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DMINISTRATOR POWER: Thanks, Sheerin, for that sort introduction.
I’m so happy to be with you all at present to supply some ideas concerning the intersection of know-how and improvement.
And I’m particularly excited to hitch Temie Giwa-Tubosun, Founding father of LifeBank, simply after these remarks, for a dialog. Temie’s work makes use of know-how to match extra blood provides to hospitals in want. And it’s precisely the type of innovation we must be upholding and increasing.
I’d additionally prefer to acknowledge Doreen Bogdan-Martin, whom you heard from earlier this morning, and who’s within the working to be the subsequent Secretary-Basic of the Worldwide Telecommunication Union. The Union is an important company you’ve by no means heard of. One that may, fairly actually, decide the way forward for the web. And we’re assured that Doreen can be a pacesetter who will advance its improvement in a way per our shared values.
Everyone knows that well-known saying: there’s an app for every thing. Properly, it seems that there’s even an app for enduring a battle.
For a lot of of these in Ukraine fleeing violence, there wasn’t time to assemble passports or inside paperwork as Putin’s missiles rained down. IDs and emergency funds might have been destroyed together with their properties. And no matter documentation, each Ukrainian, inside and out of doors the nation, desperately wanted entry to funds to outlive.
That’s the place Diia is available in.
A few of you’ll have heard about Diia’s enterprise purposes earlier this morning. Diia is an app that was initially designed to simplify paperwork. In the present day, the Ukrainian Authorities has repurposed it for wartime. It creates a digital ID, acknowledged by each native Ukrainian authorities and the border brokers of neighboring international locations. It permits round the clock entry to tv and radio stations, at a time when info may be life-saving. It permits residents to report on enemy troop actions and even donate to the military. And its core use that we’re working to assist at USAID is to offer entry to emergency funds and authorities help that may assist Ukrainians who’ve been displaced or who’re weak in different methods to climate the battle. Diia reveals us that, when well-designed, accessible, centered on folks’s wants—know-how can save lives.
However Diia’s success doesn’t simply come from its usefulness. It additionally owes its wartime success to the resilience of Ukraine’s broader digital ecosystem. That is an ecosystem whose power is attributable to direct investments from the Ukrainian authorities over a interval of years.
Ukraine enjoys far-reaching connectivity. It has sturdy cybersecurity capabilities which might be examined just about each hour of day-after-day. And it had practically 5,000 web service suppliers as of December 2021, simply two months earlier than the battle. Its workforce is extremely digitally literate—in January 2021, roughly 30 million Ukrainians used the web. And Ukraine’s digital insurance policies and rules helped construct belief within the nation’s digital ecosystem and the know-how it helps.
Lower than two years after its launch in 2020 by the Ukrainian Ministry of Digital Transformation, Diia had 13 million customers even earlier than the Russian invasion. Its wild success in such a brief time period is kind of an accomplishment, as a result of let’s bear in mind, this can be a government-created, government-supported app. And paperwork isn’t typically all that hip. Even having a Ministry of Digital Transformation tells us one thing concerning the course that the Ukrainian authorities was going earlier than the battle—a course that made Putin loopy. These sorts of improvements will permit for larger integration with the democratic world in a way that Putin seen as threatening.
Ukraine’s nationwide dedication to digital resilience has been borne partially from coping with eight years of cyberattacks and onslaughts of disinformation from the Russian Federation. I’m actually happy with the work that USAID has finished through the years in serving to Ukraine preempt and counter such cyberattacks, investments we’ve revamped a few years in Ukraine’s cyber infrastructure and cybersecurity alongside investments in know-how like Diia.
I’ll say, although—and that is one thing of a confession—what we’ve realized is that previous to the battle, we had not invested within the underlying ecosystems that allowed that app to work so properly.
These investments are among the most important investments which have allowed Diia to work. The lesson there, as a group: sure, we want apps, however we additionally have to make these investments within the ecosystem that permit these apps to perform. To construct a broader digital ecosystem is to assist the success and flexibility of apps like Diia. And to put money into each is essential in our mission to make international help extra impactful, but in addition extra inclusive.
By 2019, it was laborious to think about one side of life that wasn’t considerably digitized. All of you possibly can determine with this: banking, buying, even relationship—every thing was on-line. That yr, lower than thirty years after the creation of the World Huge Internet, 4.1 billion folks had been utilizing the web.
The COVID-19 pandemic solely accelerated that pattern.
As colleges closed, companies shuttered, and authorities workplaces restricted service, for these with accessible web, the digital economic system allowed life to proceed as usually because the pandemic would permit.
Youngsters world wide—together with my very own, begrudgingly—took courses on-line and tried to maintain up their schooling. In-person conferences happened over video. Companies shifted to e-commerce and on-line retail, generally lodging enormous features. Governments world wide, from Togo to the Philippines, continued delivering important providers to their residents digitally once they weren’t ready to take action bodily.
Digital instruments have additionally develop into important to battling COVID itself. Public well being organizations, medical professionals, and hospitals used digital geospatial and mapping know-how to trace circumstances. And we’d be nowhere in our huge effort to vaccinate the world with out digital know-how in serving to us ship vaccines and saved observe of who has acquired what dose at what time whereas additionally monitoring probably the most weak populations to prioritize and goal.
In 2021, the variety of folks utilizing the web had spiked to 4.9 billion—virtually two thirds of the worldwide inhabitants. That’s a 9 % improve in simply two years over the course of the pandemic. However with digital progress has additionally come digital repression, and in some circumstances, a widening digital divide.
Round 2.9 billion folks nonetheless can’t entry the web. That hole has far-reaching implications for assembly improvement and humanitarian wants. Particularly when the Folks’s Republic of China is all too wanting to fill that hole. This can be a authorities that censors social media, makes use of the web to push state-sponsored disinformation, and expands authorities surveillance even benefiting from COVID-19 to take action.
Such ways might very properly be contagious. All over the world, Beijing is investing closely in digital ecosystems in growing international locations the place USAID is already working. These investments create environments ripe for digital repression—web shutdowns, on-line censorship, and generalized and focused surveillance and knowledge assortment.
However whereas know-how can, certainly, be weaponized, the reality is that digitization isn’t going anyplace. Connectivity in 2022 is not a luxurious of any type, however a necessity. And if we’re to form our planet for the higher. We should make digitization a central tenet of our work.
Because the very starting, USAID has embraced digitization.
In 1996, the Company started coordinating the actions of the Leland Initiative, which granted $15 million over 5 years to broaden web connectivity and digital applied sciences in over 20 African international locations. That was a very long time in the past. I bear in mind my very own laptop computer at the moment, which was about as heavy as my desk at present. My mobile phone was the dimensions of a milk carton.
However these had been simply the beginnings.
Within the many years since, USAID has supported, coordinated, and co-founded efforts to make use of know-how to strengthen economies and improve social mobility. We’ve seen the profound impacts of offering cellular know-how to girls in growing international locations, digitizing money transfers and funds like what Diia is doing in Ukraine, and minimizing corruption in judicial techniques.
We’ve supported international partnerships just like the Higher Than Money Alliance, the Alliance for Inexpensive Web, and the Digital Influence Alliance. These partnerships present the ability of constructing actions alongside donors and like-minded companions.
As digital know-how has develop into extra central to our lives, USAID’s dedication to digitization has grown as properly. In April 2020, only a couple months into the pandemic, USAID launched its first-ever Digital Technique, which outlined the need of open, inclusive, and safe digital ecosystems to the Company’s work, dedicated to securing digital ecosystems, and acknowledged the significance of utilizing digital know-how in our applications.
That emphasis helped us combat COVID-19. Because of the Digital Well being Imaginative and prescient—the primary sector-specific plank of our Digital Technique—we started extra intentionally strengthening nation digital well being techniques and that may have knock-on advantages for well being and welfare properly past the pandemic.
Meaning techniques like mHero, a textual content messaging platform that makes use of nationwide well being employee registries to immediately join well being businesses with distant medical doctors and nurses. The platform was created within the wake of Ebola in West Africa. However at present, mHero remains to be in use in Liberia to share essential details about COVID-19 with well being staff.
So that is our dedication as an Company: to make open, inclusive, and safe know-how not an afterthought, however the basis of our work. And to broaden digital improvement itself to be extra accessible, equitable, and responsive.
Meaning working with digital entrepreneurs already driving change of their communities—innovators like Temie, whose firm, as I discussed, is tackling blood provide shortages in Nigeria and has now expanded into Kenya and Ethiopia.
It means enabling each nation and each citizen to embrace digital transformation—by strengthening digital literacy amongst marginalized populations, and by bringing total communities on-line for the primary time. And it means assembly the wants of particular person communities—from utilizing digital monetary providers to assist shopkeepers in Kumasi to serving to anti-corruption champions in San Salvador monitor authorities spending.
I’m proud to launch three new initiatives to assist these efforts.
The primary is USAID’s Digital Literacy Primer—a software to teach Company employees and companions on the significance of digital literacy and the way it may be included into USAID programming in each sector and mission. This builds USAID understanding of digital literacy, and encourages employees to share classes and finest practices—in order that we’re higher in a position to empower these people coming into the digital economic system for the primary time.
I’m additionally happy to announce the 2022 Digital Improvement Awards. The awards are open to any USAID-funded tasks and actions that use digital know-how, assist digital entrepreneurs or innovators, or broaden connectivity or entry to digital providers. Previous winners of the Digis have helped decrease corruption and improve transparency within the Kyrgyz judicial system, present real-time knowledge to strengthen well being info techniques in Indonesia, and enhance fishery sustainability and knowledge assortment within the Asia-Pacific.
Lastly, I’m happy to share that USAID’s first-ever Synthetic Intelligence Motion Plan will go dwell this week.
Synthetic intelligence is poised to extend international GDP by 16 % by 2030. However as we’ve seen in international locations everywhere in the world, democratic and authoritarian alike, synthetic intelligence and machine studying algorithms utilized in know-how like facial recognition, knowledge assortment, and site monitoring may be repurposed for digital repression.
And whereas we should always by no means underestimate the likelihood or efficiency of repression, the answer is to not flip our backs on the promise of digitization, however doing every thing in our energy to handle the dangers.
In that spirit, the Synthetic Intelligence Motion Plan affords a street map to navigate the usage of synthetic intelligence in our programming. The plan outlines and commits a imaginative and prescient for accountable synthetic intelligence and gives methods for USAID and its companions to strengthen digital ecosystems and partnerships to preempt its dangers.
We’ve made nice strides at USAID to construct digital know-how into our programming—strengthening insurance policies round digitization, constructing abilities among the many workforce and in our applications, particularly for girls and ladies, and increasing web entry.
However now we have extra work to do as an Company, and as a improvement group.
To the USAID staff right here at present, I urge you to assume extra broadly concerning the function that digital applied sciences can play in your work. Take into consideration how one can repurpose current applied sciences, just like the Ukrainian Authorities did with Diia. And assist us use current instruments to deal with gaps within the digital ecosystems that assist these applied sciences.
To our present companions, in authorities or in civil society:work with native companions who’re main digital change and innovation of their communities. Take heed to them, and put money into them. And bear in mind the dangers—and focus not simply on infrastructure and economic system, which comes naturally to our group however on digital rights and governance, as properly.
And to those that might not have labored formally with us earlier than: even if you happen to select to not associate with us, please be a part of us in our dedication to embrace a democratic imaginative and prescient of digital transformation. One which emphasizes digital literacy for individuals who want it most, and that promotes human rights, privateness, and justice for all.
In Ukrainian, Diia means “motion.” Allow us to take motion at present.
Thanks a lot.
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