I'm Dan Rundy. I hold the Shire Chair here at CSIS. It's a real pleasure to have Anjaye Chibber, who's the Assistant Secretary General for and Assistant Administrator of UNDP and Director of UNDP's Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific. Mr. Chibber spent 25 years at the World Bank before coming to UNDP and has the primary responsibility for UNDP's work in Afghanistan. He's been asked by his country of India to come back to India and to go into public service. So he's been a multilateral public servant for much of his career and I think we're very fortunate to have him here today to give us his perspective on the development challenges but also frankly the development progress and the development opportunities in Afghanistan. I think far too often in Washington and there's a lot of good reasons to be concerned and there's you know that there are a lot of things to worry about in Afghanistan but there have been a lot of progress in Afghanistan in the last 10 years. If you look at the number of cell phones it went from 50,000 in the year 2000 to something like 15 million. You can now make payments electronically on cell phones in Afghanistan. There's been a flourishing of independent media in Afghanistan. Significant amount of infrastructure has been built, not complete but been built. If you look at the health metrics on any number of different metrics I believe polio I think has been eradicated in Afghanistan whereas before it couldn't happen if you look at the any number of different health metrics and then if you look at in my mind the most important is the number of girls in school. I think everyone knows that famously there were zero girls in school during the Taliban. There's something now depending on the day something around three million girls in school every day in Afghanistan. Now okay granted there are certain regions of the country where it's tougher for girls to go to school every day but that's not in every region of the country. There are over 20 provinces in Afghanistan and not every one of them makes it difficult for girls to go to school. This is a tremendous development accomplishment and it's going to change the society over time. We're going to talk about Mr. Chibber is going to share his perspective. We're very fortunate to have UNDP here. UNDP was in Afghanistan during the Taliban period. They are going to be in Afghanistan for the long haul. They are there in good times and in bad in countries and I have a lot of respect for what UNDP does. It's an incredible thought leader. On any number of different metrics whether it's the human development report that they put out or the Arab human development report which I think changed the world or they're growing inclusive markets work they're very important player in development and so we're very fortunate to have them here. After Mr. Chibber's remarks I'm going to ask my friend and colleague Andy Cuchins who runs a Russia and Eurasia program to talk about an initiative. This is in line with this discussion about the progress and the challenges, the progress and the opportunity in Afghanistan to talk about an idea that Andy and a colleague developed several years ago that's taken a lot of has gotten a lot of momentum around the concept of the new Silk Road and the role Afghanistan plays could play in such a new Silk Road. So without further ado I'm going to ask Mr. Chibber to have the floor. Thank you very much Dan, thank you for that very warm welcome and I see some old friends and some I know of course a lot of new friends. So it's wonderful to be here with you and as Dan has already announced that I'm leaving I guess that means I can speak even more freely. That's what we're hoping. But anyway first I think exactly what you said Dan which is you know the story is always about bombings and conflict and death and destruction and security and all that. But there are people living, there are things happening on the ground as well as we speak and part of what we tried to do I don't know if you all managed to get a copy of the development advocate but my colleagues who work I cover you know 39 countries so I'm not daily working on Afghanistan but my colleague Diodat Maharaj is here who's the division chief for our Afghanistan division and he and his colleagues have put this thing together called the development advocate which is to highlight you know some of the positive development stories that are happening sort of inch by inch if you like in Afghanistan under very difficult of course security conditions but there is things happening and Dan already gave a sense of some of those, the children going to schools, the you know the communications improvements etc. And I'll come back to this communication issue a little later because I think we could do a lot more in Afghanistan on that despite the fact that there's already been quite a lot of progress already. So the and as he said also you know the UN now has this sort of special mandate type of presence with political presence mandated by the security council in the form of UNAMA which is an integrated UN mission but that the UNDP is part of that but UNDP has been there well before UNAMA was there and probably will be there well after UNAMA has disbanded. There's no talk of disbanding UNAMA at this point so don't get me wrong because there's still a lot to be done but UNDP is basically there for the long haul and therefore focused in a sense on the long haul as well. I thought I would start with pointing out of course some of the challenges that we see up front and wherever possible I'll try and interject what UNDP is trying to do to help address some of them wherever UNDP is relevant I will try to do that. I think you know the one of the things that I think is very important is that in the first stage since born one a lot was done to build the sort of institutions in Kabul and after born two I think a lot more needs to be done to focus attention away from Kabul and focus much more at the sub-national level I think this is pretty well known. Now of course you have a situation where the transition you know with so many different types of transitions that are being described in Afghanistan one major transition that is underway in addition to the troop withdrawal is that the PRTs can you put up your hand if you know what a PRT is a lot of people know what PRTs are the provincial reconstruction teams and pretty much all the international donors that were there or members of the ISAF if you like the international force picked a province and put up a PRT there or select a province in which to try their hand at development in addition to trying to provide security and establish these PRTs and quite frankly while you may have some visible success with PRTs in the sense that they fixed irrigation system here and there put up health posts and you know various types of things that they were trying to do our assessment is that in the long run PRTs were actually quite detrimental to the buildup of genuine sub-national governance capacity in this country and not to mention the fact that now that they have to be handed over the issue is really who to hand it over to and if you hand it over to a sub-national authority that is not capable of managing these assets then how do you maintain them how do you service them and how do you go forward from there so that's a major challenge that in a way has been also partially left into the hands of the UN to say you take over these PRTs and you know when initially when this sort of request came to us we said we are not going to take over PRTs we are you have to hand them over to the Afghan government or whatever authority that exists in the provinces and we can try and help to see how best they can have the capacity to work with them or have the ability to be able to manage these assets going forward but it's it's not an it's not an easy challenge but I just leave that out there as a major issue that now sort of these these teams that have left behind have created the second I think big challenge is is is a fiscal challenge which is that you know the whole structure was so dependent on aid and the World Bank had already estimated that it was more than 100% of GDP but now if that that amount of assistance is starting to come down in a post 2014 period then you have this huge fiscal gap that is staring everybody in the face and you don't have really the capacity to raise revenues in a manner that would be nowhere able in in in in any reasonable manner to be able to fill this kind of fiscal gap so how do you then manage your budgetary expenditures how do you manage to run things in a much more cost effective manner than has been the case so far and yet ensure a modicum of services and and you know facilities that the government is to be able to provide I think this is a huge issue that sits out there as well and part of it is also that the absorption capacity of that assistance is very weak and therefore being able to move even existing amounts of aid through that weak capacity has been a big issue but let me come back to this one again I think the third issue that faces this transition and a challenge is that we had such a strong emphasis on security that at the neglect of justice and the rule of law so you have to think about how we can transition from this huge emphasis on security alone you know train the police train the army pay them whatever give you know provide them all the facilities etc but very little effort on rule of law and on justice and in some sense giving the Taliban an opportunity to provide the kind of swift justice if you like and gain some popularity from that as well so I mean it's it's interconnected with the security issues but you need to address these issues simply because the emphasis on security alone will not be enough I think the other thing that these three issues that I have just raised have probably been mentioned and discussed you know many times but I repeat them here as well I think the issue also that staring Afghanistan for the long term in the face is the youth bulge in Afghanistan I mean if you look at the population pyramid of Afghanistan you are going to have a very very large increase in an age group from 18 to 25 so if you don't have jobs you have no way of making a livelihood or a job opportunity for this huge huge youth bulge then you are opening yourself to a lot of discontent and local insecurity one factoid that is not well known is that Kabul the city of Kabul is the fastest urbanizing city in the world today so you know we think of Afghanistan as probably this huge spread out country but partly because there's been so much concentration of money in Afghanistan and efforts to develop Kabul and partly it's that there's a lot of still a lot of insecurity and lack of development outside of Kabul you have a very large number of people flocking in into Kabul and and also you have returning of refugees into the country so there's a lot of displaced people vulnerable people there's very minimal property rights or services that are being provided to these people and leaving them vulnerable of course to huge issues like diseases etc but also I think creating the opportunity for destabilization into the future so these are the big challenges as we see them and hope that we can play some role in them for example on subnational governance this is a very big area for our work in the country and some of it of course is highlighted in the development advocate as well the the work that we have been trying to do with the district the elected district assemblies but also at the subnational governance level that working with the municipalities to try and improve their finances so that they can and improve their capacity and their finances so that they can deliver better services to the people but the big debate that is now on in Afghanistan is how do you how do you devolve in some way how do you devolve financial power from Kabul how do you do you do you give a block of money to each of the provinces and say you decide what are your top priorities and how you would like to spend this money do you come up with provincial plans whereas you still have money going from say the ministry of education to its counterpart at the provincial level and then down into the local and district levels or or do you actually hand over blocks of money to particular provinces and let them develop their priorities and plans as they see fit and this is obviously a debate that is very important for any future you know mechanism for service delivery and it's very important for us as well because once the structure of how that devolution will take place is agreed upon then agencies like UNDP can of course you know design their assistance programs more effectively around those issues but at the moment subnational governance capacity is very weak it's very varied also across different parts of the country and that's why when you think of the Tokyo agreement in which you know there was a mutual compact of assistance that would be given to Afghanistan in return for which of course Afghanistan was required to improve transparency improve accountability etc the latest estimates are that the implementation rate for that assistance is only at about 40 to 50 percent and a lot of that has to do with the fact that the channels through which this money has to flow through remain very weak so if you want the Tokyo mutual accountability back to be effectively implemented implemented one of the key areas for that is the capacity at the subnational governments in addition of course we have been working very closely with the ministry of finance in making aid budgets work of course the ministry of finance is as keen as anybody to bring more and more of the aid money through the budget this is also an issue of tension between within the government because many of the line ministries are quite happy and quite cozy in the relationships they have with donor agencies don't want any interference from the ministry of finance consider that if it if the money has to have some flow through through the budget it will actually slow down the implementation rate even further but for the long-term future of the country you cannot have a situation where a very large part of your development budget does not go through the ministry of finance with the money that is coming through UNDP what we have I signed an agreement with the minister of finance minister Zakhilwal to try and bring most of the money that goes through UNDP through the budget but also have an arrangement where the monitoring the auditing of that money will still follow to some extent UNDP rules so that we can have accountability to the donor community but yet be able to have the ministry of finance be part of the mechanism of approval of these funds of these monies flows into various ministries the we are also of course working I mean the country clearly needs a major civil service overhaul you can't have a situation where in ministry after ministry every time a minister changes the minister then brings you know 40 50s 100 political appointees into the ministry as jobs for the for the boys and girls from wherever province that they are coming from and that cannot be the way that you can run an effective civil service in the future so a kind of civil service reform a major merit-based recruitment system is needed as you see in the development advocate this is being done piecemeal we have made an attempt at more I mean the headline is more merit-based recruitment right and you'd say is that a is that a headline to have that you have merit-based recruitment for the first time in a part of the government I mean that should be the normal practice in most governments but it becomes a headline in Afghanistan because it's so new and it's so against the current culture that has persisted in the in the country but step by step we we can see that we have that has to become the norm in most ministries or part of an overall overhaul of the way people are being hired and promoted as well I think the other big issue is that because of these parallel age systems you have a dual or a multiple salary structure in Afghanistan you have people being given top-up salaries to retain the best people but you ended up with a system where you have you know such numerous sort of salary systems operating at the same time and this again in a period when aid budgets will decline will mean one of two things either these people will walk off and do something else and some of them already have begun that kind of an exit or we have to find another way to be able to retain the best of these in a system in which salaries their top-up salaries will obviously have to be much lower than they have been so so far so but you could if not handle well you could have a sudden collapse of important capacity critical decision-making capacity in major ministries in the country and we have to find a way to address some of that I mentioned earlier the issue of shifting from a focus of security to a greater focus on the rule of law and justice and this is as you some of you may know we UNDP helps manage this law and order trust fund the Lotfa fund and this fund so far has focused a lot on the security side it's focused on you know the payment of police salaries their verification induction of police women into the police force their training etc but we do believe that there is an opportunity here to widen this trust fund into a genuine law and order trust fund rather than a trust fund that is basically focused on the police system itself there has been some efforts in this at things like you know community policing etc but it's it's quite small at the moment but I think that's the direction in which it needs to go and in that case I think the engagement with the Afghan government has to be broadened out of the Ministry of Interior alone and take into account a broader justice and rule of law program in the country I don't want to take up too much time Dan but let me mention that of course we are still heavily engaged on the immediate transition not just at the long term but and one of those issues of course that is very big on everybody's mind is the next election in the country it it would be in a way a defining election because it will determine whether I believe it will determine you know if it is carried out effectively it could end up producing the kind of legitimacy to the next government which is very badly needed if an engagement with the Taliban has to be carried out effectively by that I don't mean just fighting I mean just even the negotiations have that has to be very important part of it of course the effort of the Taliban will be to disrupt that election as much as possible the UNDP elect project has a very important project that is now working with the election commission to put an effective reasonably effective operational system in place so that you can have an election that is as I said has a modicum of acceptability credibility and legitimacy and but also our effort is as we have in many other countries in which we have worked on election issues is to try and leave behind an election system that is stronger than the one that was there before UNDP was engaged in it so it's a step step by step process for example we were have been involved in Indonesia's elections the first one right after the fall of President Soharto the UNDP's engagement was very heavy the second one less heavy and by the third one we were almost out of that business so it will take probably longer in Afghanistan but anyway our effort is very much to work on that side and we are UNDP provides the technical support the political affairs department of the UN DPA works on the political side together with Unama and we hope that we have at least in place a better system that we can leave behind for the future one of the big issues of course for us is women's rights and women's participation in this election which is obviously going to be a huge issue most of the women's groups feel that their rights will be set back and their ability to participate in the electoral systems etc like we saw in bits of Pakistan recently would also be a huge issue as well two more things I if I could mention one is that on the agriculture side this is going to be very important I mean if you want to create jobs and income gains and poverty reduction I think the I mean a lot has to be done in other areas but certainly agriculture has to be a very very critical part of that here again we we believe that you know there are good programs in place but there's too much effort on supply on kind of supply of inputs to the agriculture sector you know whether it's irrigation or fertilizer or seeds it's a little bit piecemeal and not enough has been done to look at the entire value chain as it were in different agriculture products in food processing capacities so I think some of that shift in that direction is something that we are we are suggesting as well now for the issue of I mentioned the issue of you know the fiscal gap and aid and I mean there's an effort to put in a lot of money now which cannot be easily absorbed as we are seeing with the 40 50 percent implementation rate and the risk that after 2014 there'll be very little money so you say if you can't increase the capacity so quickly and yet you will need money later then one answer that we have is to set up a trust fund or you know in addition to the existing trust funds that the World Bank has and ADB has is to think of setting up a trust fund that will be able to sort of a capacity building trust fund that will be able to keep the funding now in place and be able to disperse it in a way that will increase the capacity which will also improve the implementation rate in the future so this is something that we are discussing at the moment with donors and with the government of Afghanistan you know and it's a way to negotiate our way through this transition the aid transition so to speak for the future as well to have a kind of a service delivery trust fund a capacity building trust fund that will help in building the capacities and also be able to over a period of time bring more and more of the monies on on budget as well the last issue I want to mention and in a way this is segue to to you as well is the whole issue of regional cooperation that we believe is very very critical for a variety of reasons one is it's critical also for you know the ability of a post 2015 political situation to sustain itself and it's very critical also for the kind of employment generation economic regeneration that Afghanistan needs I do believe that the mining issue has been overplayed a bit I mean this is going to take a while for the mining industry to develop in Afghanistan and to be able to bring things in and out of Afghanistan in a cost effective manner but that doesn't mean that there's a lot of other trade that cannot be encouraged particularly on agriculture and and of course the new election in Pakistan is actually in my mind a very hopeful and a very positive development because you have now the possibility of a peace agreement between India and Pakistan and so the traditional markets for Afghanistan which were always south in a way the large markets for Afghanistan those could be easily reopened and could change very much the economic calculus of agriculture production in the country quite significantly but that also means that the regional cooperation regional integration with countries to the north of Pakistan is also of course very very important and we had helped UNDP had helped establish a unit in the ministry of foreign affairs focused to build their capacity because so far regional cooperation in Pakistan was talked about by everybody else except you know but there was no capacity in Afghanistan to assess what is their interest what are their priorities etc so we started working on that but I think this will be important for any post 2014 transition as well and may I stop here Dan thank you so much thank you very much Ajay I'm going to ask my friend and colleague Andy Cutchins to talk about the New Silk Road within the context of what we just heard Dan thank you very much for this opportunity to talk about the New Silk Road and it's a special honor to share the other podium with Ajay Chabir the UNDP this is a topic I used to talk about quite a bit two or three years ago and I'm a little bit less practiced right now but I had a couple of caveats I always had to make before I would speak about it one you know I'm not an expert on Afghanistan I'm a trained sovietologist I would joke what are you doing with that working in Afghanistan Andy I would say well you know I just found working with the Russians so difficult I thought I'd do something easier fix Afghanistan secondly I'm really not I'm not an expert on on development at all and so with those caveats let me explain a little bit kind of how I how I came came to this how we our team here and with some others came came to these ideas because in some ways we were the intellectual godfathers for what has taken on a policy life of its own and it's it's not an experience that one actually has that often in think tanks when this this kind of happens and I'm kind of proud about this one but it was very serendipitous like because as I said given my given my background in 2007 shortly after I came to CSIS colleague of mine I don't know whether you've got this handout this one this one page Steve Benson he was a retired naval logistician came to my office I didn't know who was and like you know what the hell is he bringing me this for what what is this and so Steve explained what it was and basically this was a 1999 it was a satellite shot of telecommunications taking a place across the globe and you can see here in the northern hemisphere where it's black that means there's a lot going on now this can reflect economic activity can reflect construction activity can reflect military activity it reflects what we sort of just called it was human human activity and this is the northern corridor of modern modern activity here in the northern hemisphere now if you'll notice there's one spot where it's very very lightly colored it's very disconnected from the rest well that happens to be in the area of central asian afghanistan probably the epicenter would be on the the tajik the tajik afghan afghan border and this was a very powerful graphic to me and I'll tell you why because if even then we knew in 2007 if we taken another snapshot we would see quite a bit more black dots in what we called then the modern activity gap and this was symbolic of a very large phenomenon taking place that we've called the reconnection of eurasia and it's primarily economically driven and you got to remember that during the cold war your largest powers on the eurasian continent to a great extent were not really engaged in a lot of trade and transit activity that being the soviet union that being the people's republic of china and even and even india things began to change substantially of course when the chinese began to reform in the late 1970s the soviet union collapses in 1991 the borders come down middle 1990s india begins to reform and suddenly the economic forces in drivers from these countries are exerting powerful forces and they're looking to connect with europe they're looking to connect with each other looking to connect with the greater middle east etc and that's what's driving i think a lot of what is this of this reconnection in of eurasia and transcontinental trade is growing dramatically now most of it is ship by sea but increasingly more of it was being done by done by land and the the interests of large states were intersecting at this at this gap now the gap states themselves those that were sort of somewhat disconnected and they suffered from a number of pathologies relatively relative poverty corruption poor governance growing role of islam increasing role of radical islamic groups nearby proliferation of nuclear states ethnic conflict terrorist activities etc etc a lot of the pathologies you associate with instability and it comes essentially from the disconnectedness so this reconnection we saw is a is a major strategic change that was taking place that was frankly a much larger than afghanistan we didn't think of it in terms of at the time of afghanistan and we thought of a project we were going to call visualizing eurasia which was essentially to map out how this change was taking place now the interests of the various players were shifting and changing as a result that kind of language for wall didn't really go anywhere suddenly in night in 2009 my colleague here at csis arnaud de borgrove who runs the transnational threat program he had dinner with general patrice in january of 2009 just after general patrice had returned from central asia and was starting to develop the agreements that would lead to the establishment of new transit quarters for the supply of non-lethal goods via commercial routes to support our troops in afghanistan now i didn't know jack about logistics at the time either i quickly found out that about close to 90 percent of what supports our troops in afghanistan or anywhere else are non-lethal goods and they're typically uh transited by by uh by commercial carriers and they were looking to open up at new routes that went through central asia that went through the caspian and the hmm that's interesting that's an interesting proposition and the reason they were doing this because of the expectation of the much larger military footprint we would have increased demand for for those goods plus you wanted to have we were at the time entirely dependent upon one what the military calls ground lock of communication from the port of carachi uh through across the afghan pak Pakistani border at the torquem and shaman gates all the material all the non-lethal material was going going that way and uh the demand was going to increase and plus you wanted a more competitive situation so you weren't over leveraged by pakistani trucking industry port operators etc that's what uh that's what generated this and when this project came to us i said wow this in this gives us a hook into what you see is this uh this reconnection of uh of of eurasia so to so to speak and so as we began to study the uh the issue what we found out of quite uh counterintuitively is that the biggest problem to getting things in and out of in and out of afghanistan a logistical challenge that general patrice i think described as trying to supply almost the only thing more difficult of the planet would be trying to supply Antarctica uh it was not the lack of physical infrastructure although that was a problem railroads roads etc it was also not the the security problems although that was a problem but it was not the main problem the biggest problem in getting things in and out of afghanistan on a commercial basis was uh what i've described as basically borders acting as toll booths bureaucratic institutional barriers corruption uh which would make it very unpredictable uh both the time that a good would get from a to b as well as the cost of good getting to a and b that was also a rather counter a counter intuitive um finding and it led us to start thinking about uh well when we were working on this in the fall of 2009 there was the big debate about afghanistan policy going on in washington and i was amazed at what seemed how narrow the debate was because it really boiled down to counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism af pack versus pack af um you know uh you uh mr chipper said uh you know there was you're saying there was so much emphasis emphasis on security uh that there wasn't that much thinking about you know justice and governance issues and there was even less thinking about uh at least in this town about economic strategies for recovery for the long term in what passed for economic strategies were really just nice wish list there was no sense of prioritization implementation et cetera that came that came with them and that was just kind of amazing to me i mean you know again like i don't know anything about uh about about sort of development and in conflict and post-conflict situations but you know if you're not thinking about the longer term prosperity of this of this place then you know whatever gains are made on the on security are likely going to be lost and secondly if you're thinking about you know afghanistan and are in a quite a narrow geographical fashion uh not really thinking about the other four states that uh covers borders not not only them but also the other major states in the region besides besides pakistan you're also i think missing missing the boat and so the debate in this in this country at that time it kind of boiled down to to the extent that there was a debate about economic development it was sort of minerals or agriculture okay well look you know it's not going to be a or b it's going to be both both a and b but if you're not thinking about actually how these goods are getting to markets then they don't have value and so what's what's the point of it all and this is where we thought that this focus on trade and transit as a strategic enabler for all economic development not only within afghanistan but also with its with its regional partners was essential you had to have a regional economic cooperation plan because that would help for the the partners to have some kind of economic thus and thus political buy-in to greater stability and prosperity within afghanistan that was the idea at the at the time the people that were thinking about this uh in the government ironically were mostly located in do d and in sent com and we kind of we kind of hooked up and we produced this report in may in may of 2010 called with the modest title of the key to success in afghanistan a modern silk road strategy um you know ignorance is bliss so uh but it was endorsed by general patreus it was endorsed by uh by president carsi uh it plugged into you know something that the afghans afghans have been continuously talking about since their first afghan national development strategy back in back in 2000 2005 um and uh it it was this concept which really was the leading uh idea that president cars i presented in july 2010 at the the cobble conference the so-called heart of asia is heart of asia speech it's really basically about about this now we thought this would be attractive the u.s leadership because you know the biggest challenge it's a political challenge it's not so much you know the investment in the infrastructure although that's important and and that has to be dealt with um but it's political leadership which is going to try to bring together these various interests to endorse a common plan um and that's been very very hard to come by but we thought that could be something that would be attractive to the united states we thought it could be attractive to uh to our european allies who are even more rapidly becoming tired of the uh of the security engagement at afghanistan and ultimately it is the private sector which is going to drive this process um but the uh but the need for the articulation of the idea it had to come from the from the president the president of the united states that's what this whole report was about we even drew up a national security memorandum from the president about what need to be done when the president says something then you get uh you're more likely to have bureaucracies working in tandem together because this is the ultimate whole of government challenge and public private partnership as well all right well let me just conclude by saying what's what's happened well the good news is that the state department took leadership and this was evidenced by hillary clinton's speech in chennai india in july of 2011 and there have been many very talented dedicated bright really hardworking people that have been working their tails off for the past nearly two years to try to make this happen but there are a lot of problems as one would expect with a big challenge like this and one of it is the first piece is that you know the president our president has not said anything about it and i think that's a really that's really unfortunate because that that sends a message not only to our our bureaucracy in our government here but to the government in the region as well secondly most of the attention that the president has gotten as far as december 2010 speech about the withdrawal in 20 2014 and that uh uh has created the impression that basically the united states is heading for the exits um thirdly even when secretary clinton gave the speech it was only as a vision it's not a strategy it's not a plan now i understand there there's a real political sensitivities and that you can't have the strategy or a plan that emerges from the us of a it's got to be an afghan strategy that has the buy-in and endorsement of its regional regional partners but again when we call it a vision it doesn't help i think the political prospects here fourthly you know um i mean there is just an international miasma of groupings and institutes institutions and endeavors uh in this sort of new silk road uh a vision there's the six plans of the istanbul process there's the 25 deli deli investment summit efforts there's the 17 reka the regional economic cooperation council of afghanistan uh projects and policy priorities there's the 12 karat the central asian uh regional economic council projects etc there's a fair amount going on but it's not prioritized it's not it's not coordinated and so i think the sum is far less or the whole is much less than the sum of its parts so just my last statement why should president obama get his teeth into this now well i still think it is the right thing to do for afghanistan and to get afghanistan right but so far that argument doesn't seem to be enough so let me offer another one i think we need to think about the incorporation of the new silk road vision strategy plan or whatever in tandem with the so-called pivot to asia okay if the pivot to asia let's face it may not be politically correct to say so but it's basically about the management of the rise of china um but in typical american fashion we're thinking about asia is simply east asia from northeast asia to southeast asia only to china's west well i can tell you when china thinks about asia they think about asia very differently and they think about what's north and they think about what's west and they think about what's what's southwest let me just give you one quote to leave you with from an article in october of this year by one of china's leading geostatic thinkers wong gz at pecking university he says the title is marching westwards the rebalancing of china's geo strategy quote the obama administration has recently proposed a rebalancing strategy centered around the idea of a return to asia following changes in the global economic and political structure russia india and the e you and other major global players have also adjusted their geo strategies this new round of geopolitical and geo economic competition between the great powers is becoming increasingly intense personally the focus of u.s strategy is shifting eastwards while the e you india russia and other countries are beginning to look eastwards located at the center of the asia-pacific region china should not limit its sites to its own coast and borders or to traditional competitors and partners but should make strategic plans to look westwards and march westwards now china is going to be the biggest already is and will continue to be the biggest economic player in central asia uh and af and afghanistan and we need to think more carefully in a strategic way about how we work together uh with the chinese in this capacity and not only the chinese but indians pakistanis and other regional partners as well and we shouldn't be essentially throwing away the baby with the bathwater uh as we make our withdrawal from of our military forces from afghanistan 2014 thanks thank you andy we've got time for a handful of questions we're going to do this world bank style so i'm going to ask people to raise their hand and i'm going to capture a handful of questions the gentleman up here up front and we're going to do this we're going to take three three questions so this gentleman here this gentleman the uniform gentleman here and then let's get some uh anybody else other other hands please anyone else i'm doing to make sure there's uh the uh well i'm something for a little gender balance here we got you okay and those women back there okay so these are going to be the three questions go ahead sir uh yes my name is uh ij saying uh former world bank staff member but also a professor at the national war college so i know a lot about prt's many of my students being there i enjoyed very much uh what mr j chipper had to say uh i got hackles down my neck when i heard uh what mr hutchins has to say there's nothing wrong with the silk road what is certainly wrong with the idea that the us should manage all this if you go to the region you'll find that the regional partners have not even worked on sark if you remember sark has been there for a long long time and they're not going to work as you correctly state until they you know take care of their own accords and i don't see peace coming because if the northern alliance people are left out there might be another 20 years of war in afghanistan but if you went and talked to the indians or the pakistanis or even the afghanistanis the last thing they want is the us planning the silk road okay gentlemen over here and i'm gonna ask both my colleagues to respond to go ahead sir thank you very much and return from the uk mr chipper thank you very much for your your presentation and points i just wonder whether um there is a discerning aim within the un to secure strategic persistence across all of the various donor community whilst we go through this the security transition and how in real terms you see afghanistan in let's say 2025 because money has been sustained and the fiscal gap has been avoided hi my name is carly i'm from global witness um mr chipper you mentioned that the mining issue is a bit overplayed i was wondering if you could comment on that a little bit more andy why don't i start with you so okay good question or or comment um the uh i mean i would be the first to say that uh the planning of the silk road uh cannot be a us led endeavor um but i also don't think that uh the silk road is going to uh and i feel very strongly about this recreate itself uh as quickly or as effectively without the united states involvement um again because the the biggest problem being uh in facilitating connectivity being uh related to the nature of most of the governments that uh constitute the silk road that they're basically patrimonial regimes that read that uh uh are rely on patronage politics uh and the funds uh that are collected and distributed in border regions um you know are are more the first priority is maintenance of regime stability i think rather than rather than you know broader national interest and uh um and prosperity of of people and uh without um more focus being brought on that and i think it's something that the united states can do reasonably well and the other problem being that the region suffers from enormous distrust amongst each other and historical rivalries uh that perhaps the united states could have some value uh in the role of kind of an honest broker now that's a great stretch and that's probably raising even more hackles on your neck but uh raise hackles on the neck i don't know but um uh you know like i said it's i think it's i think it's kind of it's kind of a political catch catch 22 um you know i don't i don't think it happens as effectively as quickly as uh as you want without uh some kind of significant uh u.s leadership leadership role but it has to be you know a very muted leadership role and one which is done in concert uh and really led uh at least the context of the uh of afghanistan from the afghan afghan government itself okay ajay let me i'm hoping you can comment on all three of the uh both questions and comments if you would please okay thank you i'll try to be quick uh thank you for those questions i mean i i think yeah you i mean the best times in afghanistan have been when it has been the as president kaza i said the roundabout uh in the region i mean if you go back to very long history uh and if any of you saw that exhibition of afghan uh treasure that was saved during the taliban that probably came through washington i saw it in new york um you know you can see that it was the crossroads of of china india and the near east uh in the past so if you can get recreate that that's probably important i mean perhaps the new the word new silk road and or the u.s involvement i don't know which one may have raised some issues but the idea itself is is not bad and i think uh now with the possibility of the pakistan uh you know part of that sark arrangement opening up then of course i do think that regional cooperation will be now the downside of it is exactly what ajay says that if there is if there is a split in the northern alliance um you know bifur kate so to speak then of course you know it's uh all up in the air the uh issue on the long term 2025 of course you know it's a you want a scenario a hopeful scenario in which uh the progress that dan described in the beginning so far can be preserved and the preservation of that will require you know establishment of national systems you know as we talk about you know a nationally owned development strategy uh to which the international community in various forms uh will you know support rather than a strategy that is determined by each each donor or each group of donors as they see their interests and uh it's not going to be easy of course in afghanistan to have that we we all are well aware of that but our effort is very much the un effort is to say what would be the building blocks of budgetary systems of uh you know trust fund arrangements of um capacity that would be needed not just in Kabul to build a national plan but at the state and local levels to be able to implement that easily as well and uh it's not going to be an easy process but that's i think the kind of arrangement that we need at least for the future and uh one thing i didn't mention that while of course we are very happy that there have been uh 14 14 million people with cell phones and all that and you know i met last time i was there in january i met with the information minister um and uh raised with him the possibility that what we've seen in other countries like bangladesh is how do you digitally connect the different provincial cap headquarters the district headquarters to each other and to Kabul because these days as you know a lot of services can be provided digitally and given the terrain of afghanistan given the logistics difficulties of moving things around afghanistan to my mind i mean that that is a use of technology that we have not seen so far so he he has informed me that they are now working on the fiber optic cable and if if that arc is completed then they will be able to play with that that is a platform from which medical services educational services basic you know training recordation etc can be done now we've just helped the government of bangladesh finish all this in bangladesh so it is possible and we are arranging a visit from afghanistan to bangladesh so that they can see the terrain is very different i understand but the idea is an interesting one and i think quite useful for afghanistan for the future i'm not down on mining i think the potential is huge it's just that um you know it's going to take a lot of time and effort to get to a point where you can actually see some results from it and for the immediate and i agree also that you need to work on all fronts um in fact one of the other ideas i've pushed in afghanistan is a kind of cash for work program which is for this period of transition when investment people will still be holding back not being uncertain of the political climate then um perhaps uh and with this youth bulge numbers that i talked about perhaps some you know cash for work programs for maintenance of roads for reforestation for you know helping with critical needs in the country could be a way to to have people show up daily to get a wage and you want to see them and you want to check them out because otherwise they're with the other side you know so it's an idea which we have also discussed a little bit it hasn't got as much traction from this government as i would like but uh because they say we want genuine private sector uh employment but i tell them that you want to get the private sector employment but till you get there what about all these unemployed people and what do you do with them and uh you know so that's another idea anyway thank you i think i think our time has ended please join me in thanking uh aje and andrew thank you


Hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon. My name is Abhijeet Singh and I'm director of AT&T Cloud Platform. Here I have my colleague from Ericsson who work with me here and they're going to introduce themselves. Shraddha Navina, please go ahead. Hi, I'm Sharath Rao. I'm a solution architect in the Ericsson Cloud Platform team currently working as a network cloud architect in AT&T, designing the AT&T network cloud. Hey, hi. My name is Abhijeet Shahgavendra. I'm a solutions architect in Ericsson working with AT&T for designing network cloud as a cloud solutions architect. Okay, so today we are going to talk about continuous integration and continuous deployment as a service for the agenda. We'll explain why there is a need of CICD as a service, the continuous integration, continuous deployment and service. What are the typical requirements as a telco we have for CICD? Then we will explain we evaluated the various continuous integration process flows. We are going to explain that process first to you. Same way we are going to do with the continuous deployment process flows. Then, of course, there are many softwares and open source softwares available in the market and some commercial softwares as well. And how do we make choices? Choices of a good CICD as a service. We'll explain some implementation approaches and then in the end we will conclude with the various topics we talked about and we'll explain that some best practices, some choices you should make when picking a good set of software for your CICD as a service. I mean, I think that's the next slide. Okay, so like I said, I work with AT&T and as a telco we have to meet the promise. We have to meet the promise for 5C software upgrade where we are going to update, upgrade all 5C network functions as truly software based upgrades. Now, if you look into a typical telco network functions ecosystem, we have suppliers, the OEMs, providing many of the network functions. And we have like so in 5C with 3GPP standard, we have like set of network functions, each coming from different suppliers. Now again, all this network functions are built on cloud network principles and we hope so. But even if it's built on the cloud network, the integration, the management of the software is a very huge task to talk about the version management, which is a typical day-zero activity, the integration with the continuous integration pipelines. Then we talk about the deployment of those applications. Box fixes, troubleshooting, and then change management. And then day two when we go and our operators has to operate those software that has to manage, deploy, upgrade, all those activities. And that's where a good CICD, resilient CICD, secure CICD built on a good cloud network principle, has to be there to build a very good role because that's the foundation. If you don't build a good CICD as a server, this whole big ecosystem will be very difficult to manage. We're not going to move to the next slide. So again, I'm going to dive into the typical requirements of cloud-native CICD. And now we all are, most of us, I believe, are using Kubernetes based on the stricter. And that's where I think the CICD has to be built, the CICD system itself has to be built with the cloud-native principles. And security for all, for the self-help is very important. And we must protect our customers. And that's where working with Kubernetes, working with various C and CF communities, and the framework which we already have, things like role-based access, control, things like container security policies, things like network policies. We must integrate the CICD system with the same set of policies to provide a secure infrastructure. And again, like I mentioned, the day zero, day one, and day two, everything should look like to have a truly developed approach of the linear central functions. And that's where the native support of GitHub's model that can be tied to each pipeline and work flows with further support for itemized rollback and reviews and rollback mechanism is a must and is required. In addition, there must be capabilities to perform canary deployments with a given set of posts and a given set of reasons. And last but not the least, we build networks. And with networks, the solution must be resilient, must have high availability. And again, like the CICD infrastructure itself, it has to be HAA, it has to be DO deployed in multiple locations. There should be proper integration between those systems. So in that network to protect our infrastructure from a disaster kind of scenarios. So with that, Avinash, and why don't you take us away to the next section and explain the CI processes and CD processes and share of different approaches. Thank you. Avinash, take it away. You are new, Avinash. Thank you. So thank you, Abhijeet. So as Abhijeet was explaining about the need and the technical requirements, let's dive into some of the typical processes that a CICD environment would need for such a solution. So here we are looking at from the left side. So you have a service provider admin who is actually working to create a manifest of what artifacts would be required per vendor. So this could as well be a vendor admin. So in our typical AT&T or a service provider environment, there would always be a service provider admin who would actually create a manifest on behalf of the vendors. As I said, this could as well be the vendor admin who would be automatically pushing the manifest from their existing CI CD systems or their software delivery units into the CI as a service DevOps pipeline. So what this would do is this would prepare the repositories. So you have the content repository and you have the manifest repository that would configure it for each vendor with appropriate paths, appropriate user access, everything. And then once the paths and the repository is set up, these repositories will be further set up to actually auto-fetch the content that was just approved for pulling. So this auto-pull is very much important.  So what technically this mechanism is achieving is once the manifest is ready on what to pull, this central system would automatically pull in the content that is specified for each vendor and then combine them for a particular release catalog which we call a V1Alpha. Now when we go into the next slide, so this is a part two of the vendor CI and onboarding. So we carry on from where we left off from the previous slide. So here on the left side you again have the repositories which with the content as termed as V1Alpha. So the CI as a service would then have built in service provider preset jobs like security scans. As Abhijit was mentioning, security is a very important detail here. So everything that is coming from the vendor or in-house produced has to go through an industry specified and auditable security scans. So this includes image scans, code scans, and manifest scans. So once the scan is complete and then if there are any manifest changes, so if you actually see inside the inside detail inside the git path, you would see the Helmcharts has various tiers of changes. So a Helmchart for a particular service might have some global values. Some may have over readable site values. Some even within the site every app may behave differently from each region on each site. So all these changes could be applied at this point in time and a vendor admin who is responsible per vendor software could peer review it and then trigger once the peer review is complete, the trigger would go into the CI as a service DevOps pipeline that would trigger the package of the incoming software into v2, v1, beta. So you actually see, so this repository now contains both the v1 alpha and then the v1 beta, which is the latest of the software. Now going further, so once the initial scans and the peer review is complete, you would then move the software into test QA and further. So where we left off again from the left side. So now you have v1 alpha, v1 beta. What happens here is the CI, in all technicality, the CI as a service is complete. The CD as a service would pick up. This is what Abhijit said about the canary deployments. So it is aware of various regions that is preset for it or it could be defined dynamically. So here I am showing two different regions where there is a region where there is a dev testing done. So there is a certain set of preset test cases that needs to be run per software that could be run here. Once that is done, then the QA testing. So this QA testing usually involves end-to-end testing. And then once the end-to-end testing is done, it creates a GA tag on the same release. So that means given there are multiple feedback loops that have happened. So I am showing a best-case scenario. That is why there is always a v1 alpha, v1 beta, and v1 GA. So in reality, it might not be like this. So it would be v1 alpha, v10 beta, or v52 GA because there would have been several revisions of that. And then eventually once the GA tag is created, the GA tag release is moved to your production. So if you have noticed at the bottom, all of our previous slides, we were working in the pre-production environment at the bottom. Now once you go to the, once you complete the software test and QA, you eventually want to move the GA tag release into production. So the same content that has now been approved, dev tested, QA tested will move into the content repositories in production. Now once it is in production, it is actually now ready to actually be deployed in the production regions. Now I would hand it over to Sharath, who can speak on how the production deployment would work and eventually take further into the implementation approaches as well. Hey, Sharath. Thanks, Savinash. So now that Savinash mentioned, we got a GA tag on a particular piece of software. This implies that it has been appropriately QA tested and we are confident that this can be deployed into production. Remember, we don't want to push anything into production unless and until it has been completely tested. So once we get this GA tag, we can now start the continuous deployment as a service space of the DevOps pipeline. Here, what we can do is we can apply different configs that are required for different production sites. Not all production sites are equal. So what we'll do is that, for example, in East Coast, we may want it to reach out to the application to reach out to certain things on the East Coast itself in order to minimize latency. If the application has to be deployed on the West Coast, then we'll reach out to other applications that are deployed on the West Coast itself. So do some kind of geo-redundancy as well and as well as ensuring that different deployments can actually have different configurations when we are in the production zones. Any cloud native deployment can be deployed in not only just local internal production zones but also in public cloud. So the deployment pipeline should be capable of doing deployment into various different clouds and not be tied into a single cloud. Let us now look at two different implementation approaches that we are considering in order to satisfy these requirements and the requirements that Aviget initially set for. If you look at the first approach, here the vendor again still has a control because he has the best knowledge in order to figure out how his application has to be deployed in. So you will have a vendor admin, as you can see on the bottom left of the screen. Vendor admin creates appropriate pipelines using Spinnaker, which is one of the tools that we have selected for this approach. He can fetch all the required data based on the tag. It can be a V1 GA tag or a V52 GA tag as Avinash was mentioning and pull it up and create the appropriate pipeline along with the service provider. Airship is the AT&T or OpenStacks cloud building platform which builds the infrastructure as a service. And in this approach, we are using that to actually create to actually deploy the software workload in conjunction with the Argo CD. And here the Argo CD will help us to actually make those small conflict changes that I talked about before for different regions, be it Canary or be it region on the east or be it a region on the west. So that is one approach for doing the continuous deployment. We'll now move into the second approach where the concept is similar, but we are using a different tool. Here also you have a vendor admin who actually builds the pipeline to deploy his or her, their application. Then we have one main difference here is the concept of the deploy part. The deploy part is a self-contained part that has got all the details required for deploying that particular application. So the first part is that the vendor would actually help build the pipeline and then utilizing the deploy part will deploy his workload on appropriate regions, either let it be private cloud or the public cloud regions. Obviously, we are still using airship as one of the tools, driving tools to build the infrastructure and to push in any Kubernetes clusters that are required. These are the two different implementation approaches that we are looking at as part of the continuous deployment of service. Avinash, you are on mute again. Sorry. So thank you, Sharath Abhijit. So in conclusion, CICD as a service in a multi-vendor environment is absolutely a must as Abhijit initially elicited. You have multiple vendors. Each vendor has their own software delivery process. We don't want to impede that. So they are best at what they are doing from their own shops, so to better and smoothly integrate their software to build a bigger service. Sharath, can you take the rest of the conclusion? Sure. Sorry. As Avinash was saying, these are the periods of virtual summit and working from home during the pandemic, but I will continue. So once different software vendors know what is best on their deployment strategy, as well as the integration strategy, and it's very important to understand that we need to push open source tooling so that all the vendors have access to the same set of open source tooling so that they can adopt it and then provide it back, not only to the community, but also share best practices with us so that we can push it as a best practices downstream to other vendors as well. Then thirdly is that there are other CICD tools. There are plethora of CICD tools that are available, but the concept of whatever we are talking about will still remain the same. So we are setting up the framework. You can plug in different tools, but the concept of our framework will still remain the same. Avinash. Thank you, Sharath. Abhijeet, any, yeah, go ahead. Just to conclude, I think as I mentioned in my opening remarks that the CICD is the foundational and as any cloud native application's deployment, if we have the responsibility, we must invest a time and careful selections of those tools, but the amount thing is that, number one, I think any tools we choose, it has to be built with the cloud native. We can't compromise on security and then the resilience. You have the tool at the same time when you work on the complex ecosystem, complex vendor OEM ecosystem, there is a lot of cognitive desires, which is masked to operate. So the tools which is there with the cloud native and tools, which is providing security as a source, they're just not compromised. But they're very resilient, use a very well-architected service-oriented architecture tools on this building with tools that's out. And last, but not the least, provide flexibility. We call it a structural flexibility, where yes, there are rules, but at the same time, there's a flexibility which allows different functions to evolve, to do the software revolutions of queries and things like that. So thank you, everyone, for your time today, and we are open for Q&A. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Abhijit. Thank you, Shahad. Thank you. Appreciate it.


Aloha, I'm Kirsten Baumgart Turner and this is Sustainable Hawai'i. We air live every Tuesday at noon until 12.30 and thinktechhawaii.com and also on Oceanic Channel 16. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature's World Conservation Congress culminated at the Honolulu Convention Center on Saturday with the presentation of the Hawai'i commitments. This document, which sets the global conservation agenda for the next four years, is titled Navigating Island Earth. This title and many other references to canoe sailing and navigation throughout the proceedings of the Congress reflect the impact our Native Hawaiian community and culture had on the Congress participants and perhaps none more so than Ninoa Thompson and the Polynesian Voyaging Society. My guest today is the director of the PBS Learning Center, which is the Education Resource Center for the Polynesian Voyaging Society and the Malama Honua Worldwide Voyage. Mickey Tomita was born and raised on Maui, graduated from Baldwin High School, then completed a BSE in Biosystems Engineering at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa and went on to get a PhD in education at Stanford University. Mickey is also a Voyaging Crew Member of Hokulea and Hikianalia. Thank you for joining us, Mickey. Thank you for having me. Thank you so much. We're so delighted and we're so absolutely thrilled with the impression that Hawai'i was able to give at the World Conservation Congress, particularly through the works of the PBS Polynesian Voyaging Society. Tell us about it. You know, it was such an amazing opportunity, this being the first World Conservation Congress hosted ever by the United States, and of course, Hawai'i being the natural fit for it, and Nainoa's role along with the other voyaging leadership and really helping people to understand that through a perspective that's grounded in traditional knowledge and traditional wisdom, wayfinding and navigation, can we see beyond the current horizon and begin to pull a more sustainable future out of the sea that we see in front of us? It was just a really wonderful opportunity to show people that perspective. And I understand that Nainoa got to speak there, and there were some pretty cool opportunities to showcase all that Hawai'i represents through PBS. Yeah, definitely. So Nainoa himself spoke on a number of panels and was included in a number of very high-level conversations. He also engaged with students from Malama Hono Public Charter School and other schools that were there presenting as part of the public presentations and displays. We had many voyaging crew members and education support team members that gave presentations and demonstrations of all the things that the voyage has inspired. And many of Nainoa's friends that are also ocean elders, part of the organization that he's in with Sylvia Earle and with John Makoto, they were in large presence throughout many of the proceedings along with Pacific leadership. Well, I think we ought to inform our viewers all about PBS and we have a wonderful video that you folks have on your website. Let's look at that. Sure, yeah. What is the worldwide voyage? Thank you. 7,000 years ago, the first really oceanic people came out of China and came out of Taiwan. Then you get to Polynesia, this oceanic country bounded by Hawai'i in the north and New Zealand in the southwest and Rapa Nui in the east. 10-minute square miles bigger than Russia. It was discovered by these extraordinary people. They were really the astronauts of our ancestors. They were the greatest explorers on the face of the earth. Unated by modern instruments, these extraordinary explorers discovered and settled every livable landmass in the Pacific, relying solely on a complex understanding of the stars, the winds, the waves, and other cues from nature. Guided by this traditional wisdom and perspective, Hawaiians mastered the science of living sustainably on islands. Western expansion, however, brought not only new ways of seafaring but a shift in perspective on how to interact with the natural environment. Eventually, traditional practices and world views were nearly forgotten. But a group of determined individuals got together in the 1970s to resurrect indigenous wisdom by building a traditional canoe and sailing it in the way of the ancestors. Hokulea's first voyage to Tahiti reawakened a cultural pride, identity, and an intimate connection to place. In a generation, Hokulea has sailed over 140,000 nautical miles to reunite the world's largest oceanic nation. Today, Hokulea voyages around the planet with a message of Malama Honua, or caring for island earth, with a firm belief that blending traditional and modern technologies will help us find our way to a healthier future. Hokulea, to us to go around the world, has this enormous potential to go to 40, 50 countries on the planet to be with the great navigators on earth. I'm not talking about those on canoes. I'm talking about those who are doing things to give kindness and compassion to the earth and those on the dead water. Those navigators. We're not going to change the world, but we're going to go and build a network of people around the earth who are going to change it. And our job is to help them be successful. So the Malama Honua is really about building a network. Tell me how you're doing that. So the intention of this worldwide voyage is to really build on the legacy of the first 40 years of Polynesian voyaging, starting with Hokulea's birthplace in Kualoa, taking Hokulea and that story of hope around the world as a source of inspiration, but also as a way to gather up stories from around the rest of the world of people doing work to steward their land, their ocean, and their people. And so we have with us some images that represent our voyage map and things like that that we can really talk about. So this is Kualoa, Hokulea's birthplace, where we really think about our origins and how we anchor to our home and take that story with us of Hokulea's story of hope around the world to all of these different countries. And we have learned so many lessons from all the Earth's ocean and the ocean people that we have met. Many of them actually resonate so deeply with us. As Nainoa says, the further we sail away from home, the more we realize that we are all alike. And we have had such amazing opportunities to meet with people. Like when we train as apprentice navigators, as crew members, that is just part of the story of what's happening. Hokulea sailing around the world is to help us to ensure that the art and the science of wayfinding is never lost again. But it is also to share that traditional knowledge and ancient knowledge can be made new again in contemporary settings. For example, we voyaged to Aotearoa to New Zealand and visited with the Manai Kalani schools, which actually their school cluster is named for the Fishook of Maui, which is said to have dragged all of our, to pull all of our islands out of the ocean. It's absolutely chilling to hear about the different myths around the Pacific Islands and how they come together really as one and they're rooted in the same traditions. Yes, what was so amazing Nainoa stats, you know, he stood in the sands at Point England, Tomaki Beach and talked to 2,500 students, 95% of them Pacifica and Māori youth that had never touched sands of the other Pacific Islands and we brought to them those stories of their ancestors and of the voyage in canoe that their curriculum is built around. And so that was just such an amazing experience for us. So that's one of the legs of the journey that you were on? Yeah, so I was so privileged to be able to do one of the very few deep sea crossings. It was the last leg of the Pacific. We started in Samoa and voyage through Tonga and then from Tonga to Aotearoa. And it's important for our viewers to know you started in Samoa but Hokulea and Hikianalia started here and continue and crew members join at different legs so that everybody gets an opportunity to finesse the skills that they've learned in the Hawaiian Islands. Yeah, our leadership approximates that it takes, you know, it will take over 300 of us to complete the voyage because we sail as volunteers, we sail on different legs for about a month at a time and so far there's been about 186 crew members that have completed the voyage and voyaging training. And I understand Hikianalia has more high-tech ecosystem environmentally oriented technology that's able to gather data as well as to be used for education. Tell me how the educational outreach happens for Hawai'i kids to experience this but also for the host communities. Yeah, so for both of the voyaging canoes, we actually really try to envision what traditional voyaging and navigation looks like in contemporary society to think about studying the Earth's ocean and to help raise awareness that cutting-edge technology can happen on this very ancient platform. Hikianalia, as you mentioned, is a different canoe. She's built differently. She does have motors as opposed to Hokulea, which is all sail-powered, but Hikianalia's footprint, her footprint is zero because she's solar-powered and she has electric motors that run off of the solar panels. And she also has slightly more technology in terms of some of the water quality instruments that we have on board. Both canoes support fish DNA research and also support marine debris and plankton trawls. And so as kids in Hawai'i tune in, they can do that live through the web as well as the website is absolutely replete with opportunities for teachers to use materials around the navigating voyage. Yeah, so we have on Hokulea.com. We have regular postings. We do have Google Hangouts and other video calls that we create classroom, canoe to classroom connections is what we call the program. And we have crew members that answer questions that come directly from students. Some of them are live. Some of them are staggered through email, and then they do a video recording and stream that back to us. And a lot of this is also recorded on OEV because not Alehu Anthony, the founder of OEV, is also a captain of the PBS and also... Now which canoe did he start on? Not Alehu has been sailing Hokulea since he was in college. And so it's been about 20 years that he's been her storyteller. So how do you arrange the live classroom events? So what our team does is we work with the technicians that are sailing on the canoes. We have satellites that we've installed on both canoes so that they can actually stream live to the classrooms. And then they work with our education team to connect via Google Hangout. We moderate for the class or they might do a direct call via Skype or FaceTime. So teachers can connect with you to set this up? Yes, definitely. And it's for all ages, right? K through 12? Yeah, we match them. We ask them usually if they have specific questions and then we try to identify one of the 14 to 16 crew members currently on the leg that's best able to answer those questions. Well, when we come back from the break, I want to hear about some of the stops in Africa and I think Australia and you have a few other visuals. So we'll be right back with Sustainable Hawaii and the Polynesian Voyaging Society. Aloha, I'm Carl Kampania, host of Think Tech Hawaii's Movers, Shakers and Reformers. I hope you'll join us over the next several weeks as we take a deep dive into biofuels in Hawaii and explore the alternative fuels supply chain necessary for the local and global transition towards transportation fuel sustainability. Join us as we have good conversations with our farmers, our producers, our conversion technologies, our investors and our legislators as we try to achieve our transportation sustainability goals. See you soon. Hi, I'm Crystal. Welcome to Think Tech, my show, Clock Talk. Normally airs at 10 o'clock on Tuesdays, but it's going to change to 11 o'clock. So don't miss it. It's an hour later. You can sleep in a little longer. Come with me and engage in some sensitive, provocative discussions on everything. It's all good, all right? Women's issues, things that people don't dare talk about. We want it on the table. So join me. Looking to energize your Friday afternoon? Tune in to Stand the Energyman at 12 noon. Aloha Friday here on Think Tech Hawaii. Hi, we're back with Sustainable Hawaii and Miki Tomita from the Polynesian Voyaging Society. She's telling us all about the learning legs as well as the host communities that the voyage has visited so far, and you were one of the crew members. Yeah, I was really, I was blessed to be a part of the visit to Point England, Manekulani and Aotearoa we were talking about earlier. And also, you know, many of our crew members were able to engage in Australia through the Reef Guardian school system. Just an amazing network of schools, almost 300 of them, that have all dedicated themselves in some way to protect the Great Barrier Reef, one of our greatest natural resources. That's phenomenal. Have you heard of this anywhere else in the world? Actually, it was really interesting. After we met with them, Jenna Ishii and I, we both run the education program for PBS. We traveled and met with NOAA representatives on the West Coast, and they have an ocean guardian program that was adopted by the Carmel School District that is inspired by the Reef Guardian schools. And so we're going to try and connect with that school and see how they've worked through the U.S. content standards so that Hawaii schools can also be a part of that. That's terrific. Who might be some of your partners, and that would be the Department of Education or Charter Schools? Yeah, so we've actually had some interest that was expressed from Charter Schools, from Independent Schools, from some of the Department of Education schools. All of them, you know, we've worked with a network of schools here, 900 educators around the world and 200 schools here that are all following the voyage and really want to be involved in some way, and this is one opportunity that they might have. And some of the other places that we've been to, you know, it wasn't just about learning from students, it was also about being able to visit with people like Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the kinds of work that he's done in South Africa around the Tutu Legacy Foundation and the Tutu Desk. So in South Africa, one of the challenges that they face is that the schools don't have writing surfaces for kids, and so they actually, their development of their writing skills and their academic achievement becomes much lower. And what Archbishop Tutu has founded is a program to bring desks, portable desks to schools. So we had a very wonderful, yeah, we had a very wonderful presentation and an exchange of music and culture with some of the township schools in South Africa, and we presented to them Malamo Honua-inspired Tutu Desks with the Tutu Foundation there. That's just amazing. Another chilly. I think I'm going to have chicken skin on this whole show. That's delightful. And so what is the follow-up after you leave? Great. So one of the really interesting things that we are hoping to do is when we come home in June 2017 is to invite all of these amazing partners to tell us their story of what they've been inspired to do or how we've inspired them and for us to tell them how they've inspired us and also hopefully to invite some of them to join us here when Hokulea and Hikianalia return to Hawaii in June 2017. Well, we shouldn't leave out the United States port where you had a phenomenal impact and that is, I'm sure, a school district that's going to stay in close touch. Tell us about the New York visit. New York was incredible and our host there was the New York Harbor School in the Billion Oyster Project. We spent a lot of time with the United Nations and World Oceans Day but this school is so amazing. They are, they have a goal of restoring the Hudson River watershed to growing technology, which is ancient technology, oysters, which no longer can grow in the Hudson River because it's one of the most polluted waterways but they seed them at this school, this charter school, learns how to grow oysters, seed them and plant them and people adopt these oyster beds to clean up the Hudson River. Wow. It's amazing. Well, that's certainly a global impact that you're having. We've seen it, you know, in Africa, in Aotearoa, in New York. Tell us a little more about how your global impact was demonstrated at the World Conservation Congress and the different declarations of different nationalities. So one of the things that we've been able to do, and I know as such a compelling speaker and such an activist and a voice for the oceans, but he really stands on the shoulders and the work that have been done by other Pacific leaders. And so at World Oceans Day and at the Conservation Congress, we were joined by people that represented ocean voices like Tommy Romingo Sal and other representatives from across the Pacific that have really taken a stand to talk about the health of our waters and our people. So this actually preceded the World Conservation Congress to us at the UN. Yeah, and many of these people were there. So that was at the United Nations. Right. So what we did was we had a really wonderful engagement with Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who actually came aboard Hokulea in Samoa and gave us a message in the bottle to protect the oceans and asked us to bring back to him messages from other ocean people so that he could share that. And so we delivered onto the United Nations a series of declarations that came from other countries, other oceans, from children around the world, from our own State Department, from our own communities here, promises to Pai Aina, promises to children that are originating here in Hawaii and really are the driving force behind the voyage locally. That must have been one of the most exciting high points of the entire voyage. What's ahead that could top that? Oh, goodness. Well, we just, riding in the wake of World Oceans Day, we come here to the World Conservation Congress where all of a sudden, World Oceans Day was an amazing stage for the United Nations, but to have all of those people convening here in Hawaii and to really have them be a part of Nainoa, welcoming them on the beach, to our waters, to our sand where his ancestors have stood and talked about what it means to steward to Malama, our Honua, or our Earth, was just an incredible experience. And I think that the momentum keeps growing. He's going to be speaking at our Oceans Conference with Secretary Kerry in a couple of days. What conference can you give us a little more detail so people might watch for that? Yeah, so we're going to be at the Our Oceans Conference, which is in Washington, D.C., but there is a live stream that of part of the speeches, and I think we're going to be posting that on Hokulea.com, so we can find the information there. And it's just going to be a really exciting experience for all of those that are so blessed to speak there. And at the World Conservation Congress, not only did they, did you folks, the PBS, receive so many of the delegations, but you saw them out at the end with the Hawaii commitments and the 30 by 30 commitments. Tell us about what that was like and particularly the details. Yeah, we had some really exciting moments around IECN World Conservation Congress with the expansion of Papahana Mokoakea, that President Obama, you know, that he announced with Governor Ige and his Hawaii commitments. These were all sort of part of the building momentum that has happened in the wake of our promise to Pahaina, which is a group of local and global organizations that are dedicated to protecting our oceans and ocean commitments. We hosted many events through the promise to Pahaina, which was through the Pacific Pavilion, and we also hosted some in partnership with our promise to children, which is our education network. And so these were really an opportunity for both local and global partners to showcase their work and their promises to steward the ocean and to protect it. And this is the Hawaii's 30 by 30 oceans target. So Governor Ige made his announcement and he really, you know, everything was inspired by the voyage for Island Earth and protecting our resources. And the promise to Pahaina target is next, I believe. So our promise to Pahaina Group, which is made up of CUA and NOAA and all of these different organizations that work here and work globally, we're really thinking about how the voyage and canoe helps to set a new mindset for what we need in terms of a more sustainable future for managing our resources for treating each other like family and for stewarding our planet and our canoes into a better future. And tell me a little bit about the very student focused centered design challenge and I think some of the design charrettes. Yeah, so one of the things what we were so blessed to host was a couple of activities that Polynesian Voyaging Society was able to support and that was we had a star compass activity teaching students about learning from the natural world and how you can never be lost if you can find yourself and find your directions and know which direction you're pointing in. There's so many wonderful analogies to use from this. It was so great. There was nothing more inspiring to see everyone at the Congress pick this up and start to use it in their own declarations and debates even. The mindset, this photograph, I love this photograph so much coming up, this is NaNoah doing one of his opportunities of 6,000 data points he says he gathers in a day. He says a navigator actually has to study the natural world so intensely that they take 6,000 observations a day. Imagine if we all took 6,000 observations a day to tell us if we were sailing our communities, our world, our lives in the right direction. Our entire world would change and that's kind of what the mindset of the navigator and voyaging is and it's meant to be metaphoric for our lives. Are we paying attention? Do we know what course we're staring on? Are we engaging those around us in a team effort? Are we all pointing our canoe in the same direction? And so that's really what we see is echoing through things like World Oceans Day at the UN and the Conservation Congress here. So what happens when the voyage is over? Everybody's come home. The thrill and the chilling moments end or what's going to be the chicken skin event? That's a really great question and one of the things that we hope for is and I know in our leadership it's their vision, their dream that we have taken Hokulea out across the world's oceans to meet the world's people to bring back a thousand stories of what people are doing to steward our culture and our communities to celebrate ancient wisdom and new technologies and the hope is that that launches 10,000 individual voyages and so when we see Hokulea returning home to Kualoa what we'll find we hope is a new mindset and that people have embraced what is actually an old mindset, a traditional subsistence very much in tune with nature and a love for Aina and a desire to Malamo Honua when we return. We see how you're already sowing the seeds for this to happen within the schools but how do you get people like me and the in-between ages between us old folks and the young folks to grab on to this legacy and start implementing it in our daily practices? That's an excellent question and that's one that we actually pose to our communities and to people like here to ask what does it take to reach down into someone and to turn a light on in them and to ask them what is it that is worth protecting in your life in your culture, in your community and how can you tell that story so that the rest of us understand how precious it is and then we can all learn about the precious places that we need to protect and that way the whole world will in turn be protected and I think that's part of what we ask is people share with us their story that's the first ask come to Hokulea.com share your Malamo Honua story with us tell us what's special and sacred and we'll share for our island earth and we'll also share opportunities like this weekend international coastal cleanup the largest cleanup in the world to take trash out of our beaches and our oceans and there are many opportunities that we're posting on our website with partners to talk about those kinds of things that you can do every weekend so everyone should go to Hokulea.com and I really appreciate you being on the show today we'll be back next Tuesday at noon with Sustainable Hawaii at Hokulea.com Mahalo for tuning in