This is Mises weekends with your host Jeff dice Hey, ladies and gentlemen, welcome back once again. It's Mises weekends. I'm joined by my good friend from Switzerland Claudio grass He's someone I've known for a few years I've known him through the precious metals industry. He was recently at PFS in Bodrum at Professor Hoppe's Event and is now visiting us in the US. He's a precious metals advisory agent for Swiss and worldwide clients Claudio great to see you Very happy to have you bringing us Swiss chocolate Here in Auburn, which is just one one good Swiss export, but I just want to set this up a little bit We're talking this weekend about the Swiss model Obviously America has some very deep social divisions a culture war We have a really nasty political environment since Trump won and as libertarians as and caps We have some answers some thoughts about how to ratchet down the hatred in society in the number one way We would argue is by sort of depoliticizing things By having private societies private ownership private property But short of that in the world in which we live here and now There's actually a country your home country of Switzerland is doing a better job of making life less political and and Switzerland is basically doing that through a very Direct and hardcore principle of subsidiarity and decentralization, which I got to say I'm a little blown away because when you look at the Swiss Legislature's own website The way they talk about subsidiarity as an important contribution to social cohesion Yeah, I'm quoting here is really amazing. So I want to talk a little bit about about Switzerland But from a libertarian or an cat perspective You know first and foremost Let me just say you said something the other day I mean, you know people get a little scared when you talk about hardcore libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism But when you talk to him about the Swiss model and radical decentralization, they they feel more comfortable Yeah with that to talk a little bit about that absolutely nothing when you when you try to explain I mean as a libertarian, of course, you know for me any kind of government is basically a criminal act But you know when we talk about anarchism Then you know most people are so far away From that concept or the only the idea about that concept that they don't know how how to handle that Kind of thought and what kind of picture they can basically draw in their own mind how it would be So I always combine it with with Switzerland because we really have You know, first of all, we're a nation defined by our own will You know, we had in 1291 basically we had three guys coming together taking an oath to you know to fight against foreign reefs and Foreign oppression and that's the whole basic idea of Switzerland, you know staying free in the pundit sovereign and And when we look at the decentralized structures, you know, we are basically have four different languages We have we were formed by different ethical groups different religions So basically when we look at how a nation state is defined in these days, you know Basically, you're saying hey the same ethical group or the same religion same language So Switzerland is none of this when there is another there is another country on this planet Which has the same basis and that would be the United States at the end of the day but because of that diversity and The decentralization, you know, it was able that The Italian speaking part from the Roman speaking part the German speaking part French speaking part They had their own their own culture and because we didn't have the centralized government Which tried to oppress and you know come up with one single rule for all of them we had a lot of competition and Decentralization means competition and it also means competition of ideas and it also respects of course, you know the different cultural habits of certain regions and I think that's why Switzerland today is a great model just to give you know the direction in which This world could you know modify Themself well you talk about diversity obviously America is very diverse ethnically Religiously in terms of national origin, but we don't have that many different languages a lot of people speak Spanish But they also speak English so even though Switzerland's about eight and a half million people I think yeah, it is diverse and So talk about this idea of decentralization subsidiarity Making real diversity more possible and creating social cohesion in other words the different parts of Switzerland the different cantons Don't have to fear each other as much as people in the US feel like they have to fear each other's political power Yeah, I mean I think the key is you know that Switzerland really has been founded on the ideas of you know The principles of subsidiarity from the beginning from the beginning so basically solve all issues at the lowest level You know if you municipality, I mean they were responsible still up to the day.  They're looking after the roads So stuff had been settled on that level and if let's say the municipality got the problem which you couldn't handle Alone then they were able to call up the next high level, which is the state So that's that's the whole concept and of course that keeps that keeps it, you know, I mean I like Aris total s, you know the Greek philosopher and he always said, you know demos the village karate are the rulers So a democracy can work, but on a very low scale You know when you really limit the power of the politicians because as we know power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely And so I think that's still, you know, yeah, you know look at even at the federal level No, we have not one president. We have seven presidents, right? So even they're a division of power is implemented and And at the end of the day When the government tries to come up with a new idea and they want to change the Constitution or whatever Basically, the people are the sovereign So, you know, we can always raise signatories and then we have to we can bring the front of of the people But the final vote at the end of the day have to Swiss people and that that prevents, you know, a lot of this progress which is Which is taking faster place, you know in other countries than right based on the on the rule of law in in Switzerland We'll talk about how minimalist really the federal Administrate administrative state is You may remember Lou Rockwell wrote a famous article one time about how he wakes up the day after the presidential election And nothing's really changed. It's on the back page of the paper. It doesn't really matter who won the presidency This is more or less true in Switzerland where you have a Presidents who just survive I think one-year periods and also the legislature meets very just temporarily, right? They come together four times a year for a short session, so You know the federal level basically that's their response with the foreign and security police So basically defense, you know, there are customs is under their rule the monetary policy Unfortunately, we also have a central bank. I mean the the great evil of our times And and of course legislations that applies to the whole country And defense and that's it and when we look at the I think it's it's important to see, you know How it is how a country is being financed? So When we look at the taxation, I mean all the three levels, you know The federal government the state level on some municipalities level they can all raise taxes and we have on all three levels. We have basically How do you say executive legislative and the 2d 2d skill judicial ranch So when we look at how the taxes are distributed, I mean the federal level gets 10% That's it. Yeah, and then the 90 90 percent are, you know The biggest portion remains with the municipality and then a certain portion goes to the state And of course, you know, so we have based on that structure We have a lot of competition because if a municipality decides, you know to raise taxes And the people are all happy with it. Even if they are, you know The 49% losing they have the possibility to vote with their feeds, right? You know, they can say, okay I don't like it in the village of Hünnberg So I'm I will move to the next one in home, which is maybe 1.5 kilometers away And so that always keeps, you know, the politicians and also the ambitions of these guys Probably under control We're sort of the opposite. We tend to send about 80% to federal of our taxes Maybe 20% state one one or 2% local Yeah, this is crazy. I mean if you look at the history of the United States and our constitution We were set up much the same a central government of very limited constitutional power The the rest subordinated the states it didn't last It lasted less than a hundred years. The civil war comes along How is how is Switzerland managed to make federalism last? Why doesn't the central government try to encroach? on smaller on on communal or municipal municipal governments I mean first of all, I think it has to do with the DNA of the people, you know, the whole culture The history so we never had a king. We never had a president. So we don't trust central authority We don't we know that government cannot give what it has stolen before So, I mean, we just had, you know, for example a few months ago. We had a public boat You know, that's every every family of four gets an unconditional basic income of 75,000 francs a year and We had 78% of the people saying no to that offer and I think that's quite unique in these days Or we had another world, you know going for six weeks of occasion mandatory six weeks for everyone So the Swiss were saying no against there, you know, they could have profited from it But they understand what it's about, you know to keep the government out of out of that business Which yeah, he has nothing he shouldn't have to say in that. So I think that's I think that's That's that's really, you know part of it and then the other aspect definitely is You know with our political structures, we have Chained the government To ensure that the government does not put chains on us on the people and enslave us And I think there we have done the better job based on our structures Then for example in the United States because I mean the idea of your constitution was also pretty good But the politicians they just come up with new amendments and change it and interpret it Completely different, but I think the wording was also basically quite clear what you know the founding fathers meant by putting chains on The political system and the politicians. Well, so 78% of Swiss or at least Swiss voters Voted against a universal basic income guarantee and you said about 70,000 Swiss francs 75 There was a figure that has been brought up I mean it was not 100% clear how much they are going to receive but basically the idea was, you know 75,000 that should be is that middle-class existence. Well, it's below. I mean, I mean You know that not everything is shiny in Switzerland and we can see that you know in the past We had you know the bankers were basically the guys making them the biggest average income right now It's became you know the government employees. So so they have an average income of a hundred and forty thousand, right? Right. Okay. So 75,000 is at least I mean it's you can live with it But definitely not. I mean, which one is expensive. Well, I think in the US even even US Libertarians, I'm not sure 78% of them would vote against universal basic income But certainly us the US population generally that that might prevail here if that was ever held to a vote You know, we talk a lot about how Wars abroad Diminished liberties at home talk about how staying out of two world wars, particularly in the 20th century staying neutral in those wars it helps Create the Switzerland you have today and you talk about sovereignty and freedom being in the Swiss DNA Do you think Switzerland would look a lot different if you got pulled into those European wars? Oh, definitely. Definitely. I think there is also I mean, you know the Swiss You know, we never had Resources in the ground, you know, we're pretty, you know, we had The Alps which made it hard, you know to control the whole territory But I mean even angles he was he was traveling around end of the 18th century and then he came back and he was saying Yeah, Europe has a great and bright future with one exception That's Switzerland because it's a shitty country to speak different languages They have no centralized power and no natural resources and so on just this mountainous place with no resource, right and And the Swiss I mean we have, you know, so in the past basically we have been, you know The toughest and the most brutal mercenaries, you know Because they had to survive somehow and we had winter time and summertime something they had to plan and it wasn't easy to make a living in Switzerland, so we basically exported a lot of mercenaries and That lasted until the big battle of Marino 1515 where basically we had you know on both sides Approximately 10,000 mercenaries fighting against each other and killing the Swiss were killing each other and Up to then we had also ambitious, you know, the Swiss were strong Hard-hard fighters, so they tried, you know, also to take over, you know, especially in northern Italy And after that battle of Marino at least, you know, the Swiss decided, okay, we stay out of Out of, you know, we don't have expansionary Last any longer, so we stay within our borders and So then, you know, that that's the kind of the basic setup and then of course first First World War second World War Also 1815 there was the Congress in Vienna where it has been decided that Switzerland remains a sovereign armed neutral country by the the foreign powers that had an impact and So that's why we survived. I mean the First World War was not, you know I mean that threat was not that big as in the Second World War, but I do remember the Second World War We had the famous General Gizzo And he said, you know, we are not going to surrender and the Swiss will fight to the last man standing and The Germans the Italians, I mean they were surrounded by by those guys I mean they knew exactly, you know, if if we if you fight the Swiss, I mean, it's a piece of land, which is Not not as much, you know important of importance. Yeah But they also knew that we are going to fight hard And I think that was one of the reasons they haven't been aided as Switzerland because it was really yeah Neutrality only works if you are armed forces and you're strong to defend the neutrality if necessary Well, when you were a young guy, we spoke a little bit yesterday about your mandatory service time in the Swiss military You were you were the head of a tank division not a division a tank company Did you did you resent that? Did you feel? Fine about being conscripted. Did you feel proud of being in the Swiss military? I mean talk about your thinking as a young guy then I mean as a young guy, I mean I was You know, I had a great time in the military and back of course, you know for a young guy It's always a shooting and you know playing soldier. I mean, it's great. It's it's an adventure. No real war. No real war Yeah in the US you actually get sent. Oh, that's I mean, yeah, that's now I think yeah an army needs, you know We have to defend our borders and therefore people need to understand, you know that if you have an army Then it's basically for national defense. We should not fight somewhere at the Hindu Kush to defend our liberty over there I mean, this is nonsense and how about how about we're women conscripted as well back then Hardly, I mean we just had a few logistic groups where basically women if they really wanted they could sign up So of course that agenda is also pushed being forward, you know by our national government they want to involve the girls more and I Don't I don't find it's basically unnecessary. I think but at least you know, I mean as long as the people understand why they serve and You know to protect liberty and freedom in a harsh crisis scenario. I mean that must be there must be the goal What do you think about the mindset of young Swiss today? Are they as? Socialist left-wing as jaded as Young Germans or young Brits, or do you think that they still retain some of the Swiss DNA that you've talked about? It's pretty interesting. I think there is you have the differences between the cities and the rural areas I'm the rural area sometimes. I'm surprised to see how sound The house is over there, you know in terms of thinking and they want to they want to do. Yeah, they want to pursue you there They're like their happiness They are quite conservative. I mean when we look at especially of the SVP, which is so-called right-wing party But it stands for you know, and they they occupy the right topics They are saying a sovereignty Neutrality Independency small-state that's their topics. So they have a lot of the young people basically are sympathizing with with SVP and then of course the more you go into the city areas The more socialistic it becomes and the more multicultural also becomes and you know in combination with the big multinationals so it has And you can also see you know when elections take or when votes are taking place and then you always see the differences But the majority so far. I mean I'm You know, we we try to end Swiss Propaganda for example, we were gathering a hundred thousand signatories because we are forced to pay 1.4 billion To finance public broadcasting public broadcasting. So to finance basically government propaganda And so we raised a hundred thousand signatories saying hey, we leave it up to the people in the future They should decide if they want to do it freely or not and So I was you know, I was also helping them to raise some some signatories And then I had to talk with a lot of different people and it gives you a good insight You know in all those different How this was because right you speak to I know I most likely have spoken to five six hundred people and I would say 75% Absolutely great. Wow, you know, they still they still have it. They they understand that the real ways basis They are kind of Libertarian without knowing that they Kind of libertarians and so on. So I'm positive.  So far the Swiss are resisting pretty good I want to touch briefly on Swiss banks. They've lost their luster Somewhat in terms of the privacy they used to afford the Swiss National Bank has also gone off the rails In the last five or ten years for a while it had tied the Swiss Frank to the euro. There was a peg I guess that's been released Talk about the banking sector and banking culture in Switzerland and how what it used to be versus what it is now Yeah You know, I mean you still have to the work ethic, you know, I think I mean what we can experience Since 2008 I mean we have seen a lot of money went to Singapore and Hong Kong Now basically over the last two years three years It's coming back again because just the whole culture the way the way the people work, you know the way They the privacy at least you know amongst the bankers and so on.  So these are you know, you need for the Swiss banking for a nation that is saying hey Okay, we are independence over in if the Americans come up saying hey, this is a crook or there's a crook I mean, yeah, we know international politics. So it's not always that, you know, the crooks are really the crooks So and in the past basically the Swiss bankers they understood that in a post it has been abused as well, of course Which always happening if you have a certain amount of liberty, but I think yeah, the Swiss banks You know, I mean, it's It's too big the banking system definitely still I mean it has shrink But you know when we look at the leverage in the banking system, it's huge when we look at the central bank It's the hedge fund at the end of the day But Yeah, that's you know, that's why we have to make sure that more Swiss people are also buying physical gold, you know Because I mean it's everywhere pension funds. I mean, it's a joke You know if somebody relies on the pension or you know the promises by the government I mean when we look at these unfunded liabilities all over the world, you know, which is 15 20 times higher than the funded that It just shows no it's bankrupt So I think you know what I also try to do in the future is you know, really go out talk to the Swiss people and try to Explain them gold why gold and how you can protect yourself You can be you can have your own pension fund and you don't so that you're not depending on government promises, right? Well, we're almost out of time. I'd like to ask you a little bit Enclosing here about the real diversity amongst the cantons. They have their own coat of arms They're a lot like us states in that sense But I think they have a lot more power in leeway than us states do relative to the federal administrative state Could could you have different social? Rules and regulations at the canton level here I think America would benefit greatly if we could you know move abortion and gun control and religion some of these really contentious issues Down to a more local level instead of this federal one-size-fits-all policy that makes everybody miserable and angry at each other Is there diversity even amongst social? Policies within the can't amongst the cantons. Yeah, I mean especially when it comes to you know health and social security I mean that's still on it on a state or content level. Okay, so it can be you know if you if you go to Geneva, for example, then it might be that your Health health health insurances Might be double the price as in the state of took where I live for example So I think yeah, the best is really diversifying, you know, I mean decentralization Cut off, you know cut off the money which is going to the central state and you know really try to To move those responsibilities away from the center and bring it down on the next level and you know If as long as I think that's that's that's the best way I mean for yeah the money you have to cut the money to get these guys out of power And you can organize it yourself on on on a lower level and it's it's not a problem at all And I think that would also be great great for for the United States Well, I hope so because we're we're in such an ugly period where people are talking about Civil War Claudio I want to thank you for your time. It's great to see you ladies and gentlemen We will post a link to the Swiss Legislative website which is unbelievable because it's not grandiose or expansionist is actually humble and Self-effacing so when was the last time you saw a legislator saying we want less power Really amazing and and I think it's important for and caps and libertarians to be talking about Maybe that real-world solutions, but at least real-world direction. So with that Claudio, thanks again. Great to see you ladies and gentlemen Have a great weekend Subscribe to Mises weekends via iTunes you stitcher and SoundCloud or listen on mises.org and YouTube


Hello. Hello everyone. Thank you so much for joining us at the launch of my school today. My name is Amanda Abram and I will be your moderator for the session. I just wanted to start out with some brief housekeeping items. We're going to hear from a variety of speakers today, keynote speakers and panelists. We would appreciate if you would please keep your microphones on mute. And you can post any questions that you might have in the chat as we will have a Q&A portion later in this session. I'd like to give you some brief background on why we are gathered here today is SDGs today is launching my schools today. Hashtag I mapped my school the call to action launch event. Now SDGs today was launched by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network in partnership with Esri and the National Geographic Society to advance the production of timely data on the sustainable development goals. They are launching a data set using open source data to share national population counts and various travel distances from recorded educational facilities across Africa. They will be doing this using open street map technology. Now we are happy to invite you to the launch of my school today, a call to action to encourage students, local communities and other stakeholders to map schools and contribute to the ongoing development of data and progress towards SDG for quality education. Now I would like to introduce our first keynote and welcome speaker. That will be Mr. Chief Nathaniel Ebonarsco the executive director of the Millennium Promise Alliance. He has over 17 years of practical field experience as a community health and development communications expert, and has held a variety of positions at the National Regional District and a community level in Ghana. His rich experience has earned him deep involvement in projects with the ministries of health, employment education, gender and local governance, and we are so honored to always have the opportunity to work with him, and with his leadership and initiatives throughout Ghana. So without further ado, I would like to hand it over to him to welcome us to this amazing session today. Thank you very much, Amanda. And good morning to everyone and good afternoon to my colleagues on the African continent. I'm very pleased to be here today for the launching of my school today. It's a pleasure to welcome all our guests and our eminent speaker Professor Jeffrey Sachs to share his rich experience in the mapping school location project. I'm equally honored to welcome the Honorable Minister for Education Ghana, who is in the person of Dr. Yaw Osei Edutun to this program. In this place, a critical role towards the achievement of sustainable development goals with a specific attention on improving life opportunities for the hard to reach and the vulnerable in society. The SDGs were formed to improve on the accomplishments of the Millennium Development Goals. To provide ensuring inclusive and equitable quality education and promoting lifelong learning opportunities as captured under the SDG for education contributes directly to the SDGs addressing poverty reduction and reduce inequalities, health, nutrition, economic growth, and labor market opportunities, as well as institutions. Education therefore should be recognized as a catalyst to meeting many of the most important development challenges that exist today. As governments and international community increasingly focus on ICT to addressing most of the needs of a citizens, it is crucial to leverage on ICT to improve educational planning. One of the essential reasons for educational planning is economic efficiency in resource application. A very vital part of educational planning is school mapping. Education has a transformational role to play in addressing all developmental challenges the world faces today. Today has over the years partnered with several governments in the sub region to make attempts at leveraging on ICT to advance education through mapping and other things. At that time, we called it, we called it, what do you call it? The FAA, that is making sure that we assess all the facilities that can contribute to making sure that the proximity of school facilities are accessible to all, irrespective of where you find yourself. It's very important that at this point where UNSDSN is attempting to make sure that we bring this to the doorsteps of all other developing countries, we all embrace it with all arms, and make sure that we put our shoulders to this reel and move it to the right direction. I therefore, on this note, would like to thank you all for your time and wish all of us a pleasant contribution towards this launch. And beyond the launch, we would want to see all governments and other institutions take it up and make sure that we run with it. And then we will all be very happy to see the results of how we are able to help identify map out schools and in so doing help us to know how we can apply the resources equitably and efficiently. On this note, I would like to thank you for your time and wish all of us a pleasant launch. Thank you. Thank you so much to Chief Nathaniel for that amazing welcome. We are so glad to have you here and we definitely are going to hear from many distinguished speakers today. We will move right along to our three keynote speakers. First, we will have the honorable Dr. Yeah, who say I don't do the minister of education of Ghana. He dreams of a Ghana where every child regardless of their background, whether poor privileged will be afforded equal opportunity towards education, access equity quality is what he tends to bring to education in Ghana school reform and emphasis on stem and steam. And he believes that it's important to prepare students to be career ready, teaching the 21st century skills which are critical thinking creativity collaboration and communication. We are so honored to have you here with us today. Just to say after that we will have Dr. Jeffrey desax the president of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He is a world renowned economist professor, best selling author, innovative educator and a global leader in sustainable development. He serves in a variety of positions as an SDG advocate and has twice been named among time magazines 100 most influential world leaders. Thank you so much for joining us today as a keynote speaker. And our last keynote will be Dr. Radica younger, the director of education at the Center for Sustainable Development she has rich practical and academic experiences and international education and her scholarship has been featured all over the world. She is also here in her capacity as a secretariat member of mission 4.7 a new initiative to push transformative education and target 4.7, which brings together approximately 50 technical education experts and high level leaders across the world working on education. We're so happy to have all of you here today. First, I would like to turn it over to the Minister of Education of Ghana, the Honorable Dr. Yahoo say I don't know the floor is yours. Thank you so much for such a wonderful opportunity, but I definitely sucks at not and fellow panelists is a great opportunity to be with you today. I'm excited by the invitation extended to me to work closely with you and today we are going to have the opportunity to share with you some of the things that we're doing and how the system that you developed for school mapping is going to be of great help to us. Since 2016 Ghana began the project mapping our school senior high schools. This was funded through a World Bank program that we participated in called a secondary education improvement projects and secondary schools have been mapped. We have begun a very interesting project of reconfiguring junior high schools. By the way, the interesting thing about the Ghana junior high school system is that since 1987, when we decided that junior high schools should be created in a way from the senior high schools. We've had a very interesting junior high school system going on in our junior high schools. We don't have the same facilities as the high school so you go to a junior high school we have the science labs are not there libraries are not there. And it's limiting what we can do within our second education space so the government and the president and I would have thought to follow. I decided that the junior high school should work up to our senior high schools which means we are now mapping all the junior high schools. In certain midsize towns you may have like 11 of them. We're trying to see okay where can we place a new junior high school that would take over all the students from the 11 junior high school so that we can have efficiency gains. It's not just mapping for his own sake, but we are mapping so that children can walk to the nearest new junior high school that has science labs that have libraries and have computer labs and that has all the facilities that the senior high schools have. So in a typical town with 11 junior high schools then trust in tennis when you map them we begin to say okay if I place a junior high school at this location, all the children can work. And inside of 11 schools, I'm going to have one school. Now inside of 11 head teachers, I'm going to have one head teacher and maybe two assistants. And now the second supervisor who is the inspector of schools can stay at that school, two days or three days a week.  It allows you to have a library which will hit that's not possible to have, because you couldn't have those 11 libraries, you couldn't have the 11 science lab, you couldn't have the 11 libraries. Now once you map and you set up one school, what it means is this, you now have one school with a science labs and you have about 10 students who are accommodated there. You have one headmaster inside 11 headmasters. And then the interesting thing that we find after we map all the schools and do at the look at the staffing is that in some schools to have a teacher who is there, and the only teaching every other day on all the other, the every other day, other they don't have anything to teach they have 70 students but they have the full complement of teachers. Once you do the map, you find a relocation the efficiency gains from the management and obtains the efficiency gain from the teacher or staffing, then down the line pay for cost of the construction. So when we look at the school that we are building now that has everything that the 21st century school has, we end up also saving on the teacher and obtains in a in a typical 11 junior high school kind of community. So we could realize that instead of 120 teachers we can reduce it to 80 teachers, we have further teachers who can then be sent to communities without teachers. So the mapping tools that we are using is not giving us the opportunity to reorganize our education system and put us in a situation where the efficiency gains is also leading to improve in quality learning outcomes, because our advisor doesn't have to move to 11 schools. He can stay in this school for two days and bring about the improvement that is a new dinner so school mapping as we see it as a means to an end and in fact it's a very very important aspect of what we're doing here. We're also using it to look at communities that have limited number of schools. So, where we just have dependent upon community initiative to build schools. Now we're looking at the mapping giving us a heads up and say hey this community extended how many schools you have within a kilometer. How do you ensure that we have enough school to cater for the population within a certain geographical distance and how do you reduce the distance in such a way that children are not going that far to access school so it's such a simple tool. So here mapping and here survey but the efficiency gains of it in terms of education what really assigns me about this initiating that you embark upon is going to make our life much easier. We're going to use the tool very well to really think about reorganization of education, reconfiguration of junior high school in Ghana. And for that matter, we then also map out the primary schools onto the junior high school and gives you a clear sense of the deficiencies and how you can maximize opportunities for education. I'm very excited that Prof Saks and your team have put this together and we're going to use it to improve what we are already doing to really bring about that efficiency. And I think in the future years what we are looking at research on how using mapping and locating new junior high schools have felt the Ghana education system to really transform itself to give us quality six years of secondary education. And we are putting schools together with all that we need in a high school and I'm very excited by the opportunity that we are going to get, even with the deployment of this new mapping system. Thank you so much for this wonderful opportunity. Thank you so much for those words minister and for sharing the mapping that you're doing already in Ghana, as well as sharing your exemplary leadership to dedicate this as a means to an end to achieve quality education. Thank you for your time we are so glad that you were able to join us and will be a champion for these types of projects and innovations. With that, I would like to turn it over to a professor Jeffrey D sacks for his keynote remarks. Thank you very much, Amanda. Thanks to everybody for joining and thanks colleagues for launching my school today. Minister, your remarks were really inspiring, absolutely fascinating, extremely important for us. I think really the kind of guidance that we need. We sense that having real time up to date, global maps of where the schools are will make a huge difference but you're proving the point. We're giving a lot of crucial ideas about how to use the information that will be developed in this project. Please count on us to be with you. You know that chief Nat is there to help support you in any way and our whole team at SDSN and Millennium Promise Alliance are completely with you. Ghana, by the way to everybody is just an exemplary leader in pushing forward on the quality of education. It's extremely important that President of Kufo Otto, early in his first term, took SDG for and said this calls on us for universal completion of secondary education. In doing so said therefore, we're going to ensure that secondary education is available for every student every learner in Ghana. We're going to make it free and available for all. And that is the kind of breakthrough that you say, wow, that's really crucial. And that I use to give examples all over the world to say you need to follow Ghana's lead to make sure that every child is going to receive a quality education all the way from pre K through completion of secondary education at the least. Now, this idea of mapping schools globally brings in another crucial element of course and that is crowdsourcing of knowledge and engagement in the SDGs, because with the tools that SDGs today is bringing to this project. Everybody can participate in describing where your schools are in geographically tagging them. And I hope over time in building up databases school by school, so that we can take the ministers wisdom and guidance and help ministers of education and district officials, all over the world to make the most of this information. It would be wonderful, especially in the COVID period, if we knew where are the students, each day, which schools are open, which schools have been closed because of COVID a teacher sick or the district is being hit by the pandemic so it's closed which schools have online capacity. What's the quality of the connectivity. How can we expand online learning. Well one way is to know what the capacities of the schools are right now in terms of physical infrastructure and the software and the training of teachers and students for using these new technologies. And I would assume minister that another thing that can be done in addition to the great spatial dynamics that you have underway now where you're using the apex high school to help shape higher quality of the junior high schools that we can use digital technologies effectively so that maybe a master teacher or really well qualified science teacher or specialist or mathematics teacher can teach for a whole district in places where there might not be that quality and I, I want to ensure that every school everywhere has the connectivity to be able to get online information to be able to use digital services to be able to be in connected classrooms around the world or within districts so that we can use all the tools that we have at our disposal. Now, SDSN, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network is a global network. It's a network of especially universities and think tanks around the world committed to the sustainable development goals. STG-4, which brings us all together today calls for quality education for all learners and universal education from pre-K through upper secondary as an absolute baseline. Well, COVID was a terrible setback to this because hundreds of millions of kids simply didn't have school in rich places. Maybe it was possible to go online, but even in almost anywhere in the world, there was a digital divide of who could participate online and who could not. But in poorer districts, poorer places, it was not possible to just shift online and have universal coverage. So we're trying through this project, first of all to help get the schools everywhere back and operating to understand where the schools, how are they functioning, where is learning taking place, and then together with UNESCO, together with the great leaders like Minister Dutum, we are trying to ensure quality education everywhere and to bring added resources to bear. So I would say to the minister also part of our job is you tell us what's needed. I'm out there wanting to campaign for you to get you the added resources so that you can really get the job done. If you say I have a plan, but it requires a few million dollars more but what a return because this is the most important investment that any society can make any time is in its children, no doubt, the highest return socially, economically, politically in every way. So I want to make sure that we're also using this project effectively to mobilize the resources needed for quality education for all. I want to hear from Dr Radhika Yangar, who is my dear colleague at Columbia University and SDSN on another aspect of our journey, which is, as Amanda mentioned to you 4.7 a target under SDG for because target 4.7 says not only should all children be learning and receiving quality education and completing higher education, but they should be learning about sustainable development. And that's another challenge that is a big one. You know, sometimes the school curriculum doesn't even help students to understand what's in front of our eyes like the climate that is disrupting the whole planet right now the massive heatwaves that droughts the floods, or tell students understand COVID-19 for that matter, because that's a matter of understanding ecology, epidemiology, how disease operates, principles of public health, which also should be part of a sustainable development curriculum. So Radhika will be telling us about all of the global partnership to also infuse the knowledge of sustainable development within the curriculum during the next 10 years. I'm excited for all of the SDSN network globally to become foot soldiers if I could put it that way all over the world in my school today. Mapping, teaching young kids how to map, how to use geographic tools, how to use a tablet or a smartphone to help put their school on the global map, and for all of the data scientists that are engaged in this project, we use this as a way to crowdsource the crucial information about the school's functions, its capacities, its infrastructure, its needs, so that we can really mobilize the real time data to help Mr. Adutam and all his colleagues around the world to make this revolution and quality education, which is by far the single most important investment we can make for sustainable development. Thank you everybody. Thanks, Mario and Robbie. Thanks to Esri and National Geographic and all our partners in my school today. It's such an exciting project. I'm so grateful that we have the partnership with the government of Ghana in getting this going because this will be a powerful tool. The partnership will inspire countries all over the world to make the most of this and I know that we can count on our networks to help pull this off. So thanks to everybody. Congratulations on the launch minister so great to see you, and Chief Nat great to see you and I'll turn it back to you Amanda so that we can thank Dr. Iyengar to everybody. Thank you so much. Oh, Minister, would you like to go ahead and respond. Oh, can I have you. Okay. Thank you. It's always great to see pro sacks. This is wonderful. I'm super excited about this opportunity and I think out of this we are so in seas of transformation and Ghana is going to take the lead on this. Very soon some research will be done to see the impact of school mapping and improving quality of teaching and learning opportunities that have been extended to us we have a 15 school that will be next year and the use of master teachers from one location to make the others taking a profit. We're going to do it. And, of course, we need support we're coming. We're going to get it done. Thank you so much. I think Professor sacks you gave us a great reminder that this is a collaborative effort and Ghana has been showing a lot of leadership in this space and we're really excited to keep working with the government of Ghana and all of our partners there. So thank you for those remarks. I want to turn it over now to Dr. Radhika Iyengar, and she will discuss, as Professor sacks said, more about mission 4.7 and the new initiatives there. So Dr. Radhika over to you. Thank you Amanda, and it's an honor to follow Professor Jerry sacks. Mr. cheating panel as well as Dr. Yao so welcome to this really wonderful initiative, which is really very timely. And as you can see, we have started, as we speak, there are many students who are coming back to school, and it's really taken us many children many months who have been out of the school network and now we are coming back to school slowly and taking into consideration aspects only as Professor sacks said that many students were out of the school network and we were not able to reach them. So I think this pandemic has yet again taught us the importance of community members village leaders, town leaders, parents coming together for an integral part of what we call well functioning schools. I think this happened to make schools function again I think that we need to have a big partnership we need to have all the stakeholders involved and to me I think there are two very important things that need to take place one is we need to know where these schools are located so that we exactly know which communities left behind who is not reaching the schools, and to be able to do that I really welcome SDG today's initiative. Congratulations, Miriam for launching this event where we can now actually locate where these schools are so that we can say these communities are connected behind these communities are joining and then they can focus on the quality of education in the schools I think both Professor sacks and Dr mentioned these aspects of how to make the schools efficient through this network but our basic minimum criteria is, how to follow Ghana's lead to exactly know where these schools are located and mapping of the schools is very, very critical I consider this as like a baseline or where we need to go beyond this. The second component which Professor sacks also mentioned is the quality of education. For this, I want to discuss our mission mission 4.7, which is focusing on SDG 4.7 actually implementing SDG 4.7 through two lenses education for sustainable development and global citizenship education. The mission 4.7 brings in a lot of education leaders, including Bunke Moon Foundation UNESCO, SDSNs SDG Academy, SDSNs Global School Network Center for Sustainable Development This is where I am based at the Earth Institute at Columbia University through our UNESCO ambassadors program we have been focusing on quality of education in many different countries, including here in the United States which I feel is really lagging behind in many of the aspects on making education for sustainable development and global citizenship front runners in the education system here. So through mission 4.7, we have partnered with SDGs today to focus on many quality aspects and taking the two common missions that we have taking care of people and its planet I think are really very critical at this stage where we are just coming back from the pandemic and many things have happened so far. We've already started to work on many different aspects here, including our eco ambassadors program where we partnered with SDG, we partnered with SDGs today to focus on story maps, which bring in this aspect of SDGs learning about the sustainable development goal which I think is completely missed out on being a big core of education in many countries and so how can we bring the aspects, global aspects of SDGs and how can we bring in the local stories and the local context. And through our eco ambassadors program and through mission 4.7 working with SDGs today we've been able to combine these aspects learning the SDGs and making it very local and very actionable. It's not just learning about SDGs and and that's it we actually drive the action component as well so I would love for you to look at the SDGs today website. We have the education component there the eco ambassadors program is listed there to see how can we actually make these story maps learn about you know how can we make use of these story maps to learn about the SDGs and how do we localize it to make action possible. So this is something that we really welcome and I hope that through SDGs today's fantastic work on story maps and its partnership with Esri National Geographic and many other partners we will be able to drive SDGs bring them more local empower our students to learn about where the planet is going and what is their role in taking care of its people and its planet so welcome to the SDGs today website and please look at all the details there it focuses on mission 4.7s focus on SDG 4.7 and I hope that this partnership with Minister of Education in Ghana as well as other world leaders who can take this work forward and make sure that mission 4.7 is actually a reality and is done at an international level. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much for those wonderful remarks and discussing more about mission 4.7 and the plans to really make things actionable and taking forward this agenda and the importance of quality education but education on broader themes as well to shape our society. So thank you to all of our keynote speakers we were so glad to have you thank you for your wonderful presentations and remarks. We will now be moving into a panel discussion with three additional speakers. And this panel discussion will be about the importance of timely data on school locations and enabling students how to make the data through their locations and communities. It will also be on understanding how the data that students are collecting or community members or that teachers are collecting can impact the policy making processes and lead to improving quality education. The first panelist will be Mr. Jason Solly the global manager for schools at Esri and he leads the school GIS strategy and is responsible for partnerships worldwide and we are really looking forward to hearing his presentation. The next panel speaker will be Miss Monica and Figa the regional director for Eastern and South Africa hub at the humanitarian open street map team. In this role she works across East Africa to support and amplify open source communities in about 24 countries in the region. We're really excited to hear about her expertise in this area. And lastly we will have Miss Anita Mwagiru the deputy project lead for the SDG students program and this is an initiative of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network youth. She is responsible for program strategy implementation and global recruitment across youth and university hubs across the region as well as internationally. We are really looking forward to hearing from these three panelists and they will each have about seven or eight minutes for their presentation. So I would like to turn it over first to Jason. Thank you. It's going to share my screen. Okay. Hi everybody. So my name is Jason Solly. I'm based in the UK so I'm talking to you from the UK today. And I just wanted to take you through talking about some of our the Esri technology very very briefly on here just to give you another flavor of who we are as a company. So we're a huge mapping and technology company essentially. I've been working with Esri for at least 12 years and my main focus has always been on schools whether it's actually this type of activity where it's schools planning administration in here. I know the schools today program is going to be using one of our apps called Survey 123 to check later and that's been really really well received in the education community as a curriculum tool and also the planning tool. And this instance, the reason why it's so useful in this context is the immediacy of the data. So it's really easy to set up so you can use it on a phone or tablet and once you've collected your data, it's immediately into a database where it can be easily shared analyzed, added to other maps or dashboards and this type of thing. So it's a really, really simple and easy way to collect really timely data and make it available to everybody almost in an instant. This same technology, this same survey 123 here we've got our mapping platform. We can flip that around so as well as actually doing education planning, we can also start to look at how this technology work as a curriculum and a teaching and learning tool. So part of the big part of what I do is around managing our schools program so our schools program is free for all schools and probably the mainstay of this is probably our teach with GIS website. So how do you teach with this technology, how do you teach all sorts of different subjects, whether it's computer science, whether it's geography, whether it's maths through the medium of geospatial technology is being used for this project. My scores today project, we've created some story maps that we mentioned in the previous speaker with some activities that are really focused around this concept of the school. How do we use the school as a way to actually learn, you know, there's a commonality. If we ask that question as a child, where am I, and where is my school in that space. That's something that can be had. You know, so we've created some activities around here with student tasks. And the idea being is, we want the students to be thinking about where they are, what's their journey, and through that simple process, they can start to be learning things around mapping skills about scale, about maths, creative writing in here biology, sustainability of the other of their journey to school looking at local to global impact, and also helping the students to think about how can they take action in the end. So if they join the school, is there an impact, is not that pleasant, what can they do. Well, we've got some resources we've put together for the program that will help teachers think about and create and adapt their own resources for the program. This can be used offline or online in there. So whatever the circumstance you're in the teacher, there's something here for you. And yeah, and again, we'll share the links to various websites and free resources as part of the program in here. But the idea of this GIS Geospatial Technology has many different roles, even though it's the same technology is the context is different. It could be used on education planning is curriculum. And it puts you on maybe a great pathway into a really interesting and useful career in life. So it's certainly what did that for me in there. So that's it for me. I'm going to finish up nice and quickly for you in there, but lots of free resources and lots of ways to work offline online depending on your circumstance. And please get in touch with me via Twitter or this program. Thank you. Thank you so much Jason for sharing specifically what you're doing with the mapping technology and how schools can get involved and we'll also have a Q&A later after we hear from the two next panelists. So next I would like to turn it over to miss Monica to share her presentation with us. Hello Monday. Okay, it tells me the previous speaker was sharing. You should be able to share now it seems. Okay. Thank you so much and hello everyone. Good afternoon. Good morning. My name is money can dig up. I am the original director. Sorry to interrupt you, but we can't see the full presentation. Okay, sorry just one minute. Okay. Are you able to see it now. Not yet.  Yes. It might be frozen right now. So how about you close out of it. We can actually go to Anita quickly and then we can come back to you it would that be okay. Yes, that will be okay. Okay, I'm sorry about that. So Anita will go to you just to give your remarks and then we'll come back to Monica. Okay, thank you that's fine. Good morning. Good afternoon and good evening to you all. So my name is Anita McGarry from Naribe Kenya. And I am the deputy project leaders has been mentioned at the students program and we deal with university engagement all over the world on the STG and about the snowball development as well. So I'll talk a little bit about how I started out with youth. So I have worked with youth and other youth for more than five years. And during this time I have worked with in grassroots projects that sought to engage youth and the police in the area to work together to end police brutality. I have worked with youth to increase their employment chances. I have worked to provide basic necessities for children in orphanages. I have worked to increase youth participation and environmental cleanups and awareness, and now I walk to increase engagement and participation on the STs all over the world. Through this journey, I have seen the innovation, the steadfastness, perseverance and power that youth possess. If only they are invested in and given a platform to raise their voice for the necessary changes to our society. And this small story from like this last year during the pandemic which has truthfully affected I think children and youth in terms of their education the most, especially in emerging markets all over the world, and Africa included as well. And it's been a time where people were very unword especially as young people and even as we had discussions with the various coordinators all over the world for our program. We would always come back to us and say I just want to go back to school because I know school is the pathway.  And during this period we've seen the innovation that all the students all over the world within our program have been able to do for example in South America we had students who reached out to their university professors who had no idea how to use zoom or how to use Microsoft teams or any of the other platforms during this time. And having that partnership to be able to teach them how to use this product so that they can be able to in then in turn teach them because they didn't want to miss out or lose a year of school during this period. And in this I would like to quote anonymous person who says that we want our legacies to stand upon the youth we want to give knowledge the younger generation and be part of changing the game. So how do we take the tools that as we are unveiling the my schools today application today how do we take this and then involve the use so that we can become and make this project great. So one of the ways is we fast address the underlying issues. Africa has a bargaining population that can either be seen as a challenge or potential for growth for the continent. Imagine markets face a daunting list of issues in Africa such as child labor FGM child marriages period poverty and several others. And this issues can only be overcome with more education and for both children and adults alike was also do learn as well. And education is this passage to progress that can only be seen if we are able to come together and see the value of it. So by mapping out schools whether it's in very remote regions or within our cities. We provide children young people and adults are like the knowledge of what education is available in their local area, which is very important because that means that people are able to understand and be part of seeing their bigger picture or the framework that they can be part of. Another way is by ownership, having students learn how the data is collected and be actively involved in the process. And mutual engagement engaging youth networks all across the continent. A lot of this youth networks are involved in education they're involved in youth empowerment and giving you the voice. Educating them and partnering with the schools and ministries directly like for example with the Ghanaian government that's very, it's part of the whole process so that we can eventually be able to ensure that everyone all over the continent of Africa has access to quality education. Within SDSN youth there is a continent wide reach through the global schools advocates the SG students program and the local pathways fellowship. We'll all focus on education in various different ways in their local communities collaboration with these programs will produce a better result in the buying for this project within the local communities as they are the ones who work directly with the people who will benefit most from this tool. It's not just enough to collaborate, but with the youth or increase their participation in projects, we need to give them as well as seat a platform at the table so that they can be able to be an effective member and actively implement their ideas that they come up with. Provide them with the tools funds and other resources so that they can actually take part and also be part of the change that they are seeing around them. Thank you very much. Thank you so much Anita to discuss exactly how the youth networks are going to engage in this project and the importance of youth empowerment and bringing youth into the mapping project. So, Miss Monica, I would like to turn it over to you. Thank you. I'm sorry to change the order on you but I want to make sure. No worries. Yes, I'm hoping that you're able to see the full screen now. I can only see it now. Okay. Thank you. Hello everyone good evening good morning so my name is money can dig up. I am the regional director of the open mapping hub eastern and southern Africa with a humanitarian open street map team. And it's an absolute pleasure to share our work supporting communities and partners that use data to advance the SDGs, and how we can further amplify the call to action on my school today. I want to take background into who we are as hot as an NGO. Yes. Is there a way to just move the, the speak the present present review to the left a little bit so we can see the full slide. I'm sorry to interrupt again. Sorry, I'm having a really good. That's great. Thank you so much. Yes. So, we're an international NGO that is committed to ensuring that communities and international partners are contributing to map data. And beginning 2019 we had envisioned doing this in three ways. So ensuring that everyone is counted through high quality based map data. The second is ensuring that international organizations governments have access to high quality data, but also that they're able to contribute and to contribute to this data and make decisions based on the data. And the third one is really the understanding that everyone can engage and contribute to a map based on their, the resources that they have at hand. So, globally, it's estimated that one billion people live in places that are not marked. What this means is that if you're basically living in an area that's not mapped that means you're unaccounted for. And at the same time it also means that you're at very high risk of disaster, and that response services are not likely to get to you. So, and how do we, how are we able to solve the challenge of groups that are unaccounted for. So OpenStreetMap is a collaborative project that brings together people that are able to create a free editable world map. What this means is that if you're able to contribute to OpenStreetMap, you're essentially contributing to a process that's open, that's editable. What this means that you're building into a community that's able to advance the sustainable development goals, while building highly timely data, given that a lot of the data that we have is, is what we'd call a time bound within within given communities. And taking us a little bit back to 2019, as part of the global partnership for sustainable development goals, the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap team committed to advancing STGs by focusing on STGs one to six, as well as STGs 11 on sustainable cities and communities. 26% of STG indicators need maps, and in order to get measured, and statistically in Africa and Asia, only about 20% of STGs have available data to monitor. And the 5% of sub-Saharan African countries have no poverty data that has been updated since 2015, pointing to the fact that there is a huge need to embrace innovative data, so says in order to fill these gaps. And when you think through, for example, STGs nine, OpenMap are a powerful tool to measure and monitor many of the STGs. When you talk of the need to track the population of the rural population who live within two kilometers of an all-season road. One, this is very difficult to measure given the different complexities of the different countries and how people define, for example, an all-season road. But then it is very important that we actually need to have this road mapped, we need to know where people live, we need to know where people are. If, sorry. So the question is, where can the map my school project go in the future? And when you think of STG four and the context of how difficult it is to actually track some of these STGs and monitor implementation. So I'm going to walk you through two examples of local communities that are using OpenStreetMap to advance sustainable development goal four. One of them is a local community known as Map Uganda that has been working with HOT across seven schools in northern Uganda. Through the project, they've been able to train over 203 teachers and students, and they're training with these groups on how to use OpenStreetMap. They're training them on how to actually add data to OpenStreetMap, but also most importantly, training the teachers to be able to use teacherOSM.org to conduct their geography classes in school. And why is this important? In talking to these communities, they recognize that one, they do have resources in terms of schools or laptops in terms of mobile phones that are assigned to these schools. But then from then on, the teachers mostly will use the laptops and the free mobile phones, for example, to teach a general lesson or to teach the children how to use Word. And especially the youth are very keen in terms of what additional skills can they build. And so for them, mapping mobile data collection GIS is something that's of high interest and of high interest to the teachers as well. And through that, they've been able to build interest in these groups in teachers as well as the students. The second project that I'll speak to you about is a school in Peru. So, beginning 2017, there are only about 700 schools around OpenStreetMap in Peru, but today we have a total of 108, 523 schools that have been mapped on OpenStreetMap. And this has been done through kind of a seven step process. First of all, identify the different categories of schools that need to be mapped from the lower primary through to the tertiary level. Lots of community buying, seeking licenses, documenting and also importing a lot of data on OpenStreetMap and uploading that. So we've been able to see a huge growth in terms of the number of schools that actually have been mapped on OpenStreetMap through a collaborative effort. And so for today, what can we all do? So the first thing is, if you're a student or if you know a school in your area, at the school in OSM, become a youth mapper at your university or start a youth mapper chapter. Most importantly, if you are an educator, use OSM to teach geography in classroom through teachosm.org. And if you're working with the National Statistics Agency, a mapping agency or a donor, encourage school location data sets to be shared openly for collaboration with cities and mappers, as this has been shown to actually advance towards mapping of schools and mapping of infrastructure such as roads that are really important in delivering services to schools. Thank you. Thank you so much for that detailed information. I know we all were really looking forward to hearing exactly how we can engage in this project. Now we have a little bit of time left for Q&A. So I encourage any of the participants in this session to please post their questions in the chat. And I will pose these questions to the three panelists that we have here, Anita, Jason, and Monica. So we do have one question in the chat so far about how people get engaged in the responsibility for mapping schools and can it only be taken up at the state and local government level? Does this require a countrywide initiative or are individuals able to mobilize community by community and participate? So this maybe could be a question for Jason and Monica, how people can participate if they don't have a countrywide initiative in their specific country in Africa. Jason, you're on mute. Yeah, sorry. Okay, so in terms of how people can participate in instances where there isn't a non-going campaign, so I'll take us back to kind of the two committees that I mentioned, that you can start off a local intervention, self-mobilized intervention, and begin actually adding data to OSM, and for this you don't need to be part of, for example, an existing wider initiative. The reason being that OSM is really open source, and this means that you can create an independent sort of task manager project and begin adding the details or the resources on what you want to map in your locality. I would also encourage you to reach out to other organizations or other networks and be able to do this as what we call it as a collaborative effort. I think that also helps in terms of increasing the number of contributors that you can get or the number of kind of resources that you can bring together to be able to start an initiative in your country. So in terms of of an experience, some of our most interesting or very proactive groups have been very self-mobilized. Local communities sometimes are not formally, for example, registered but have an interest in actually mapping the initiatives. Great, thank you. Jason, do you have anything to add to that? Certainly one, two, three app is part of the program that you can map anywhere in the world. You don't need, and you can go to any, the app itself has maps for the whole world, so you can map anything inside that. If you want to do more curriculum based classroom activities, you can go to just Google Teach with GIS, and that will take you there, but I'm sure we'll be putting other education resources out on social media as well. And it can be used by educators that are not in Africa as well, correct? How well, how well. Great, so I know there's a question in the chat about how do individuals get involved, and maybe they might be outside of Africa, so that's great to hear that they also can use the resources and be involved. I'd like to pose a question now to Anita. There's a question on how to build community around mapping and getting people engaged and involved, and I think maybe you can speak to your youth engagement, how to get people excited around this mission in that answer. Okay, yeah, so I would say that the easiest way to build a community is to first go, I wouldn't say person in person because of the COVID situation, but I'm trying to get people to understand it at their level. So for example, if it is like young children or students who are over, like not yet rich high school, it would be more useful in this situation to have like a one to one conversation with them to explain how the data is collected, why we need to collect the data, and how it will be used afterwards because the thing that you see most when you are trying to engage a community, whether it's young people or people is that you have to be able to be open to communicate with them the whole process so that they can also have a buy-in and take ownership of it for themselves. So I would say that's the easiest way to get a community just to basically back a project. Great, thank you so much. Jason, there's another question about how the data stays up to date over time and you should ensure that it's always accurate. So could you please comment on that? I think that's just the growth of the program, really, and continually refreshing that maybe, there's ways and methods of providing these projects to actually keep coming back and visiting this data. Hopefully you're going to sustain the scores, you're going to want to be involved in the geospatial aspects of it, you want to just embed that as a process inside the curriculum. Hopefully the score will update their own data. Things change in their school, they can do it as well. There's not one single answer to that. It's just keeping the pressure on and just keep working on it and making sure everyone sees the value in it and it's getting value from it and then it will work. Great, thank you so much for that. There is another question about safety as oftentimes journeys to schools for students, there's a lot of protection and safety concerns. So it would be great if someone could comment on how safety is can taken into account in this project as school children are often vulnerable to road crashes and other things and maybe these contexts. So with the results that I created, the idea of actually where am I as a child, where is my school, what is my route to school, what the child is thinking about actually their route to school, what's going on. And one of the things we would like to do as the program develops is then start, so instead of actually measuring trees or animals and environment, we measure the child. So how does the child feel on that journey to school, whether they feel safe, whether they feel unsafe and start to map those locations so we can start to believe that for the whole school. Hopefully you'll start to see areas that actually start to think what, what's the issue here. And there's also a call to action in that resource as well. If you see something that you want to change. Do something, what to let it to the teacher, what to let it to a local counselor, what to that to Parliament that we want to see this change because it's unsafe. So it's almost using the children to actually map out the environment as they perceive it from their from their experience and then acting on that. Yeah, that's great to hear that it's it's also used as an advocacy tool and then you want students to take action beyond mapping the data. And I'm just seeing quickly let me just check the chat to see if there's additional questions. Let's see. There's a question about data quality. And because it's an open source map. What are you going to do about data quality potential ramifications on data quality. You don't know if anyone wants to jump in on that question. Yes. So, on data quality, a key component of mapping, whether it's remote mapping through, you know, satellite imagery or its local mapping where you have students actually map facilities that they use. Then there's an additional component that ties it all together and that's data validation or sort of ground shooting. So, for quality and completeness. So a number of projects will have, for example, train validators, or actually train a local commission order to validate that data. So it's an added sort of that step but that's very critical and could be improved by things like how well the training or how to do the mapping is done to ensure that there's kind of a second, what is called I to the data that you to already have there, especially with remote mapping where it can be difficult, for example, to tell the difference between a main road and a, you know, in a service road, or sometimes a tree can be confused for something like a small toilet structure. So then validation becomes a very important component of any mapping exercise. Yes, that's great. Thank you so much for answering that. I just want to also mention, I see that chief net and the minister still on the line so if there's anything you want to come in on, please feel free as well but it's also not a requirement. So I think I would love to hear from all of you in your own words, all three of you. Why this is really important to achieving SDG for and what is your statements towards the audience towards schools that are getting involved on your inspiring words, you know, to really push this forward. So Anita, could we start with you. Yeah, so for me this is, it's a tool that will bring about change in how the education is looked at in Africa because now you have the data to back up what has been said all this years so that's important to me because I am a child of the continent I've been I've grown been raised here and I have studied in schools within the continent as well so I know the needs of the countries, the countries in Africa so I understand the need for this and I totally see how it can help to map out and even provide like better education for places where we had no information before because it was just not feasible prior to this. So for me it just shows that we are taking a step in the right direction and that direction will end up with all students all over Africa being part of a bigger world where we're learning to not only someone is doing for us but also taking part in it as Monica said where we are we start youth chapters and start to map out and so it's, it's also involving youth which I think is such an important thing because we are the next part of the society where the people who are going to take it up from the people who are before us as well so I think that's, it's just inspiring to see. Thank you so much. Monica, do you have any words on that or Minister if you want to come in as well. Thank you so much they have been very insightful in terms of the experts knowledge and this area and what we can take away that is, we have another set of tools that we can use for education transformation. I also want to say that I have another meeting so I really really beg of you to move on but touch base with you again and it's just a very exciting conversation and I believe it's something that most people, educationist and leaders in education will find very useful so thank you for such a wonderful opportunity. Thank you so much for joining us. We perfectly understand and thank you for those remarks. We were so honored to have you here today. I will just maybe get a closing statement from Monica and Jason on that same question. Why is this important for SDG for and in general why is data literacy important for the SDGs. Okay. This is this is really important because, especially when we empower for example peoples or teachers, then that means we are actually transferring power to the very people that are affected for example by any disasters or that are affected by any humanitarian crisis. And when those people are actually contributing to say an open street map, then they are creating a free open shareable tool that can be updated over time, which is then a huge benefit for the my schools, my school today projects. Thank you. And Jason. Thanks a minute. So for me, just thinking about generally about geospatial mapping technology in education for me, for me at the heart of what it does, it places every single child in the center of the map.  And we can introduce so many other different topics into it, whether it's mathematics or creative writing, or it's computer science or it's gaming, we can start that it's always all these things have a geospatial element of it and embedding that into teaching. I think it's going to be vital to us going forward with things like sustainability. Thank you so much all of you for those comments. It was really amazing to have you join us today as panelists and for this important Q&A as well. So just to close out here is a list of all of the supporters collaborators and partners that are working on this project together. This is the launch of the open call to join the actions to map schools. Please reach out to us if you need more guidance or have activity ideas that could mobilize more communities I've seen a lot of exchanges are happening in the chat so I hope you've been sharing some of your emails as well as links. So our data set, you can find it on the SDGs today website all the information that you will need, and everything is now live. So the first phase of the call to action will continue until the UNGA, which is the United Nations General Assembly, which takes place in late September. We're hosting a variety of webinars and workshops throughout August and September so please stay tuned and follow SDGs today on Twitter as well as check their website to get all of the information on the additional webinars we will be doing as well. To discuss more about this and to really improve and talk about how we're doing the mapping. You can also see all the educational material on the SDGs today website if you are a teacher or educator. So thank you everyone for joining us today. We are so happy to have had you here to have this launch of my schools today. Please follow SDGs today on Twitter. Thank you to all of our supporters to our speakers to our panelists and to our honorable distinguished guests. I hope you have a great rest of your morning evening and afternoon wherever you are and we look forward to this incredible and important project. Thank you.