So, tell us about the capacity building that we need. Because access is available. Quality access is affordable, but then what next? What can I do? Talk to us about the possibility.
>> JOYCE DOGNIEZ: Thank you so much. Not sure I can get to the car today but let's see, you know. Thank you very much.
As mentioned, I'm with the Internet Society and over the next five years our focus is really to connect the most difficult people to connect. So, we are looking at the hardest to reach people, indigenous communities, refugees, and women social‑led enterprises.
But getting people online, as we just heard, is just the first step. We also want to make sure that when people are online, they have a safe, secure, and a meaningful experience.
Simply put, we, basically, connect the unconnected and we protect the connected. We all know that connectivity is not just about technology or policy. It's actually about people. So, if you allow me today, I would like you to tell you a story about a person, a young woman based in Kenya, Ruth. Ruth, as you can see, she grew up in a rural village in Kenya where access to technology devices and connectivity both was very limited. And, actually, her mom was very reluctant to let her play with technology because she didn't really know what it was. And so it was not a good thing to do.
But Ruth was very determined. And so she found her way. And in the 2022, she joined an Internet Society training programme focused on designing and deploying computer networks. That led to an internship with local community network called Tunapanda in Kibera, in Kenya, one of the largest informal settlements in Africa.
And actually she impressed the team so much that they decided to hire her. And she is now the lead network engineer for the community network.
And the journey didn't stop there. So, Ruth is also an Internet Society early career fellow. She is continuing to grow her leadership journey as she continues to work. And fast forward to today or a couple of weeks ago, with our growing supports to clinics, refugees, we invited Ruth to help train our trainers in Kakuma, in refugee camp in Kenya and in Rhino Camp refugee settlements in Uganda.
Those trainers are now actively working on training other refugees. And so we hope that ‑‑ well, we know that in a couple of weeks we will have 250 learners that will be trained in the camps.
Ruth's story is just one example of the many that I know we all know. We all have heard those stories, how building local capacity can really transform lives but it can also transform communities.
At the Internet Society we believe that empowering people to take connectivity in their own hands is the best way. And Josephine already mentioned some of the challenges, or shall I say opportunities, that we see with community‑centered connectivity solutions. One is as she mentioned, financial sustainability, long‑term financial sustainability.
The second is a need for enabling environment and regulator frameworks.
And the one that I wanted to focus on today is capacity building. So skills competencies and the technical capacity to install, maintain, but also expand community networks.
As Poncelet mentioned and we heard Onica say as well that 2.6 billion people are still not connected to the Internet. That's far too many for any of our organizations to connect.
So, this is why we focus on building the local capacity to train people who can then train others to bridge that gap. We can't be everywhere, but people at the grassroots in the local communities, they are. And so they understand the culture, the regulation, but also the needs of the communities, which is really, really critical.
We currently work with over 20 partners in our 120 chapters across all regions. And we build a Global Network of over 200 local trainers. And by the end of 2025, we will have reached over 70,000 people with our trainings since 2021.
So, a couple of examples that we had was CITEL in Latin America, we did some work in Zimbabwe.
Now, the largest 2.6 billion are the hardest to connect, as I said. If they weren't, we would have connected them already. The reality is that many of these communities are in rural areas where there's little commercial interest for traditional operators. So, we need to work together. We need to bring all stakeholders together.
This is also why we launched the connectivity co‑funding initiative, to help us reach our goal of ensuring that connectivity is really for everyone everywhere. And it's affordable and reliable and resilient.
Over the next five years the Internet Society and the Internet Society Foundation have committed to invest $30 million in connectivity focused initiatives and we are actively looking for partners who will join us in connecting the last people and hopefully build that big cake that we can then provide to everyone. Thank you.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you. Thank you very much, Joyce.
Very interesting information shared with us.
And about project challenging and tried to bring connectivity and meaningful connectivity, we have now the next speaker online with us that will talk exactly about that, Ms. Shiva Burgos. Can you explain what you are working now?
>> SHIVA BURGOS: Hello. Thank you for the opportunity to speak with such an esteemed panel and I'm glad that I am speaking last because everyone has already outlined several of the common challenges that we have with solutions. So, I really appreciate the expertise that's been brought forward and also how we might benefit from it, from our part of the world, which is Oceania, which is often forgotten in all these global conversations.
So, I could say that I am an artist, and my background is formally trained in art. I'm also a curator and at the moment I am working in Papua New Guinea as the international representative for arts and culture for the national cultural commission and also with Prime Minister as his Special Envoy for Papua New Guinea arts. So, we can influence how policy might be shaped in this area and I think that's from the perspective of culture heritage protection, it's essential because we have already brought up ideas about infrastructure and access and in Papua New Guinea we have over 800 language communities at risk. So, also the digital divide and those most vulnerable people that can be excluded.
It's also important to think about what is accessible online, and not everything needs to be. And so, there are models for protecting sacred and culturally sensitive content. In Australia there are content warnings where blurred images and clear warning signs require user confirmation. So, we need sophisticated mechanisms and protocols that recognize the traditional knowledge, sacred sites and ceremonial practices should not be digitized or shared without proper cultural authorization. And there we have to invite tribal leaders and the communities to make these decisions about how cultural custodians can have a veto power of what's available for the wider public or also within the small communities.
And there's also the issue of the dominance of western technology companies and that approach which is seen globally can threaten cultural sovereignty and economic independence and create dangerous precedent for cultural preservation when aspirations and values come from another source, rather than from them.
So, I would say that our honorable prime minister has noted that to forever preserve Papua New Guinea arts and work that is now getting more globalized through ICT and realtime transactions, for example, through our recent art interventions at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, it's a big step to secure the family of humanity, and indeed our recent lunar landing, if we are talking about space, that was on March 2nd, and so collaborating with LifeShip where digital archives of culture are protected onto microfiche and binary code and now contain cultural artwork.
These art and heritage as living sacred presences, relational, entwined with identity and the museum itself can be transformed into a living space, sharing voices, shared stewardship, and we are also extending this through an exhibition project and platform called One Bell, which units digital exhibitions and resources from the world's great collections of Papua New Guinea art and that gets shared back to source communities. We have public display and developing our digital archives for the nation.
So, this case study can be scaled to communities worldwide. So, cultural heritage, tangible, intangible, how do we store and preserve this, how do we transmit back to source communities, control access, how can oceanic countries collect it. We think cultural is not something we put away in museums or hidden in books, that it lives within us and it needs to be shared for future generations to know where they came from and who they want to be. Thank you.
>> GIANCOMO PERSI PAOLI: Thank you very much, Shiva. That's a very interesting example you bring to us. I remember we spoke some years ago about what was happening in Papua New Guinea.
So, now I hand over for the minutes remaining to the room first. And then to the online moderator. So please, Margaret and Judith.
>> MARGARET NYAMBURA NDUNG'U: Many thanks to all the panelists for the insightful discussions and to all the participants, both online and on site.
We are now going to open forum, open discussions where we will be answering questions and answers. For those who are on site, please introduce yourself by telling us your name and organization, be very concise with your questions and state who you are directing the question to, where possible. And we will kindly ask you to be next to the mic.
We are going to start with our insights from our online participants. And I will start with Dikchya kindly highlights the questions, if any, and any other insights that is happening online. Over to you, Dikchya.
>> DIKCHYA RAUT: Thank you. There are pretty interesting conversations happening online. Also, everyone is engaging with the resources that is being shared about the speakers' role and their work. There's a question from Joseph, this is directed to Joyce, but also everyone. He says, I admire your pathway to connect everyone. What about having a seat in every community. An example, a community learning and living lab. And then extend to community networks.
She also has another question so maybe I can hand it over to Roberto.
>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANA: The other question is what about participation and what is your pathway to talk in natural language through the Internet and get information that is specific for you and your community. That's the online. I think those are the two questions that we have. And, yeah, we come back to you.
>> MARGARET NYAMBURA NDUNG'U: Thank you, Dikchya, thank you, Roberto. Over to you, Joyce.
>> JOYCE DOGNIEZ: Thank you. One of the ways in which we actually want to work is to actually work through local hubs. So the way as I mentioned that we work for capacity building in particular is to work through our local chapters, but not only through the local chapters. Also actually work with local partners, local training institutions, local tivets, and also in some cases innovation hubs where we know that when we bring the capacity to the rural areas and we actually bring the training capacity to the rural areas, that is really where we see the difference.
For example, the training we are currently running in Rhino Camp, for example, refugee settlement, is the first time that they actually manage, we train trainers there. We train Saruth, as you saw in the pictures. She trained trainers in the camp. And so they now have the training capacity locally, which makes a huge difference because not only are they training in the local context. In many cases and I'm kind of bleeding into the second question as well in terms of languages, is that they are able to actually train in the local language. Ruth was using, for example, the content in English. Many of the technical words are in English. However, she was actually training in Kiswahili. This is where we see the impact at the local level and why local training capacity is really, really important to reach the hardest to reach in the most remote areas. I hope that answered the question.
>> JUDITH HELLERSTEIN: Thank you so much for the answers to the online question. Now it's the opportunity for the people on the floor. If you have any other questions. There's an open mic on the stand over there. So, if you want to come up and ask your questions, we can have one or two questions. For anyone.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: In the meantime, there was a question for Borre. He can answer.
>> JUDITH HELLERSTEIN: And then in the meantime, Borre will answer the question.
>> BORRE GAUP: Yeah. So, the language resources and the language resources that are developed by the language communities are fully governed and controlled by themselves. Also, the corpus that is collected, you could divide it into a free part and bound part. Where the free part is downloadable by anyone. And the bound part, you give a license to those that need access to those things.
And then the whole thing is, the infrastructure is mostly open source. So, we get to cooperate and find the needs that we have and try to cover the needs of the language communities.
>> JUDITH HELLERSTEIN: Thank you so much. We have a question from the floor. Remember to please state your name and your organization and who you are directing a question to.
>> PARTICIPANT: Thank you very much. My name is Kunle Olorundare. I'm from Nigeria, and the president of the Internet Society in Nigeria. The Internet Society is advocacy within the IG ecosystem, so it's a sea and we deal with issues that deal with community networks. I appreciate the conversation we are having today. And my contribution or my comment has to do with, yes, I agree that we need to get to the unconnected, and, yes, they need to have access to the Internet.
However, I think it's high time we advance the conversation beyond that. We need to be looking at they in the community having what we can define as meaningful connectivity. And what I mean by meaningful connectivity is they should have the kind of access that those people in the urban areas are having. We should have something like that in the village.
However, it may not be ubiquitous. Ubiquitous is saying that each and every person in the valley should have that. It could be like a centre, just like the ISOC lady mentioned, you know, community network. But it should be meaningful. They should be able to do everything even at the community centre. And, of course, I'm thinking that we also start to look at the issue of the language, because for those people in the villages, the fact remains that some of them may not be able to speak English or maybe some of these national, international languages we are talking about. So, they should be able to have access in such a way that they can use their language, and that is when they are going to appreciate this connectivity we are talking about.
So, I think we need to have a conversation at that level. Thank you very much.
>> JUDITH HELLERSTEIN: Onica, you want to answer that?
>> ONICA MAKWAKWA: Jess, I totally agree with that. One of the things I mentioned was the emerging inequality amongst the connected. And I think the issue of being able to address the unconnected, but also improving the standard for those who are connected from basic to meaningful connectivity is really critical for us to be able to talk about how technology is transformative. Thank you.
>> JUDITH HELLERSTEIN: Thanks so much.
We have one more online question. To hear Roberto, will you summarize the question for us?
>> ROBERTO ZAMBRANA: We can go ahead with this next question. It's for Shiva. Could you please share more content details on how the project ambition the projection of the data of these communities online in practice. That question is for Shiva.
>> SHIVA BURGOS: Okay. I think that I understand the question correctly. It's how does it work practically. Those are always evolving situations, and as Judith knows, it's the land of the unexpected. So, from the small village that I represent, Nadiway which has no electricity, so we don't have real Internet connection, and if the wind is in the right way or the sun has lit up the solar panel, you might get a connection to WhatsApp or Facebook.
So, what we have to do is bring in, like we have a film festival. So, we bring in content from wherever and it's based on battery. So we have to get solar. And then in terms of the One Bell project to bring about the content from around the world, we have different venues, for example, like concerts in arenas, the national arts exhibition and that can spread around through universities and online so people that do have access to, occasionally they will store it in their devices and then share it back in their villages. I hope I answered.
>> ALHAGIE MBOW: Thank you very much. It's unfortunate that we have to draw the questions here as we are running out of time.
But I want to take this opportunity as the co‑chair to thank each and every one of you, both online and on site, for attending such a wonderful discussion on the Meaningful Access, particularly to our on‑site participants here, from Ponce, from Josephine, Borre, Guilherme, Onica, Fabio, and also you, Margaret, for assisting us, Joyce. And thank you all for attending. I give the co‑chair to give the last word and thank you very much.
>> GIANCOMO PERSI PAOLI: It's a pity we cannot discuss more but the most important is that the work doesn't finish here much as you know, this year the IGF was unanticipated because we need to prepare documents and substance for the decision that will be taken at the end of the year at the United Nations General Assembly. So our report will be done in time for November, but I just met the facilitators, that they ask for a preversion of the report in September so that they can insert in their conclusion and recommendation to the General Assembly.
So, the work is not finished. Those that are committed to this scope, please continue to stay tuned with us. We need your help for the months to come. Thank you very much, again.
(Applause)