Felly, i fawr, mae'n mynd yn fwrn a lwyddo, ac mae rhai dweud yn Lleidbrod, ac mae'n mynd yn blawd. Rwy'n ni'n gweithio i'r rai ddymu. Rwy'n ni ddechis i'r ddymu i'r parodau mewn ddwy yn bodieithion i'r ddiwethaf, i gael i'r ddymau i ddechis i'r ddymu i'r ddymau i ddymau i ddymau i ddymau, i gael i'r ddymau i'r ddymau i ddymau i ddycontraeu'r ddymau, L Explain sorry for being put, and I would invite those members who wish to speak in the debate to press the request, to speak mutton's now, or as soon as possible, and I now call on Patricia Ferguson to open the debate. Miss Ferguson is seven minutes to thereby pray.いく As you are aware, Parliament holds this parliamentary debate every year on or around commonwealth day and while the motion that we consider tonight was tabled in my name, it is not solely my debate but a debate that is sponsored by the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association or CPA branch executive and we will hear from my colleagues on the branch executive, Margaret Mitchell, Tavish Scott and Sandra White in the course of the debate. The theme of this year's commonwealth day is young people and that seems to me to be a particularly relevant theme to pursue in a commonwealth of 2.2 billion citizens, 60 per cent of whom are under the age of 30. As part of the celebration of commonwealth day, the CPA branch will hold a reception immediately after this debate, which will be attended by university students from around Scotland and by young people nominated by the 13 consul generals and honorary consul generals representing commonwealth countries who are based in Scotland. Immediately before this debate, we held a round table discussion on the issues of the Commonwealth and specifically on the issue of violence against women and girls. We were joined in that round table discussion by 22 young people from around Scotland's universities and they joined us in the public gallery this evening. On behalf of the branch, I thank each and every one of them for their insightful contributions, for their challenging questions to us and for the thought-provoking issues that they have given to us and that we will no doubt reflect upon and take forward. They encapsulated exactly what this commonwealth should be about and what this particular celebration should be about, too, so we thank them for their contribution. The issue of violence against women and girls is of course not confined to one region but affects us all. At a recent conference that my colleagues Sandra White, Kara Hilton and myself attended, we heard Baroness Scotland speak of her time as a Government minister pursuing this issue. She engaged researchers from the University of Lancaster to make sure that she had the very best arguments at her fingertips. They estimated that the cost to the state—that is in England and Wales—of domestic violence was £23 billion. A staggering figure and one that she, Baroness Scotland, used to persuade her cabinet colleagues that they had a financial stake as well as a moral obligation to tackle the issue of domestic violence. That same research demonstrated that for every £1 spent on initiatives to tackle and to raise the profile of combating domestic abuse, for every £1 spent, £6 were saved. There are 53 countries in the commonwealth. How much money could be saved if domestic violence could be eliminated? A challenge, yes, but one that is perhaps worth aiming for. Of course, domestic violence is not the only form of violence that women and girls are exposed to. We do not know how many girls, normally resident in Scotland, have been subjected to FGM, female genital mutilation. What we do know is that it is an abhorrent practice. It is physically and psychologically damaging. It is not a requirement of any religion. Indeed, some 350 faith leaders have asserted that it forms no part in the practices of their faith, but still the culture persists. Often, as we discussed with the young people that we met this afternoon, it is often the women in society who are at least in part regarding this as something that is desirable for their children and their grandchildren. We have to challenge and combat those views wherever they occur. I warmly welcome the additional funds that were announced by the First Minister this week. It remains the case that there have been no successful prosecutions in any of the jurisdictions of the UK to date. We must be alive to the issue and do everything that we can to raise awareness of it. As was put to us this afternoon, how can we talk to other countries in the Commonwealth about their practices if we ourselves have been unable to prosecute people for this crime? There have, however, of course been prosecutions for human trafficking, which have often involved women and sometimes men being forced into forms of modern slavery that forces them to live lives of drudgery and despair. The world that our young people are inheriting has its challenges and its advantages. To my mind, the internet is both a challenge and an advantage. At a recent CPA conference, we heard examples of the kinds of exploitation that can occur online. This particular presentation was, I have to say, harrowing. We heard of one website hosted in the USA, which operated on the basis that if you did not pay its operators a sum of money, it would post online explicit photographs of you. Even where women were sure that no such photograph existed, they paid up because they were afraid of the consequences of family, friends or employers finding out. In some cases, the situation was much worse, with children and young people being abused and the film of that abuse being shown online. Governments around the Commonwealth have taken action of various kinds to prevent such abuse, but it is not easy to legislate against. To demonstrate how difficult it is, we were told that, some 19 years ago, it was estimated that 18 per cent of the pornography exploiting children was hosted in websites in the UK. This figure is now down to 1 per cent, which is a very good thing. Clearly, that abuse is still continuing and has probably increased, but it is just that those websites are now hosted elsewhere. It is extremely important that we work together. That is an area where I think that the Commonwealth could really play its part, and we already have the Commonwealth cyber crime initiative as a good example of how that work can be taken forward. It was put to us this afternoon, and I very much agree that we will not tackle violence against women and girls unless men and boys understand and are involved in our campaigns. I would particularly identify the white ribbon campaign as a way in which men and boys can be involved in helping to eradicate that kind of crime and of standing up and saying that we will not be part of it and we will not condone it happening. I know that a number of football teams and rugby teams have now adopted the wearing of the white ribbon on their strips, and we should do more to encourage that. The advantage of the Commonwealth is that we can discuss those issues and support one another in finding solutions to those problems, which beset most countries in the world, but we do so knowing that we share the strength of 53 countries. We have to speak up on issues like that. We have to recognise when we will disagree. We have to support one another to change, but we also have to articulate our shared values of democracy and equality, and the Commonwealth Charter is one way in which we explain our values. In her message to the Commonwealth this year, Her Majesty the Queen said that the Commonwealth can only flourish if its ideas and ideals continue to be young, fresh and relevant to generations, very apt words for someone who has been at the heart of that Commonwealth for so many years. It is often said that young people are our future, but they also live in the here and now, so we must listen to them and encourage them to be part of shaping that happy and fulfilled future that we all wish for them. Many thanks. I now call on Sandra White to be followed by Malcolm Chisholm. Four minutes are thereby, please. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer, and I thank Mr Ferguson for her contribution and welcome the young people in the gallery. Presiding Officer, this time last year we were team Commonwealth, gaining up to the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games. Certainly, in my city of Glasgow and throughout Scotland, there was huge excitement and expectation as to what the games were going to deliver, and deliver they certainly did. Being in Glasgow at the time of the games was fantastic, the city was buzzing, and I've honestly never seen Glasgow or parts of Scotland so full of energy. Walking down the street seeing people from across the globe was simply amazing, and thanks to the people of Glasgow and the 15,000 volunteers, everyone was treated to the friendliness of welcomes. Over the period, we played host to four and a half thousand athletes and over one million spectators, making the games one of the most successful of all times. Of course, to us, the legacy that the games gave us was equally important, and I would like to congratulate all involved on ensuring that not only were the games successful, but they also gave and are giving us an amazing legacy. Since the games legacy 2014 has already supported over 150 projects to improve community facilities, and by 2016 we have created 150 community sports hubs. It's also established over 100 cultural programmes with links to 26 Commonwealth countries and created 150 young Scot youth legacy ambassadors. I think that we should all be very, very proud of that legacy, and although the list goes on, the key point is that in many of these cases it's young people who are benefiting, and it's young people who are making such a difference. So whether it was 21-year-old Charlie Flynn winning gold in the boxing and the Commonwealth games, young as ever medalist, the inspiring 13-year-old Erad Davies winning bronze in the swimming pool, young people across Scotland and throughout the Commonwealth were all winners. Of course, since then the eyes of the world have also been in Scotland for other reasons. Name of the referendum in Scottish independence and regardless of the outcome, one thing is clear is the profound effect it had on our society and especially our young people. 16 and 17-year-olds were the first time, given the vote, which led to unprecedented interest in what kind of society, what kind of future they wanted to see. It also led to an incredible amount of political engagement not only from 16 and 17-year-olds but people even younger, and of course many older people as well. This interest and engagement is sure to continue as the franchise for 16 and 17-year-olds to vote has been devolved to coincide with next year's Scottish Parliament elections. I think that that is something that we should celebrate also. I would like to see the other Commonwealth countries pick up on that. The referendum taught us that, given the opportunity, many young people have an incredibly important role to play in shaping the future and that, given that chance, they are very willing to do so. As I said previously, I sincerely hope that all countries of the Commonwealth can learn from that. Given that this year's theme is a young Commonwealth, young people with potential who play a vital role in sustainable development and democracy as the title. We met many of those young people early today, as Patricia Ferguson has already mentioned, around table discussion with engaged and contributed passionately and constructively on the topic of violence against women and girls. I look forward to meeting them all later on at 6 o'clock at the parliamentary reception. The 53 member countries of the Commonwealth have a combined population of 2 billion. 60 per cent of the people are under the age of 30 years. I believe that it is our duty and all of us to listen to these young people and through them and the relevant organisations such as the CPA and others and our partners in the rest of the Commonwealth. We should be working towards a secure and sustainable future for all of us. I congratulate Patricia Ferguson on introducing this motion today, part of which recognises the great work of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, of which she has been a dedicated member since 2012. The CPA fulfills a vital role in the context of Parliament's relationship with the wider international community, with programmes promoting parliamentary democracy and activities encouraging sustainable development, the reduction of poverty and support of human rights. As co-convener of the cross-party group on violence against women, I agree with everything that Patricia Ferguson said about domestic abuse, FGM and other forms of child abuse, and I agree that that has to be tackled on an international level, because unfortunately these problems bedevil every country in the world. However, today I want to focus on the theme of young Commonwealth. The Commonwealth comprises 53 countries with 30 per cent of the world's population, but over half of that population is under the age of 25. Today we joined to recognise the young activists and entrepreneurs who contribute such a great deal to their countries and this family of nations. Each story of progress is an inspiration and I know many will be told today. The Commonwealth Day is celebrated on the second Monday of March every year. The celebrations culminate in a multi-faith service at Westminster Abbey attended by the Queen and representatives of the Commonwealth countries and, importantly, this year, 1,000 school-age children. This is an important valuable opportunity to reflect on the diversity of the Commonwealth and it reminds us of our shared aspirations for a fairer and more equal world for future generations. It is these generations who will work to achieve their own potential as active members of a global community. As Commonwealth Secretary General Kamalae Sharma highlights, and I quote, a young Commonwealth recognises the capacity, contribution and potential of young people who play a vital role at the heart of sustainable development and democracy. Terry Smith, from my own constituency, is active both within her own community but also as vice-chair of the Scottish Youth Parliament. She attended the service on Monday as the representative from the Scottish branch of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association. Her thoughts on the experience echo the positive sentiments of the many hundreds who attend the event each year and I am quoting again here. She said, young people are not only here and now they are our future. Being united with young people from all over the Commonwealth was a unique experience. We are all from different cultures but what unites us is that we are the future. The inclusion of young people and their empowerment is, I feel, key to the long-term strength of the Commonwealth and, indeed, political structures here in Scotland and the UK, which is why, for example, I certainly support votes at 16. The Scottish branch has worked closely with our Scottish Youth Parliament in the past, supporting Emily Shaw MSYP to attend the Jubilee Youth Parliament hosted by the CPA. That allowed young representatives to mark the Jubilee year and discuss issues pertinent to their lives in the future. Recognising and rewarding social concern and philanthropy is at the heart of what young Commonwealth is about. On Tuesday, four outstanding young people were honoured in the Commonwealth Youth Awards for excellence in development work. That was to reward their exceptional work in promoting youth empowerment, education and entrepreneurship, the environment and gender equality, that achievements have been chosen from the 16 positive examples selected for recognition this year. Catherine Ellis, director of youth at the Commonwealth Secretaryate, pointed out and I am quoting again, young people throughout the Commonwealth are creating and leading projects that have real and tangible impact. The work of our incredible finalists has proved that young people are integrally involved in the process of change and not simply passive beneficiaries of development. I was going to give a couple of examples, but I can see that my time is running out, so I would conclude by saying that these are all examples of the many exceptional young people represented on Commonwealth Day this year. They are trailblazers for improving our human rights and ambassadors for an approach rooted in community activism that reaches out across their regions. We may close the debate today and the safe knowledge that the young Commonwealth has a very bright future. Excellent. Many thanks. I now call on Margaret Mitchell to be followed by Tavish Scott. I am pleased to speak in today's debate and to have the opportunity to highlight the unique role the Commonwealth plays in fostering valuable relationships and connections between parliamentarians across the world. The Commonwealth Parliamentarian parliamentary association, the CPA for short, mission is to strengthen parliamentary democracy and to promote good governance. One of the most valuable yet largely unspoken aspects of the CPA is the contacts that are established through networking and participating in conferences and seminars and the sharing of information between delegates. This opportunity to learn from other countries, both at conferences and in correspondence, which often follows between delegates, is helpful not only for the 31 small nations of the Commonwealth with a population of less than one and a half million but also for more established democracies such as Scotland and Canada. As Her Majesty the Queen stated in her Commonwealth Day message this year, one simple lesson from history is that when people come together to talk, to exchange ideas and to develop column goals, wonderful things can happen. However, in the same message, the Queen sounds a cautionary note to the effect that this will only happen if these common goals bridge the various generations and are relevant. That is why today's round table discussion with young people from various Commonwealth countries studying here in Scotland was so important. For with 60 per cent of the Commonwealth's 2 billion population under 30 years of age, the phrase young people are our future has never been more apt. In September 2007, I attended the CPA annual conference in New Delhi and it was here that I first heard human trafficking described as modern day slavery and the full extent of this appalling trade, which predominantly but not exclusively affects women and children, was made clear to the parliamentarians attending. That was because it was given prominence as part of the main business of the conference on the floor of the chamber. Seven years later, the Scottish Government has now introduced its own legislation on human trafficking and exploitation. The bill is being scrutinised by the Justice Committee with the definition of trafficking and in particular the word travel has been thoroughly discussed. Travel is intrinsic to the process of trafficking and it is important that it covers not just travel between countries but more alarmingly travel within countries and even from city to city. Furthermore, uncomfortable issues such as historic childhood sexual abuse and forced marriage are also being tackled here in Scotland with the recently announced public inquiry into historic in-care abuse and the amendment to the forced marriage act, which now makes it a criminal offence carrying a sentence of seven years. There are therefore important steps being taken and we are moving forward and clearly the contributions and thoughts and ideas that we heard today from the young people who took part in the round table discussion were for me and my colleagues proof positive that the commonwealth is indeed in safe hands. I thank Patricia Ferguson for bringing this debate to Parliament and my colleagues from the branch who have contributed already and indeed to other members who take a very close interest in the work of the CPA and have represented this Parliament on a number of occasions at CPA events in different parts of the world. This is not like for those who are in the gallery, this is not like the normal debates in this Parliament building of knockabout on accounting figures as we were debating this afternoon. It is much more an occasion for those to give voice to some really deep themes and I think I would suggest that colleagues across the benches have done exactly that this afternoon, both on a young commonwealth and what a young commonwealth should mean and also on tackling challenging and campaigning against the violence that is brought against us. That was, as Patricia Ferguson first this afternoon outlined, the purpose of the meeting or the discussion that we had with students from universities across Scotland earlier this afternoon. If there was one great advantage of that, it got us out of that debate on numbers earlier today. But much more importantly than that, there were two or three points that seemed to me fundamentally important about the next generation and how they are thinking about these issues in a way that should be a lesson for all of us who are legislators in this Parliament or indeed play a role in any Parliament. The first is the diversity of the commonwealth. A number of our student colleagues made that argument I thought very well today and they perceptively picked up the reality of the challenge that all of us face when we are representing our Parliament at events overseas. That is the difference of view, the difference of emphasis that comes to bear on the issues that are culturally inbuilt, culturally incredibly challenging and mean some hard questions have to be asked. I thought those points were very well made this afternoon. The second was about the need to recognise what needs to happen here in Scotland on female genital mutilation and indeed on the education of our medical professionals and the education of all of us in that sense. One of the students is a trainee nurse and she described to the meeting this afternoon the importance of making sure that we learnt, understood and therefore could do something about some of these profoundly important issues. Indeed, there are abhorrent practices that need to be tackled here in Scotland as well as in other parts of the world. There is no point in any of us going overseas and lecturing if we cannot deal with matters here in our own country. Again, I thought that that was well made to us this afternoon. The final point, and I forget now who made it, but I'd like to pay tribute to Queen Margaret University because it's clear that there's a considerable body of research going on there which I hope will help Parliament and help MSPs and help the Government as well in terms of violence against women and girls and ensuring we understand that. There were some interesting questions about definition. A definition that we might all understand in this Parliament and how our prosecution services will understand would be very different in different parts of Africa or India or in other parts of the Commonwealth. Again, a point incredibly well made this afternoon. I just want to make two other points, Presiding Officer, if I may. The first is about the importance that our branch here in Holyrood attaches to young people. What we can do, Malcolm Chisholm very kindly mentioned Emily Shaw. She used to be a constituent of mine now as a law student at Aberdeen University. She had a glittering career in law, indeed in anything, given that I know Emily, ahead of her. As Malcolm Chisholm rightly pointed out, she was done in London a couple of years back representing the Scottish Youth Parliament but also Scotland at that particular ceremony. We do that every year now. I think that that is one of the strong initiatives that we support in ensuring that a couple of our members of the Scottish Youth Parliament do take part in the Commonwealth Day observance ceremony in London for a very good reason, not least of which the elections to the new Scottish Youth Parliament are taking place right now. On Monday, I am due to be in Lerwick to, no doubt, greet warmly the two new members of the Scottish Youth Parliament for Shetland. No doubt colleagues from across Parliament will be doing the same in their own areas. The final point that I wanted to make is about international education. Again, that for me came very strongly across in the discussions that we had this afternoon with students from across Scotland's universities. In my own part of the world in Shetland, when you live in somewhere like Shetland, international education is pretty profoundly important. One of the strongest relationships that currently exist is between the Anderson High School in Lerwick and the South Peninsula High School in Cape Town, South Africa, which is one of the oldest links between a South African school and a UK school. What it means for students from my part of the world is that they not only get to go to an astonishing part of the world but they also get to study, learn and listen to political activists, young and old, older ones, of course, can reflect on apartheid, can reflect on what that meant and can reflect on the modern South Africa that they now live in. That is one heck of a good way to make sure that a generation of young people from Shetland, but this would apply to any school in Scotland, who know about the world around them before they enter into the largest parts of life that faces them. That is indeed a young Commonwealth and we should do all we can to promote it. I thank Patricia Ferguson for bringing this debate to the chamber in light of this year's Commonwealth Day celebrations. I also commend the Scottish Parliament of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association for its work. It has been over the past 16 years in supporting the Commonwealth and being fully participative through its parliamentary association and in demonstrating Scotland's commitment to international engagement. In 2015, as we have heard, we honour our youth and in doing so we celebrate the vitality and the energy that they bring forth, which is necessary if we are to develop a sustainable future, not just here in Scotland but across the Commonwealth and beyond. Commonwealth comprises people from across the world, across all the continents, and what is important is that, despite the incredible diversity, there is an intrinsic link through our common histories and a dedication to democracy and education. As with all collaborations, nothing of course is perfect and some countries within the Commonwealth still struggle with equality and, indeed, human rights at the very basic level. The militant extremist group Boko Haram threat is Nigeria, mirroring and even suggesting ties to the recent struggles in the west and in the Middle East against ISIS militants. Malala Yusafsai is still pioneering women's rights to education in Pakistan and India's daughter, the BBC documentary, demonstrates that India too must work to overcome misogyny, as must other societies. Of course none in the Commonwealth is perfect and we in our own country must struggle against such things too on a daily basis. Even in those instances of ignorance and violence, hope appears in the efforts of our young generation. Protests against the treatment of Malala and Nardbaia fill the streets of cities across the Commonwealth and social media pages can attest the interest and the stake that the youth of the Commonwealth place on the values of civil liberty and democracy. Colleagues have talked about FGM and human trafficking and I associate myself completely with the remarks that colleagues have made. Tavish Scott has just talked about students and how important students from across the Commonwealth are to Scotland and, indeed, bring a tremendous vibrancy to our communities here in Scotland. In terms of women's rights, I suffer myself in Tanzania, a women's collective that raises and loans fund to its members to allow them, in a fairly small way, but in small, very poor, often rural communities, to purchase very important day-to-day items such as, for example, a loom, farming tools, maybe even a livestock, which in many cases leads to the establishment of independent businesses, in which those communities raise the steam with which those women are held by the wider community and, indeed, adds to their acceptance as economic contributors. That has significantly reduced domestic violence with regard to the women who are part of those collectives. By sharing information, experience and protesting about atrocities against basic rights, our young people send messages that will not be passive in the face of blatant injustice. The Commonwealth enables young people from across the globe to find connections, given their shared histories. A tremendous opportunity lies with our younger people to work together to create the most sustainable future that we all seek. The Commonwealth facilitates exchange of ideas across international borders and gives young people a chance to come together and to discuss positively our best impact on their surroundings. In terms of our planet's future, as we have heard, the sheer number of people living in the Commonwealth countries gives youth the opportunity to work together in discovering new ways for our social, political and economic structures to develop. The world is becoming more accessible and relying on international relations and technology. People may increasingly begin to identify themselves by the technologies that they use or by their views on civil liberties. Young people and their views are vital as they are more adaptable to change and understandably curious about the world around them. Living within the Commonwealth gives young people an opportunity to share ideas with peers and find connections, given our shared history. Here in Scotland, we are doing our part to support the Commonwealth and deliver opportunities for our own young people to achieve their best possible future and to make the most of their natural abilities through everything from apprenticeships to higher education. Finally, the Commonwealth day reminds us of our tremendous interconnection. It is a collaboration between our younger generations that will navigate us towards a much brighter future across the world. Many thanks. I now call the minister to close the debate in behalf of the Government. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I want to thank Patricia Ferguson and the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association for bringing forward this important debate as they do every year. I want to welcome all the guests in the public gallery, the young people and our consul generals, as well. I want to pick out one young person, who has travelled all the way from Malawi young Monica Zonsi, who is a special welcome to her. I think that she is well known to most of the association here as the person who began that journey for the Queen's Baton. More than that, more important than that, I think that she is an ambassador for UNICEF. She is a great ambassador for those who have not read it or heard it.  A very powerful one about the legacy that we hope to promote together in relation to human rights and that no child should be left behind. Fascinating to have so many young people, as Patricia Ferguson said, and other speakers reiterated 60 per cent of that Commonwealth under the age of 30. I am part of that statistic for another 26 days at least. That is important. I think that less so perhaps for the countries in the western hemisphere and more so for the countries perhaps in the global south that this is a huge opportunity for those countries, but only a huge opportunity if those young people are given the support and the cultivation that they need. Many people have referred to the fact that, when we had this debate last year, we were in anticipation of the Commonwealth Games. Had those Games and what a phenomenal success, that event was success for Scotland, a success for the city of Glasgow, a success for the entire United Kingdom, but I would say a success for the entire Commonwealth. That city that I have the great pleasure of representing, Glasgow, has had many firsts. We know that. The first city to grant Nelson Mandela the freedom when he was still incarcerated in prison. The first city to ever offer an African American degree, and James McHoon Smith in the 1800s got his medical degree from Glasgow University. Perhaps one of our finest firsts to add to that was that the opening ceremony of the Commonwealth Games was the first ever Commonwealth Games ceremony to also simultaneously raise funds and raise funds for a very good cause. Indeed, for children across the world, through UNICEF, the first games to integrate parasports as well. I'm delighted after that, although I can't stay for the reception, but I'm delighted that I'll be able to open UNICEF's offices in Scotland, perhaps a continuation of that legacy. My parents came from different parts of the Commonwealth, my mother from Kenya, and my father from Pakistan. The Commonwealth was born out of difficult circumstances, so it was a challenging part of our history. I don't mean that in the UK history, but Scotland played a huge role in that British Empire, Glasgow, known as the second city of that empire. In fact, there are visual reminders of that through Glasgow, if you walk through many streets, be it Buchanan Street, Ingram Street, Bell Street and all those named after a variety of slave owners. Glasgow in Scotland is playing a role in that too, but what is important for us in the United Kingdom is to ensure that we learn from that historical past. How do we ensure that the Commonwealth becomes something more positive? It has become something positive, but it continues to be a force for positive good. Again, that was demonstrated throughout the Commonwealth games, because the games were more than sport. That was a common theme throughout the Commonwealth games. There is more than just sport. So many of the speakers, in fact all of them, have touched upon the issue of human rights in one way or another. Patricia Ferguson is incredibly eloquently about the challenges facing women and young girls in the Commonwealth. I know that the Deputy First Minister, during the Commonwealth Games, held an event for 70 women from across the spectrum, politics, academia, business and civic society. She brought those 70 women together to discuss some of the human rights challenges for women. Other speakers spoke about the Scottish Government's commitment to challenging those issues. During the Commonwealth Games, I hosted a conference on trade and aid, saying that aid is important. We continue to be big supporters of giving overseas aid to the Commonwealth countries, as is the United Kingdom. A bill passed through the House of Commons yesterday through the hard-working effort of Michael Muir Tavish Scott's colleague that the UK will now be legislating for 0.7 per cent. Believing in aid and the importance of aid, but realising the best way for the Commonwealth to grow and for that growth and that equality to come forward will be through trade and equitable and fair trade. We are big supporters most certainly of that. When it came to human rights throughout the Commonwealth Games in the central theme, we had a great example of that through Pride House in the centre of Glasgow, promoting LGBTI rights throughout the Commonwealth from domestically right the way through to some more challenging areas of the Commonwealth when it comes to LGBTI rights. Some 6,000 visitors there, I was certainly one of them as well. Those relationships that we have built up through the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association, through the Government, through the Commonwealth Games, we hope to continue to advance human rights very much as part of that. Flying a flag, as we did with the Pride flag of the Scottish Government buildings, is one thing. Symbolically, it is important. I am certainly not looking to take away from those actions, but what practical actions we can do will be the measure most certainly of our success. Tavish Scott and Kenny Gibson touched on the fact that some of those discussions can be difficult. We have to be sensitive in the way that we do it, but we have to have those discussions and the Commonwealth provides, I think, a safe space to have some of those discussions. One of the legacies that I am proudest of of the games is that I hope that Scotland has been marked out through its compassion. I have talked about raising the money for UNICEF during the games, but on top of that, I am very proud and pleased with the response from the generous Scottish public to a variety of challenges throughout the Commonwealth. The Ebola crisis, where the Government donated £1 million in assistance to the UK Government, was generous in that regard. I think of the floods in Malawi, where Mr Ferguson first raised that issue in his chamber. The Government has been quick to act in that. I was hearing from Monica Zonzi earlier on how well that had been received in Malawi. To the scholarships for women and young girls that we provide in Pakistan, which I was proud last week to announce an additional year's funding for, 53 per cent of the scholarships that we give to Pakistan are to young girls and 80 per cent of those go to families that earn less than £60 a month. I will write the way through to a small grants programme, which I also announced just a couple of weeks ago in Malawi, Tanzania, Zambia, India and Pakistan. I hope that that is the legacy that we can continue to promote, whether we are part of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association MSPs or indeed in the Government, but particularly our young Commonwealth. That will define us how we grow together, how we continue to show compassion to the most vulnerable throughout our Commonwealth and throughout the world. I hope that the young generation, as I say for the next 26 days, will perhaps include myself in that bracket, that we take that forward with the guidance of those who are older and who have helped to bring us to this point. Thank you very much to the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association for bringing that motion forward. I wish you continued success and I hope that you enjoy your evening reception.


I'd like to introduce Anand S. He's one of India's top data scientists and he's here to talk about natural language generation. One other note, I'd like to remind everybody at noon after this talk, there's a group photo in the main lecture hall, which if we just follow the crowd, we'll find it. This is a bit soft, but I think it's on. Are you able to hear me? No? A little soft? Okay. I can be a little louder, maybe about that loud. Great. Thanks. So we're going to be talking about natural language generation, but first we're going to be talking about why we need it in the first place. We love creating some fairly complex visuals at Grammar and one of the things that we did for a client who asked us, tell me why my workflow is delayed, was put together this little visual which said, look, your process goes from a draft stage to a submitted stage and then to waiting for approval and then plan and so on. So these are the stages that your document goes through. And the size of each of these circles is how many documents are waiting at that stage and the color represents how long the documents have been waiting there. So the red circle, which is completed, is all of those documents that have gone all the way to completed, but haven't been closed and are just sitting there for a very long time. And the flows here represent the transitions from one state to another. So from planning, there's a whole lot of stuff that seems to be going into in progress and from in progress, they largely go to complete or to closed when going forward, but there's a big chunk that's going backwards all the way to submitted, meaning that they go right to in progress and then get resubmitted, which is clearly a problem and this is also relatively slow step. And with this, what they were able to figure out was that all of the forward flows, the ones that were on top, that is documents going from left to right, those seem to be going fast and the documents that were going from right to left, that is where they're going backwards, they seem to be going slow. So this was an organization that had a problem where the forward flows were fine. They were doing things fast, but the trouble was they were doing things, they were doing the wrong things and therefore stuff had to get resubmitted. Now, what I've done is compressed approximately half an hour's worth of explanation into about a minute's worth of explanation. And there's just no hope in hell that anyone has of being able to figure out this visual without that explanation. It's cool, but it's not simple. And this is among the more complex explanations. I've had people stare at simple tables, simple bar charts, unidimensional bar charts and ask the question, so what am I supposed to do with this? In fact, there is an entire industry of people whose job it is to take the analysis that somebody's done and interpret it for the other person. And the boss just says, look, tell me what I should do. And then if I disagree, I will ask you why, and then give you the supporting evidence. And if you need to go deeper, we'll do that. The question is, can we automate that? Can we take the stuff that the person is doing in the middle and communicate that to the end audience? Well, what does the person in the middle do? Well, half the time, most of the time, they're really just talking. So it's words more than anything else, which is where the natural language part comes in, but it's not only words, it's more to it than that. But what I'm gonna be focusing on is just the words part of it. Let's start with some simple stuff. We were working with the state of Uttar Pradesh. And they said, we want a dashboard that shows what we should be doing from a health perspective. It showed a series of metrics like what's the ratio of Pentavalent 3 to BCG percentage of PW screen for HIV. I have no idea what these measures are, I'm not a medical person. But it effectively showed what the performance of each of the districts was. And what the district health administrator said was, apart from this, just give me a summary that tells me in English what's happening. So this summary says, based on the latest data refresh in Jant in 19, so that tells me how old or new this is. Uttar Pradesh has a composite score of 0.41. Your best indicator is the ratio of this to this, which hopefully they'll understand that has a score of 1.03 as compared to last month. Now ideally this should have been worded as 3% higher than last month. That's how humans talk. But this isn't a particularly good report and that's why I'm starting with this, it's a very base one. The next best performing indicator is this, which has a score of 35.55 as compared to last month. Here are your top performing districts. Here are your worst performing districts. Now the reason I'm showing you this is because these five lines where the five things that the district health administrators said they really wanted to know. When we asked them, why are you looking at all of this data? What action will you finally take? They said, see, we want to know where we're doing well so we can tell our bosses. We want to know where we're doing bad so that we can drive the people. We want to know how we're doing compared to our peers. That's it. These are the questions we want answered. And if you can just give us those answers, the rest of it is just proof, which we'll get to when we want to talk to somebody. That's a real simple, templatized summary. Because we said we're going to put this in, generate this using a program. And the numbers are reasonably straightforward. The text is fairly straightforward to generate, but for grammatical errors and numerical errors. This can be done in a way that you can see how it can be done from data. Let me take another report that we created. There is a doing business report that the World Bank generates. This is a report that has information around how easy is it to do business, how easy is it to start a business, how easy is it to deal with construction permits, and so on across various countries. So I search for Singapore. For instance, I thought there was a doing business in Singapore. Wasn't there in the last one? Doesn't matter. Let me take the answer to the question, how easy is it to start a business? Now, each of these little bubbles represents one country. And the country that's easiest to start a business in is New Zealand, which is in East Asia, and the Pacific, followed by Canada, followed by Hong Kong, and so on. And that's the quantitative information. But apart from that, there's a little summary here, and I'm going to focus on the one on the bottom right. It says that the time taken to complete a procedure with regards to starting a business is half a day in New Zealand, whereas in Venezuela, that would take you 230 days. An interesting sighted bit that augments what we are seeing in this, or for instance, India's among the bottom 10 with regard to dealing with construction permits, or when it comes to getting electricity, setting up an electricity connection in South Korea takes less time and effort, but the process is very painful in Bangladesh and Venezuela, which ranked the lowest. Electricity is gold to Venezuela, and it costs you about 704 cents per kilowatt hour, whereas the next highest is the islands, where it costs just 67 cents, and that's a factor of 10 reduction already there. These are not entirely automatically constructed. There is a certain amount of manual intervention in two ways. The first is we know exactly what these categories are. So this is related to electricity. So we have the option of talking about electricity related stuff and coming up with anecdotes that are specifically electricity related. Secondly, the data doesn't change oftener than once a year. So what we can do is have a base layer and say throw out some automated stuff, but then on top of that allow people to override with comments and corrections that they want in specific area. So you have a base case which at least generates some meaningful stuff if not interesting or useful, and we have specific areas where people can intervene and put in interesting observations on top of that. We're still at the realm of semi-automation. We kind of get some basic stuff, but we are able to go a little further than that and improve on it manually. Is there a way in which we can make this dynamic that is what we have is for static data, the option of creating these kind of templates. Could this be done entirely dynamically? Let me tell you a fairly interesting scenario that we were working on. We had data for about 200,000 students for whom there was a large survey that was done. The survey effectively had information on their performance, which is the marks, as well as on their behavior, how often they watch TV, how often they play games, what are their parents' educational characteristics, what are their reading habits, and so on. So these are some of the factors that were there. And we started exploring these. So for example, what is the impact of watching television on, let's say, a big parameter, science? Turns out that children who never watch television tend to score the lowest, whereas children who watch TV once a month do a bit better, once a week do a bit better, and watch every day tend to do slightly worse. So which means that TV watching in moderation seems to be the answer roughly once a week, which is also the answer for social science. Watch TV once a week seems to be about the best. But that is not true for reading habits because the more you watch TV, the better your reading ability becomes. And these are statistically significant incidentally. Mathematics is perhaps the more interesting one. It turns out that TV just kills your mathematical ability. Between watching TV once a week or once a month or never, watching TV every day is even worse. This is particularly surprising because the children who don't watch TV at all are usually the ones that don't have television and they are economically disadvantaged in any case. Watching TV every day puts your mathematical ability worse than even those kids, that's saying something. But now this is narrated in a simple templatized way below saying watching TV can improve your math marks or the right kind of watching TV behavior by as much as 1.5%, that's the gap between here and here. The once a week watching TV is best. Students score about 33.4 whereas every day is the worst, students score 31.9%. You can see how this is constructed. Just say what's the best, what's the worst, what's the gap and tell people what's happening. And this kind of annotation is present for every single one of these. And you also make a commentary about whether this is common. So it turns out that for watching TV, for reading, watching TV every day is the most common behavior. 67% of the students exhibit that behavior. And you add a comment saying luckily every day is the most common. Whereas for mathematics every day is the most common and that is the worst behavior. So you say sadly this is the wrong behavior that you exhibit. So we bring in a certain amount of emotion into this as well and I will be talking more about emotion generation as we go on to the next experimental topic. Now this can be abstracted out into a master summary which says that if I look at how much each of these factors influence. So watching TV turns out that it influenced between two to 5% of your marks. Playing games influence about two to 5% of your marks but the factors that influence your marks overall, father's education, occupation, mother's education and occupation, make the largest difference. And that's another kind of summary that says here are the factors that influence your marks. As an administrator I would just look at this column on the left and say here are the factors that influence me most, here are the factors that influence least and these are the subjects that are influenced by the various factors which can be filtered dynamically based on students that are below poverty, above poverty. So if I wanna look at just the boys, is there a difference between boys and girls in terms of what are the factors that affect them? It turns out that there is but we won't go into the details of that. And the template and the narration automatically get adjusted for these statements. So all of this stuff that's coming in is since it's automated you can do it at any level of data for any filtering of data. That there is no chart that you create that cannot be annotated at least by a simple summary that explains what it is. Let's try this to the next logical step. Before that, is it okay? How we solved our original problem which is this paragraph, right? That one had a bigger issue which we were also looking to explain what are the factors that were driving the cause of delay? So it turned out that for example, the service requests that came from certain divisions, certain customers, certain entities were huge problems and it didn't matter which organization they came from, which site they came from, which country they came from. So we put in a summary of what is really causing the delay in text which made it a whole lot easier for people to read, understand and figure out and at the end of the day all they had to do was read the summary and just say, okay, here's some pretty picture, I don't really understand it but if I get the text, that's fine. That's in fact how it ended up getting used. But we can take this forward to a dynamic space as well. Actually, I'm gonna skip this one. I'm gonna skip this, yeah, let's go through this. On the right hand side is a visualization of the impact of the budget, of the budget that was announced in India every year on the day of the budget. So the budget is announced during the day, the stock prices move during the day. The difference in stock prices between the morning and the evening ought to be precise, the market capitalization is what the chart on the right shows. Now the size of the box here represents the market capitalization of the industry. So this is banking and financial services within which there are a set of companies. These are the oil and gas companies and that's the sector. So the size represents the market capitalization and the color represents how much it's changed, whether it's increased or decreased. So it turns out that in this graph, on the 28th of February, 2005, which is the budget day, the market grew by about 1.6%. 18 of these sectors grew, that's in green and four of them shrank, that's the ones in red or orange. BFSI grew the most by about 3%. Oil and gas grew by about 1.7%, that's the second largest. Services was the one that was most impacted by retail and real estate, which shrunk by about 1.4%. The one that had the highest growth, the greenest one is Food and Beverage followed and the one that had the big drop was services, which is the reddest. What I'm doing is literally reading off the left, which is exactly the way in which we want people to be talking through a visual or a set of numbers as well. So what this does is more than the technology behind it, it's really something that makes it independent of the interpreter. The person who sits in the middle understands the analysis and says something, needs to follow a script. So that brings in a certain amount of standardization. People say the same thing and you don't need much by way of training to have to read this stuff. What this means is that it also makes it possible to put this kind of stuff to a much larger audience, the public for instance. Media, we're working with news organizations in the media to see if we can create visuals on television, digital as well as print that are entirely self-explanatory to the point where no one needs to interpret them, but at the same time don't compromise on the sophistication of the message, the way in which we communicate the message. It could be complex analysis, it could be complex numbers, it could be complex charts, but provide the annotation along with it in preferably a manual way because, automated way because that saves the effort. This can be taken to an extreme. One retailer said, look, what we do is create PowerPoint presentations out of these charts. There is a chart system, we create a presentation. Can you automate that? We said, well, there's a couple of ways of doing that. One way is to automate the generation of PowerPoint itself, which is interesting. So I'm gonna give you an aside on that. It is entirely possible to come up with an interactive PowerPoint presentation that can tell a story. This one doesn't have narratives, but I am still gonna talk about it. This is a dynamically generated presentation where the sales revenue of a retailer is broken up by geography, within which by channel, within which by product, against which you have how well it's doing in that region. Red is not so good, yellow is yeah, kind of okay, green is you're doing well. And you can see that for example, in UK, in the stores channel, product nine is not doing so well. So we can ask the question, why is that happening? Is it because product nine is generally not doing well? Click on that. That does a drill in PowerPoint into product nine shows a breakup. And we find that product nine is not doing well almost anywhere. The only place where it's kind of doing well is in the US stores channel. Is that because the US is generally doing well? Click, that takes you to the US and shows your breakup of the US. And you can click on pretty much any spot and get in there. Or another way of looking at this is, let's take that, of looking at interactive visuals in PowerPoint is, it's enabling editing, this is a slightly complex one. Okay, what we have here is the breakup of downloads from an app store by geography. Most of the downloads came from the US followed by China, followed by Germany. By model, Android four versus iOS four. And you can see that's a relatively old visual by category where games mostly downloaded or was it educational apps that were downloaded and so on. And we can start exploring where these downloads came from. So Android four downloads mostly came through games. The games downloads mostly came from the newbie segment and the double m come no kids segment. And these two are segments that are not growing. Now this allows us to perform pretty much full-fledged sophisticated explorations in PowerPoint itself. So the challenge of generating PowerPoint that does sophisticated interactive visualizations is not the problem. The problem, however, is that this still requires an explanation and can we provide that explanation which is what PowerPoint does manually. So we put together a dashboard like this which mirrored what our clients normally use for their sales analysis. It says, look, retailer number six, that's the anonymous name of the retailer. Here are your insights for week number one in 2015. Your sales improved this week, but it's dipped compared to the same period last year. If you look at the US retail division, then your sales improved, but again has dipped compared to the same period last year. If you look at where your growth came from by product, it mostly came from this brand zero to four ink last form 50p, whatever that product is. And if you look at one other subdivision, then it's mostly your ring view binder that increased your sales. Now we can start drilling in into this, which could answer the question, how exactly did my sales improve but dip compared to the previous week? That has a set of narratives that go into the next level of detail. My sales grew by almost 150% this week, but the same week last year, it was 11.2% higher and we're less. And you can see the numbers against the charts just here and there, which allows me to drill down one level further. So what exactly was the growth driven by? Which were the products that grew? Which were the products that didn't grow? Go down one level further into that, into a particular.


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