Well, I'd like to welcome everyone here today. My name is Ernie Bauer. I'm the chair for Southeast Asian Studies here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. For those of you who haven't been here yet, I hope you're enjoy the new building. For those of you who had been to the old building, this is nice to see sunlight while you're speaking about important topics related to development, economic issues, geopolitics and whatnot. So thank you all for coming. This is a special treat and it's actually a little bit of an emotional time for for those of us who are really good friends with with Dino Dijal, the ambassador of Indonesia. As you know, this is a man whose heart was in the job. He is an incredible leader, thoughtful, compassionate and in typical form, I think. Instead of having a going away party, what he thought we should do is get some of the best minds on development together and try to get some advice before he goes back to Indonesia. And if you haven't heard yet, this is a guy who's running for president of the Republic of Indonesia. So it's a guy who deeply cares about these issues and wants to apply them. You. And I thought that was just so apropos given Dino's focus. He doesn't want to have another party. He wants to focus on how he can improve the country. And I thought that was incredibly, it was not only smart, but it tells you a lot about the man. I'm going to ask him to say a couple words. And then we've gathered with us today some of the some of the best minds on development and prospects for pro-poor technologies and developing countries. What to do, what's out there, how to apply it. And I hope all of you, I met many of you coming in. I hope all of you will engage in discussion after we hear their brief comments. That's the idea today, is to get some good ideas for Dino before he heads back. So without further ado, please join me in thanking Dino for his leadership while he's here. And then I'm going to turn it over to him. Thank you. I'll speak from here. And again, on behalf of the Indonesian Embassy and my wife, who's a bit overdressed here, she just came from an event, an embassy event. And Ernie, thank you so much for having this forum. And we had, and Murray, thank you. And everybody, it's great to see you here. And I see a lot of friends from Indonesia, Indonesian who are here, again, welcome. And when we discuss what kind of seminar we would have, the original idea was to have something on Indonesia. And that was a nice idea, but I thought to go into a theme which I've always been interested in, which is not just technology, but pro-poor technology, is something that would be something that I would learn a lot from and I would find very useful as well. A few years ago, I met an Indonesian woman who studied in America. Her name is Trimumpuni. And she studied energy and a little bit of hydropower. And then after that, she went back home and she championed a movement to create independent micro-hydro-energy villages throughout Indonesia. She realized that Indonesia, we have a lot of water, a lot of rivers, a lot of rain. And she found a way to turn them into energy and made villages energy-independent. And I thought, wow, that's incredible. One simple technology, simple innovation, and it helped the poor. It's just a question of how to replicate it in a way that would meet the economic scale of Indonesia. That remains the challenge. And then I met another guy in Indonesia. His name was Johan Surya. He's a Maverick educator. And what he did was he went to Papua and found the most remote school in a place where the students had scored the lowest in national tests. You couldn't get any lower than the students at this most remote school in Papua in terms of academic achievement. So he took them in, educated them in his institute and he had a very innovative teaching in math and science and physics. And he took them for about one year. And after two years, they began to top the national test scores. And after that, he sent these Papuan kids to the International Science Olympiad, I think in Poland or something, you know, and they won the gold medal. So talent is everywhere. Talent is everywhere, no matter what your economic status or ethnic background is. It's just that they're not exposed to the right opportunity and right tools. And same story with my dad. My dad, in the 1950s, he was from the most remote part of West Sumatra. And there was no TV, no electricity, no radio, no cars, no motorcycles where he was. And he had to travel to Jakarta in the 50s and all the way to America, University of Virginia, to gain knowledge. He studied law of the sea and he gained his doctorate degree. But back then, to gain that knowledge, he had to travel halfway around the world and had to be the smartest kid in his community. Otherwise, there was no opportunity. And what happens now, what happens now is somebody in his village only needs to click a few buttons on the computer to gain the same amount of articles, essays and legal documents that he had to travel halfway around the world for. So, you know, technology does do a lot for the poor. I can tell you this. We take email for granted now, you know, Twitter and Facebook. But you know what that does to the poor? The poor felt poor and felt desperate because they were marginalized and they felt the universe was away from them. They were away from anything that was good in the world that made them feel helpless and far away and desolate. But the poor now has access to emails. And the email, when you register for Yahoo or Gmail, it doesn't ask you what nationality you are. It doesn't ask you how old and things like that. It doesn't discriminate you. You have total emancipation to your personal email access and also to Twitter and Facebook and everything. And you have no idea what this does to the mindset of the poor. He or she feels that he is empowered. He may be poor, yeah, but he's connected. He or she is connected, you know? And he or she does not feel marginalized the way that previous generations did. So, this is some examples of what technology does to the poor, not just in Indonesia, but across the developing world. So, I definitely strongly believe that in the 21st century, the technology will be the game changer. If you ask me what are the drivers for change in the 21st century, I know CSIS has seven revolutions. Definitely one of them will be technology. And the nice thing is this. For us policymakers who are looking for the right technology for our problems, the technology are out there. It's not something that you need to invent as in the past. The technology and the innovations are all out there already. But we just don't know where they are and how to access them and how to implement them and integrate them into our development strategy. In Indonesia, we too have a lot of technology. We have the Minister for Research and Technology, but I admit that technology is not place central in our development strategy and is definitely not place central in the fight against poverty. Bono says that extreme poverty will end by 2028, right? Because that's what the graph shows. From 40%, it's gone down to 20% now. And if the graph continues to go down by 2028, extreme poverty will be alleviated throughout the world. I believe if we can employ the right pro-poor technology and governments right will do that, I think we can beat that even faster. So this is the purpose of our meeting today. Just to compare notes, to find out what is the best model, how do governments should adapt technology to their development challenges. And I look forward to really learning from all these distinguished speakers. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Dino. And really looking forward to digging in here. Our first speaker is Asif Sheikh. He's the co-founder of International Resources Group, IRG, for those of you in town. You would know the acronym really well. I didn't realize until we talked before this conference that he had recently retired from that role. But I will tell you that he built that company from the ground up. He ran it for over two decades, and it was a real innovator in the area of development. I've known him for years, and I'm really looking forward to hearing his comments. I think you all have his background in your handout, so I won't go into deep detail on him or any of the other speakers. But I'd like to ask him to talk a little bit about social media and knowledge sharing and the impact that has on the agenda that the Ambassador laid out for us today. Thank you, Ernie. And thank you, Your Excellency. Mr. Ambassador, you are much more eloquently than I could. I just gave my talk. So as I sit before you, I share your sense of anticipation about what I'm going to say. But I want to really address two things. And I think, Your Excellency, you were right on the heart of the matter. One thing is the concept of donors as minority shareholders. And you alluded to the fact that these things, these technologies exist, they are there, they are playing a role. And we don't even need to go out and get them, they will come and reach us. So I want to talk a little bit about that, and then to address what you so rightly focused on, which is what is the greatest resource in any country in the world? Human capital. If you can change human capital, especially if you can improve the lot and access to knowledge and information for the poor, then you have transformed the world, you have transformed that country. And technology today, in ways that should still astound us, but as of five years ago, they no longer astound us. And five years from now, things that astound us now will seem so old hat. Facebook mentioned that. There are 1.2 billion users of Facebook in the world. And the world's third largest country in terms of number of Facebook users is Indonesia. That cannot, and there's some proportion going to be women and girls, some proportion men and boys, but that cannot but cause people, give people the opportunity, not to just be told things, but to actually reach out and to seize ideas, to have ideas about rights, to gain opportunity, to build friendships, to build networks, to know what's being served at the Beacon restaurant tonight, if they so desired. And Facebook is already outmoded. People say it's very yesterday and there are new tools, Insta something or the other and and other tools that Instagram, yeah, I thought it was I have teenagers. You have teenagers, right? Instapop and and other things that we probably wish didn't exist. But these are transforming lives. I grew up at a time when having a six month old Sears catalog was connectivity, because you do something about what was happening in the rest of the world. Now, the Arab Spring, however, turns out almost happened or did happen on Facebook, on Twitter, on internet, cell phones, etc. The second Iranian revolution almost happened on Twitter. So these are forces for good and for evil. But ultimately, they are forces that will be the most transformational in the history of the world, because they give hundreds of millions and soon billions because the technology itself is trivially cheap. Equal access to knowledge and to ideas and the ability to communicate to share and to organize as those of us in the West have. So I see this movement accelerating. I've been spending the last decade studying changes in in technology and how they are affecting life. And we as minority shareholders and I will end very quickly with this point and look forward to a discussion. The donor community is a tiny minority shareholder, even governments of minority shareholders in the process of development. Most of the forces that will shape the future of developing countries, people will come from the private sector will come from business will come from investment. And so we have to rethink our role and forget about past roles where we believe that the sum of projects was equal to development. It never was. It certainly is not now. And we have to understand that you can't. Well, you can redirect a river by redirecting its flow by using the power of its own flow. But you can't just pick it up and put it somewhere else because that's where you want it to be. So there is a power to the flow of the private sector and the global economy. We can help redirect it by using and harnessing that power and trying to make the outcomes better for the poor. But we cannot simply do what we want and have that change society by itself. So let me leave you with that. Thank you very much. I'm like actually very apropos. If you look at one of the slides or the key points in our CSIS 7 revolutions presentation, it shows a graph and that graph shows the two intersecting lines. And the line that's going down is government share of development spend in the world. And the line that's going up and crossing it is the share of private sector spending on development in the world. And I think a lot of that comes from really thoughtful NGOs like World Vision. And we're really lucky to have Mr. Lou August, who's the global co-leader for information, communication, technology at World Vision International. So Lou, please. Thanks, Ernie. Thank you, Mr. Ambassador. And thank you all for coming today. It's needless to say this is my favorite topic and I'm tickled to death that this is going to be a major part of why you're going back to Indonesia and what you hope to do for your people. It's what I've devoted my life to since I got out of college many years ago, too many years ago. And I've seen technology do amazing things for youth. Back in the early 1980s, I started a company that provided technology to US schools in a number of states. And I saw how technology empowered youth who had no opportunities, who were in rural areas, who really were disenfranchised from the US system, and suddenly put them on a fast track to doing really well. Huge, huge employment opportunities. And I saw those opportunities go global when the internet came along. So I absolutely applaud your direction. And for myself and for World Vision, we really want to do everything we can to support you. Maybe a little bit of background on World Vision. We're a large international development organization. I think we're one of the largest, one of the largest at that, the largest now. We operate in about 100 countries, about 45,000 staff. We have we operate out of 38 locations in Indonesia. And we're heavily involved in Indonesia in the areas of education, in economic development and in health. And increasingly, that involves for us working with the government. And in fact, that's an increasingly important part of our strategy, especially in education technology. Because what we've learned when trying to improve an education system is that we can't act alone as an NGO. We have to be working with the entity who's really it's their job to prove education for their people. And that's the government. How can we support the government itself in its role in delivering education? And to do that, we partner with ministries, ministries of education, health, agriculture, economic development, often looking to get alignment between the economic and the education aspects of the ministries. We work with the multilaterals, the Inter-American Development Bank, Asian Development Bank, others, so that we're really maximizing each other's investment to get a maximum impact on on child well-being outcomes, youth's ability to gain a basic education. Certainly with the development agencies, the U.S. aides and the AUSAIDs and all of those are major partners of ours in education. And also the corporations, just today I was on a call with Microsoft. And they're one of many companies we work with. And we're all looking at how do we maximize each other's impact to improve education in the world. And it's really out of the desire to help. Certainly for the NGOs, but the corporations as well. And of course for the government agencies. We're really all on the same team. And I think that's something I'm particularly excited about. I was encouraged to focus on a particular type of technology for the talk today. World vision over the course of the last 20 years really has been involved in delivering technology to schools. But really the technology is to help the most poor are really at an exciting point right now. I think we're all aware of what desktop computers did in this country. But that became a challenge for countries with poor power or intermittent power. The computers would shut down and it really wasn't a good platform. When the internet came out, that's great, but you have to have stable power for it to work. And then you get laptops that oftentimes those were too expensive for communities, especially in poorer rural areas. And then the advent of the tablet came out. And it started to get exciting, especially for the poor in those areas. And you started seeing large investments by governments. Mexico recently made an announcement for tablets. Kenya, we've been working closely with the Kenyan government on the Jubilee laptop program to provide a laptop for every child in Kenya. Really exciting initiatives. And so we're finding that these new platforms are really able to provide extremely cost effective technology into rural areas such that they are affordable for children. We're doing a pilot with Harvard, some folks from Harvard University now, where the cost to use technology for a child in primary school to use technology is less than ten dollars a year. And that's providing one to one access to a device. This is a tablet device. And what we're doing in this pilot is using every child in the classroom gets a tablet computer. And you'll note that I'm taking the word Android out of the tablet equation because it's not just Android now. Microsoft's getting into this space. I think we're going to see a real positive for the developing world war go on between the platforms and the tablets because this is really becoming an exciting platform for delivery.  So now phones become a platform for education. And so this is an exciting area where the competition is really heating up and the beneficiaries are going to be the poor of our world and the poor of Indonesia. So I'm really excited about that. But it's not just the cost of the device. It's not just the richness of the device. How good can it deliver content. How rich can that media be. How captivating is the curriculum to be able to teach subjects that are even difficult. It's also what language is it in. Is it in Indonesian. Is it in the 700 or so languages I believe that are in Indonesia. And if we're not careful we'll do to Indonesian other countries what we did to America. We'll make the wonderful fabric of our societies extinct because there was one dominant society in place. And I'm very aware of that because I worked with our Native American nations in the Pacific Northwest. I think that's an exciting another exciting opportunity for technology because the handheld laptops Microsoft in fact has announced a system called check off that allows somebody with a mobile phone to author books. Not in English or Indonesian but in I think there's a Sumatran and a Java in any language that's capable of being represented by a character set. Suddenly that's an explosion of learning content and a capturing of the rich fabric of human culture that still exists in so many countries in the world and unfortunately doesn't exist in this country anymore. So another exciting thing and finally it's the delivery of content. So nowadays to get content on your device you need internet access which can be expensive. If you want it on your phone that 3G wireless data plan is even more expensive. So how are you going to get around that? Well a couple of really exciting things. One is the ability to serve up content locally. These local Wi-Fi systems which are previously quite expensive are now down under a hundred dollars to deliver two terabytes of content as though you have a giant main frame in your village that costs fifty dollars and can provide literally two terabytes of content to the local village community off of Wi-Fi for a fifty dollar box. These technologies are out there and they're getting stronger. And the last one for broadcast I think a lot of us have heard of it is a TV white space phenomena. That's the broadcast frequency between broadcast existing frequencies. It's unused and it turns out that many of those frequencies have the ability to carry for long distances so you can cover vast regions for next to nothing. And so we're going to be seeing over the next ten years five years two years a dramatic decrease in the cost of wireless data and that's going to be another huge enabler of education and bringing that rich content to every child in Indonesia. Thank you very much. Let's dial in a little bit further to stick with the cell phone analogy here and talk with Kai Schmitz who's the senior investment officer in the telecommunication media and technology department of the international finance corporation. And Kai has had very hands-on experience with how phones and technology work in terms of global payment systems and local payment systems. And I wonder if you could share some of your insights with us Kai. Sure. Thank you very much for the invitation and I appreciate the opportunity. We invest in the private sector so as such I'm by definition a strong believer in private sector initiatives for development and otherwise. And I was asked to talk a little bit about some of the examples that we see in our area where technology has been applied to create significant change and I think the prime example that one probably has to start from these days is something that's called M-Pesa which is a mobile payment service in Kenya and I remember eight, nine years ago I ran into somebody at a conference in Frankfurt showing me on a laptop this model of a mobile wallet, a mobile payment instrument that he wanted to use in Kenya and he thought was a fantastic breakthrough. And I looked at it and I thought wow this is nice but this is Kenya, this is going to take forever to take off. How is he going to get that into everybody's hands? The phones are not there and so on so I was kind of negative I think about the whole environment. Today M-Pesa which is run by SafariCon which is the largest mobile network operator in Kenya processes the equivalent of 50% of the Kenyan GDP. So the total amount of people transacting to the total volume of financial transactions people doing on their phones in Kenya now is half of the GDP. So that means almost everyone in a urban and semi-urban environment has a phone and most likely has a mobile payment technology available to them and that has a huge impact on the economy because the cost of cash is very high. Here in the US everybody's used to pull out their credit card, make almost all small payments electronically but in many developing countries all payments are made in cash and the cost of cash payments to the total economy is very high so people assume it's about 3% of GDP. So by cutting the cost of that by half you would gain 1.5 percentage points of GDP which is of course a very large amount of money. But it doesn't stop there and that's where Kenya still is a very interesting example of what's happening in this space because once everybody transacts electronically you get data and you're getting into a big data place because now if you want to understand people's payment behavior for example to assess loans to assess credit you have this data available which previously was completely unavailable. I think there are credit bureaus in Kenya but they have data on maybe 5% of the population. So banks which reach 20% of the population maybe in Kenya would only be able to make affordable loans to a very very small part of the population. Now there are various providers in Kenya that are using the data generated from MPSA and now other mobile payment providers in the country to make very quick loan appraisals so they can provide microloans or other financial products at very very low cost and in many cases these products are offered marketed, promoted and so on through the mobile phones. So you're cutting what has probably been the biggest hindrance for the bank to service that's part of the population cost out of the equation and you're making it possible for banks but also microfinance institutions others to service these people and we are now seeing something like this replicated in other parts of the world. When MPSA started there was much debate in the development community to what degree this could be replicated because in Kenya you had one dominant network operator who had 75% of the mobile phone market so people said well if they can do it doesn't necessarily mean it can happen elsewhere but now you see many many countries where something similar is happening in the Philippines for example on Bangladesh we recently invested in a service called Bcash in Bangladesh that is a mobile payment service for Bangladesh is run by a microfinance bank and we first looked at it was very small and I think about a million subscribers so we thought well maybe this is very early for us to invest we generally tend to make larger investments and not too early in the company's lifespan and we took a few months to look at it and then the company came back to us and said well now we have 5 million subscribers so they went for 1 million to 5 million subscribers within a few months so we decided well we better make our investment in this now because otherwise it will be so large that we probably can't make it or then we won't need an investment anymore so we made an investment now Bcash has tens of millions of subscribers in Bangladesh becoming a very dominant player and you see a very similar dynamic happening to what you've seen in Kenya where you see other providers private sector providers who latch on to the mobile payment program and provide other services whether they are related to financial services to mobile telephony to content you have at some education providers who are using it the data is used for utility payments in many cases it's very difficult for utility companies to provide electricity for example in even semi urban areas because there's no means of collecting the payments people have to go make a payment in cash the cost is very high so ultimately in many cases even if the service gets installed at some stage it becomes dormant because the payments can't be collected because you can't debit people you can't have a regular payment scheme where you have mobile payments for a larger part of the population you can change this and you can do this electronically and that's what you're seeing in Kenya and that's what you're seeing in some other countries where people subscribe to electricity and they can make their payments electronically so they don't have to travel to the next town find an office of the electricity company and pay for the electricity they can do it from their mobile phone which means if they run out of electricity on a Friday because they didn't have enough money to pay for it they will be able to get the electricity switched on maybe on Saturday instead of having to wait until Monday when the electricity company opens the office again in the next city so we believe that starting from payments you begin to enable the whole financial sector to penetrate much much deeper in the poorer part of the population because A becomes more affordable B you get the data that you need to provide many of the services and ultimately you get a very large macroeconomic effect not only because you're saving money on not having to handle cash but you also create employment opportunities by providing microfinance or creating innovation a lot of innovation you see in Kenya many many new companies who are using M-Pesa and the the overall impact I think in Kenya has been has been tremendous for the banks for the utility companies for for health services for education services and so on so it is a very very important part and it's a huge part of I think what will drive innovation for this segment thank you thank you very much Kai you can't really run computers tablets or charge them and telephone if you don't have power and if you don't have power that's generated in a way that protects communities you'll also alienate communities and our next speaker has thought a lot about these issues Jacob Williams as Vice President of Global Energy Analytics at Peabody Energy and Jacob I'll turn it over to you to tell us a little bit about what's on your mind all right thank you very much and it's an honor to be here to address the poverty issues especially in the ASEAN area in Indonesia and it's true that you cannot address poverty without providing energy energy is fundamental to our lives and it is fundamental to the development and fortunately for Indonesia in the ASEAN area they have a tremendous amount of energy available to them that can be used that is low cost and it can be done so in a clean way to lift the people out of poverty through all the devices we've talked about but fundamentally in every comment you heard the power wasn't stable enough or we'd use a server somewhere else or until we get power it all came back to energy somewhere behind the scenes that was needed and so if the way we view the world is there's about 3.8 billion people in the world who do not have adequate access to electricity about 1.2 billion have no access to electricity that's true poverty without electricity you can't have clean water you can't have basic sanitation you can't take it up a level and have refrigeration to store food for any length of time you're always in the hunter-gatherer mode until you get some very basic things lighting even basic education you can't use the internet without some form of energy to do that and so that one of the things that we believe is that you can actually as you improve the energy access you improve quality of life and UN has put out their study of that and it's on the left there and it shows you as the quality of life improves in their human development index the amount of electricity that a country uses grows dramatically and you see that where the country's like a Maimar and some of those that are on the very early stage use almost no electricity the quality of life is difficult and then as you move up and around the curve it's staggering how much more energy you use and that's because electricity and energy allow you to access and improve the quality of life the other thing that comes with that is your life expectancy if you look across the world as you increase life expectancy you use 10 times as much electricity for every 10 years life expectancy increase because it's the electricity and the energy that allow you the quality of life to expand and all that things like MRIs and all that that we take for granted today they're all energy hogs that we need that are helpful for quality of life that we just take for granted here but they're very basic things that in a small scale you can do in small countries to start out and then the tie in the largest source of electricity in the world is coal coal is the largest it will be the largest source of energy in the world in the next three years little known to most people and why is that it's because people around the world want affordable electricity that is why and so that's what's driving it in countries like China and India that have went through are going through this same bringing their people out of poverty it's the same thing you see in the ASEAN area as well that can happen and so that will continue the ASEAN area has quite a bit of generation growth that's going to occur I won't go into that in detail but it's not surprising that the growth in electricity supplies in the ASEAN area will be because of coal because of the resource that Indonesia has that can supply the entire region not only itself Indonesia many of you don't realize is the largest exporter of coal to the rest of the world it's surpassed Australia over the last 10 years and now it is the largest exporter to the ASEAN area as well as to China and India that helps lift them out of poverty as well and so when you deal and why is that why did why is everyone turn the coal this is a chart just real simple puts the the value of oil natural gas and coal on a dollar per million BTU coal is the cheapest form of energy in which to power electricity that is why you turn to coal very simple and that is why and the Indonesia coal is the lowest cost coal so again it is the bedrock and as you see the areas Indonesia exports over essentially is about a third of the amount of coal we use in the United States Indonesia exports each year to the rest of the region and then we want to deal with but everyone says but coal it's there's emissions there's problems and all that we go yes there used to be and yes there is technology that's available today that can solve that immediately you don't have to wait 20 to 40 years picture on the two pictures there are Pittsburgh in the 1950s and Pittsburgh today the area around Pittsburgh uses tremendously more coal than it did in the 50s and yet today it is very clean in very very high quality of life that technology to allow the United States to to increase its amount of electricity by two and a half times from from coal and yet the emissions was reduced by 90 percent all at the same time that technology is now developed and you can now put that on plants as you supply energy to communities throughout and so as a result the ASEAN area can take the technology not of the 70s but of today that's that's very low emission rates and apply it to right away and so that you don't have the environmental concerns at all and you can have affordable electricity to lift people out of poverty provide electricity lighting internet access all those things and do so in a very clean way all at the same time and that's where energy comes into helping reduce poverty and so with that I think I'll stop right there well I'd like to ask you to join me in thanking our speakers for their comments thank you guys let me ask the ambassador if he has any questions to kick off before I open it up to the show to the audience one quick question to Jacob I mentioned this technology to some of my friends who own coal factories and they say it's a bit expensive and hard to get what would be the answer to that it may cost an extra 25% from your base power plant technology the United States every plant has it now so it can be done and its governments can start to say we want affordable electricity but we'll pay a little bit more to get the control technology it's available that's used around the world in Japan, Korea, Taiwan even China their new plants are very clean it's a problem as the old plants but you can put new plants in and put the technology on it's available off the street today okay let me open the floor to questions observations and also the panel is welcome to ask questions or other panelists madam could you bring a microphone around to the I have a well it's not really a question for Mr. Williams but coal is almost pure carbon it burns to carbon dioxide to produce the energy that produces global warming that causes the rise in the sea level that will flood many Indonesian islands as time goes on I think the increasing use of coal is very frightening and I would hope even though of course the solar panels and wind energy and so forth are much more expensive still I think it's much more important to put the investment into non-carbon producers of energy and what is your company doing in that regard before you before your answer would you mind us stating who you are I should have mentioned that we're actually using technology here and the program is live on the internet and it's being webcast live so for everybody who's watching would you please state your name and your organization okay I'm Helen Ruffel I worked in Indonesia for two years a long time ago teaching chemistry and I'm now an environmentalist with resources for the future thank you very much okay Jacob I always love to address those issues first of all there are there are an array of problems countries in the world face if you put the concerns the model concerns of climate change there's very draconian things in the future the problem is the data the actual changes that we have now experienced since the 90s and the 80s that this is a model the slope of the curve is about like that not like that so but there are problems real world today that affect lives people die because they do not have clean water today not a model problem in the future it is today's problem they die because they do not have sanitation they die because they do not have proper refrigeration for food those problems require energy now not we'll wait until three decades for now and we'll get you that I would rather solve those problems today and let technology keep working on the others that's where we start from we'd rather lift up as many people as we can out of poverty today we can solve the other problems forward and the models are overestimating what has actually occurred anybody else want to comment on this? it's sound it seems to me like we should probably address this issue now while it's on the table no? okay uh thank you very oh I thought you might swing at that I was wondering obviously this is the subject of heated debate but the risks of being wrong are enormous with respect to climate change and once we make the investment in any resource we have committed ourselves to that investment and we will live with it for decades so I think there's a strong case to be made and I don't presume to say what the right answer is you could probably guess what I think but what matters is the discussion of perhaps being willing to invest a little bit more now to have the best of both worlds 20 years from now and to have the world in fact 20 or 30 years from now good the gentleman in the back sorry I missed you thank you Dan Kingsley from USAID global broadband innovations program um first of all uh Babat Massiter Washington's loss is Indonesia's gain I was glad to hear uh why you're going back I'll have to email our mutual friend Andy and find out why he didn't tell me first but we've been involved for 15 months in Indonesia and we have reached a point now Lou uh where Microsoft, USAID come info, Babanass and some local uh mobile network operators are have the exemptions necessary and are uh in the process of putting together a TV white space project building on what Lou said TV white space is a technology that can reach the urban poor which is the mission of my program our program at USAID for about two dollars per month per prescriber if you know everything comes together and I've just mentioned a few of the components um for the donors out there for the private sector I would like to tell you that for the last 15 months we've had full cooperation from Babanass come info Muntrik Wangan in um in getting the machete or the say the conflicting laws in place so that the market is becoming more competitive so that that prices for broadband can come down for the rural poor and all of those things that the panelists have mentioned that technology can bring to poor pro pro growth are in a process and I I'm very proud to see what's been accomplished in Indonesia over the last two years and hopefully next august when I'm there it will be bapak day pay day thank you thanks for your comments gentlemen would you like to respond to that I'm excited to hear about your progress and I worked a bit with net hope when they worked on that initiative with you guys so very much appreciated by the by the entire sector you know I think this the whole thing as we're tackling the the connectivity and the the broadband issue is is the content issue I'm surprised when I go country to country the challenges I still have sourcing relevant content that aligns with the ministry syllabus especially when I'm dealing with local languages and uh you know if there's something that we all together can do in that space maybe making more of an open source making maybe make creating a better indexing system wave accessing you know high quality content I think that's another big challenge on our horizon thanks I wanted to ask a follow-up question for the panelists and maybe you'd have a comment sir the you know the Indonesian mobile phone market is actually very well penetrated I mean there's a some could argue that there's too much competition there to the to the point where you know new it's expensive there the the phones the phone companies aren't really introducing a lot of new technologies or the the service and the bandwidth is being so used up by these companies that a lot of users complain about the service that they get from their current their current users so anybody who does business in Indonesia and I see some Indonesian heads nodding you know it's amazing because these are some of the world's best or they most advanced technologies being deployed in Indonesia but because of bandwidth issues and frequency allocation and other reasons you find out that you know calls drop you know in Indonesia which is strange particularly in a country where you know I think Indonesians are the fastest adapters of new telecom technology of any almost any country in the world so I mean try to get an iPhone 5s in Indonesia and not you know have to fight through a scrum to get it you know you really gotta be good anyone want to comment on on on that issue you know because I think Dina would face that issue as he goes back I believe so I think that is actually an issue that you see in many markets where mobile telephony itself is no longer a big revenue driver for the network operators and the margins are being squeezed even in markets that are not as competitive as Indonesia so many of the mobile network operators are now looking at other services that they can sell through their networks into their subscriber base data of course is the next next frontier if you like so everybody wants to have mobile commerce because I guess mobile commerce and entertainment are probably the the two biggest drivers for the usage of bandwidth that you will see however if you're not generating sufficient revenues and certificates to invest in these new areas so it does create bottlenecks but it also opens opportunities for for other companies to sell services to the mobile network operators that will help them to increase revenues from their base and not to drill on and pace about that was the main reason why SafariCon suffered through three years of losses with this service because they knew they needed another revenue driver rather than just voice which wasn't sufficient anymore and they had more and more competition from two other companies who had to obtain licenses and I think mobile commerce may ultimately be I think in terms of into that segment of technology a key determinant how quickly you make use of of the connectivity because mobile commerce of course increases the availability of goods reduces prices for consumers and has many many benefits but where you don't have sufficient bandwidth or you don't have you don't have that data bandwidth and affordable phones where people can use it it really creates a a creates a large problem and the biggest bottleneck other than the data which in and I would say in many we call tier two countries like Brazil and so on countries is now available you have sufficient data if you're looking at e-commerce going forward one of the biggest bottlenecks you hit then is again payments because many of the people who are now able to use mobile data are not able to make payments electronically so if they were wanted to buy content or whether they wanted to transact electronically buy things in e-commerce they're unable to do so because they have no means of electronic payments so I think it's another example where both the payment technology enables a network operator to invest in expanding the bandwidth of the data the availability of data connectivity and at the same time that really having a very large impact on on macroeconomic development did you want to add anything to the sire you wanted to respond to in the United States we have special interests we have issues with regulatory certainty and in all countries you do so by no means is Indonesia exempt from that and so it's a very very slow process you know bringing connectivity to deliver data you know there are those companies that have paid for frequency and they have this investment and and now we're moving to the new technologies the low-cost technologies widen you know as we go from analog broadcast to digital broadcast we have a huge amount of space for for delivering low-cost connectivity but there it's a slow process because they're conflicting interests not only within Indonesia but internationally Mr. Ambassador it's exciting to hear many of the innovations that external groups private sector are partnering with Indonesian institutes and the cooperation from the government itself how do you in your return see yourself helping to address increasing Indonesia's own intellectual capacity building its research and innovation itself so that the intellectual capital in Indonesia can take on this leadership role within your own country thank you thank you we are actually one other country that spend the least on R&D I don't have the precise percentage but both for government and private sector we spend the least on R&D and if you look at the number of patents that Indonesians register we're also among the lowest so there are two kinds of technology users the one is the technology inventors and the one is the other one is the technology emulators I think Indonesia's next ambition would be not to invent technologies but to emulate just to find out what's out there and adopt them to our purpose I mean if you ask me what my plan is if I was to be president 2014 I would transform the current ministry of research and technology to research technology and innovation well and secondly I would start to build an ecosystem for innovation in Indonesia we have a lot of smart universities a lot of very smart IT what do you call it you know IT genius I was surprised to learn the other day that Indonesia now has surpassed China as the number one source of cyber attack I don't know there's not entirely good news but at least at least it does show that we have a lot of talented hackers that can be useful for a good purpose right but I think establishing a good ecosystem between government private sector universities and the technology community the civil society would be job number one if we are going to be heading towards innovation economy thank you Oliver Bell I'm chief technology officer for Microsoft's development and humanitarian organizations team I think there's probably two areas where I'd like to hear some more thoughts from the folks on the panel and going back to your opening comments there's no master around sort of where is technology going to make a fundamental difference to the way we think about some of these challenges the first one is really about financing and the development process itself so I think there's a lot of smart people in this town and many of the towns like it in the world thinking about how we apply technology to development challenges and we've had many examples of innovations on those lines today but I think there's a much bigger revolution that we're on the cusp of in some way if you think of the way that commercial financing has changed for businesses in the last 20 years 20 years ago we would have gone to a bank to finance a new business 10 years ago we would have gone to a venture capitalist today we'd probably go to a kickstarter type site and do a crowdfunding sort of approach to finding the money we want I think we're probably not far away from a village being able to identify its own development challenges and crowdsourcing both funding and expertise and other things it needs to to really make that happen so I'd love to get the the panel thoughts on what are the innovations we're going to cusp of like that that are really going to change the way that that we really think about about development as a whole my second sort of every interest I guess is around is around youth in that community and what difference that makes so I'm somewhere around about 40 years old I was introduced to technology in my early teens and it's been a large part of my life ever since then but I was introduced to it as part of my my sort of upbringing right behind us is a generation of people who where it's been endemic to everything they've always done so it's not about how do I apply technology to solving a problem because technology has always been a core part of their lives so as those people begin to enter politics become politically aware we're going to see a very different level of thought a very different set of thought processes around policy making and the impact of technology on policies that are yet to come I did a little bit of a project about two years ago to look for IT ministers who were under 40 years old and I've never choose the IT minister of Macedonia was the only one I found at the time there may be more now but it's a very limited group of people I think we're kind of I'm kind of curious about what happens to policy making what happens to the development challenges in IT when that generation becomes politically aware and part of the policy leadership and how do we nurture that and encourage that to happen a little bit more quickly so two questions one is what impact does technology really have on development itself second one is on how do we do more with the youth community to really use that expertise to make these changes happen a little bit more quickly great question and maybe I'll mention our friends at USAID again I think USAID recognize the need for different approaches to development as well and a few years back they introduced the grand challenges that's an idea where government agencies just don't hand money up for development projects rather they look for the partners who have who are like-minded similar goals and get them together and share their resources World Visions partner with USAID and AUSAID and the U.S. Department of Education in the education grand challenge where we are funding about 17 million dollars in solutions really focusing on technology now in the developing world so I think it's finding your partners who are like-minded who have similar ambitions with Microsoft World Vision is partnered in Africa and exact same model World Vision is providing financial resources you're actually providing technology and software resources British Council is providing training resources and Intel is providing hardware resources and we're all like-minded and we're all able to multiply off of each other's efforts I think that governments I'm not sure if Indonesia has a universal access fund but I think if it doesn't it probably ought to get one it's where you can start subsidizing the people who are more difficult to connect also the development banks of course really countries sort of banking on well what's the improvement of our economy going to look like after making an investment and maybe we should go ahead and make that investment and reap those rewards later on you combine that money with USA money with World Vision money or other NGO money and you've really created a multiplier Yeah, a great question and one of the points of reference you know completely different worlds non-technology versus technology but similar models so a point of reference with respect to how to finance 10 years ago was bang or 20 years 10 years ago venture capitalist today someone in prison whatever but probably the venture capitalist Ouch but information sharing was extraordinarily successful in the rural areas of the developing world through farmer to farmer visits people learn and adopt extraordinarily well from their peers because they understand the problems and they understand the language so when we come back to social media I think one of the greatest strengths of social media is it will exchange information on and create new ideas and new ways to do things things that didn't exist before because through that community they discovered and created a need and a solution and I think that's happening in many many places I was recently in Haiti and Digicel is in Haiti and they're doing mobile money and they're investing in a big way all over the Caribbean but they're not just giving people what they want or what they want to give those people but people are inventing things that they need that will solve their problems by talking to each other so it's a very rich space I would just just quickly add and then I'll go to the questioner here I think maybe what you were also referring to is with technology you can collect taxes and track government spending much more efficiently if you do that the government has more money to spend should have more money to spend on infrastructure and on people on education and health and I think that's somewhere you know where you can have incredible impact at the governmental level and it frees up resources for the private sector I know for a fact you know I've worked with Microsoft in Vietnam on some of these issues through a World Bank grant with the Ministry of Finance and putting governments online also forces government workers which were in Vietnam until a couple years ago still the majority of salaried employees you have to have a bank account to get paid electronically and the governments were forcing people to take their paychecks through transfer instead of a check and that was that is well I should say that is transforming Vietnam so I think that's another real way where you can exactly I mean I think leadership like that I mean I you know I would just share you with you that idea that you can you can find ways like that that actually influence society so that everybody you know if you're being paid electronically then you're going to willing to spend electronically or by your phone and the change is everything so I'm sorry you're a lady in the third row I think had a question Hi I'm Meredith Sandler thank you your excellency and others here this is really interesting and helpful my question is has to do with the Trans-Pacific Partnership and we've been talking about private sector involvement or non-profit sector but one of the things that the TPP prides itself is that it's a 21st century agreement and it includes ICT and hopefully a thought about how technology can benefit the poor what do you think that is needed that's missing in terms of policy or you know knowing that technology is not necessarily you know respective of respects national borders international borders what can the TPP do let's say for those 12 countries that are that are members of it and flip side how would that be perhaps detrimental for the countries that are not yet members both in the Southeast Asia region as well as Latin America thank you in the US the US Governor's Association put together a program that became the core standards and that became a program where every state now just about has similar education requirements what that does is it allows technology creators the authors of the technology tools to author something once not for every single one of this 50 states in their nuances and their standards we encounter that frequently in regions around the world World Vision does where countries you know just for their own reasons of autonomy or whatever might deviate create an intentional difference that really doesn't have to be there and if it wasn't there would be a lot easier for the authors of educational content to to create something once rather than multiple times for each country so I think getting countries on similar standards where they can yet at the same time respecting their differences can do a lot towards catapulting the quality and even existence in some cases of learning content I would just add intellectual property is a big issue you know we've seen throughout Southeast Asia that countries that do exactly what the ambassador said you know they've turned towards innovation and start those innovators start to bring if there's an environment where innovators can take technology to the market and be financed like Kai was talking about they want their technology protected so that they can recoup their investment and and then invest more and I think when that penny drops in economies there's a demand pull for intellectual property protections if it's properly done and I think that's a challenge both for the TPP to get that right and I think it's a challenge for countries who are not in the TPP because once the TPP happens there will be a dozen countries who have sort of agreed to the to the format that Lou mentioned where you know it'll be one standard and they will take off in terms of innovation and I think that's that's something that I think other countries will have to really consider because there there will be start to be competitive you know tearing of bone and muscle because there'll be something going on and that within those 12 economies which are 40 percent of the world's GDP collectively question here Hi Tim Xiaofang USID Office of Science Technology so I have a question for Mr. Ambassador so we've been hearing about a different way to apply technology to help the poor and so far what I'm hearing about is mostly is still more a top down approach where we have a group of elite to identify the good technology and distribute to the to the crowd and according to what I said just mentioned about very often it is those people who live in the villages who know about a problem who know the language who lived there for years so we mentioned about this because I think recently US has taken a new strategy direction where we believe that we are we are not always the one to tell what the crowd should be and what it should receive so instead of always treating the population as a solution receiver but actually educating them to become a problem solver so one of the tool as Liu has mentioned about is our grand challenge program but also the other type of prizes program where we basically just define we try to talk to people who live in a certain village who actually work on the ground for a long time and ask them okay what's the most important bottleneck in this development field and then we throw out open call whoever had who had any kind of solution to tackle this issue will welcome to hear from you and by doing this they'll actually have a lot of a proposal submission given to us and we hear about a lot of idea that we never thought about that could be a solution so I wonder whether Mr. Meso you mentioned about apart from science technology you also mentioned about innovation part I wonder if you have a strategy for citizen innovation and also citizen science in your overall strategy for your campaign thank you It feels like the presidential debate already Yeah It used to be I think one of the most important area of pro-port technology will be in food and agriculture production because obviously in Indonesia from my experience 1% growth of the economy leads to a 1.3% reduction of poverty in Indonesia and this is why in Indonesia there was a time when we lifted so many millions of people out of poverty and one of the key ways by which we lifted millions out of poverty was by way of increasing rural productivity In Indonesia our problem is that now land is limited I know we have a lot of land but the land that can be used for agricultural productivity is quite limited if I'm not mistaken it's about around 50 million hectares and within that we are seeing not much rise in productivity if you look at the productivity of rice in soybean and palm oil the productivity rise is quite limited and our problem also is compounded by the fact that land ownership per farmer is very low is less than one hectare and if you want to raise their standard of living we need more what do you call it agglomeration yes so that's what we are now I think the key lies in finding new technology that will allow us to decrease the number of people working in the agricultural sector but rise increase their productivity it does require investment the reason why Brazil was very successful in becoming a food superpower was decorated in Brapa and they spend billions of dollars every year to finance research and development so that Brazil's food crops can grow in areas that were not able to grow before so the key my wife says if you want to have quality you got to pay for it and in Indonesia it's time if you want to have the right production rise is to invest in the research and development in these areas but food production and agriculture would be my number one answer we get a small comment yeah please I've seen a bit in East Africa the crowdsourcing of agricultural extension services that you might consider where community internet centers are used as agricultural extension services and university students who are trained in agriculture work in those centers receiving some cases SMS and messages through a frontline SMS based system it's just anybody who has an SMS capable phone can get agricultural support services as well as of course more sophisticated devices so something you might want to consider I would just add quickly and then I'll go to to the question but I think the good news also is that companies I think are looking for a greater role in development and they they're also looking for better alignment in countries like Indonesia so they want to know what people at the community level are thinking that there's a gap here though be you know how do they find out you know and you don't want to go to a village and say hey I'm you know XYZ company tell me what you know what you want because then things might get out of hand you know they people might want a lot but I think companies want to know how to better align with communities with local government leadership and this is I think there's a real paradigm shift in development underway here and it's something we're working on at CSIS there aren't you know simple answers to this but I think you know Indonesia would be a great place because you could there is a lot of if you spend any time in Indonesia the thing that pops out is wow people here are really with it you know they really are thinking and trying to solve problems and if you could tap into that as a company you you can help get yourself on the same side of the table as regulators and policymakers instead of being sort of coming in and say look I want to I want to put my business model in Indonesia and I damn it why doesn't it work you know I think there's a lot of companies that are really frustrated right now with that but the it's a slight shift and the slight shift is you know how do Indonesians what are their issues what are their problems how do you get on the same side of the table and then things will start to pop I think on the development side with private sector involvement right here Lex in the front thank you Lex Riefel with the Brookings Institution for the panel when many of us think of the poor in Indonesia I think we we think first of the rural poor but I imagine that in the decades to come the poor are going to be more and more urban based and I'm wondering sort of how the technology factor is going to work is that going to help address poor poverty in urban areas or is it how can it help I think Jacob is yeah well the the urban poor part of it is again you go back to bringing things that become very affordable as low cost as you can to provide high quality service it's energy that's part of it if you but if you say we're going to run to the highest cost resources then you keep energy completely unaffordable to those in the urban areas and that can't happen it has to be affordable to all there are micro you know villages and things as they first get they use solar cells and things like that that's great in micros but once you start to get communities of such scale you have to have scale facilities to do that and that's that's one of those things it's just it's fundamental thanks great question and and something I'm very passionate about because I think technology provides a unique solution I was recently in Kenya and there is a very large slum in Nairobi the Kibara slums and I happened to also have been in Kisumu talking to a luo tribe and I asked the luo we interviewed a number of them and I said how many of you would like to move to Nairobi we probably talked to close to a hundred people in this luo tribe outside of Lake Victoria do you know how many of them wanted to move to Nairobi zero none the only reason that people are going to cities is to avoid starvation and so if we could bring jobs to people rather than people to jobs we've solved the problem and in fact we have made a better solution than what was there in the beginning because it's a lot easier to support a human being in the village that they were born in who don't have to commute to work who don't have to build houses on expensive land who don't have to build complex infrastructure to keep people alive if you can keep people where they're from you have a massive cost advantage versus an employer or a city who has to pay a higher wage because of competition and we're starting to see that now and I really hope that you from the private sector support the movement of impact sourcing it's the idea of taking micro work small work and pushing it out to the places where people are from so they don't have to leave their families and their millions of years of heritage and get decimated culturally like what's happened in this country and so many other parts of the world and so look into impact sourcing Lex you put it right on the money because now more than 50% of Indonesians are living in urban areas and we are heading to a situation whereby within our generation about 70% of Indonesians will live in urban areas and they will consume about 80% of the GDP right so urban development is is going to be the key but one interesting technology that we're putting into practice at least in Jakarta is what is called vertical green village right I had no idea what it was until I you know I learned about it but they they it's one of our diaspora in Holland and they trying to resolve the problem of slums a lot of villages in the outskirts of Jakarta and they came up with a design that built the villages upward instead of spreading you know horizontally and designed in such a way that they are very environmental friendly very green doesn't cause pollution and very well designed quite modern right so it's just very much in the early phase but I think if this concept of horizontal green villages can take off I think it will change the face of urban you know urban population including its impact on urban poverty in Indonesia Hi, did you have a comment? Yeah maybe present a slightly different view to what Lou was saying I think there are different dynamics when you look at urbanization you have of course very poor people who are desperate and hence end up in the big cities and in the slum but I think there's also a very large part of the population that doesn't leave their moral setting out of desperation but basically in search of better opportunities and I think urbanization in many my opinion presents more solution than actually is a problem because once you concentrate people you solve many problems you solve the availability of electricity you solve the availability of data access and many other issues and I think technology will play an even larger part there than you would have in rural areas because you will get into the concept of smart cities and if you look at some of the developments that have taken place especially in developing countries where cities are built from scratch and there's an ability to build them much smarter than the cities that we I'm from Europe so our cities tend to be hundreds of years old and the roads don't work and everything is built in a way that you wouldn't do it anymore and you see how much better these modern cities work where you have applied technology in a very intelligent way and you solve problems with sanitation electricity and so on I think it's probably urbanization and technology are two things that are working together to make people's lives better rather than the opposite Sounds like we could have a good debate here Lynn Thank you Lynn Cork Harvard Kennedy School Lex just mentioned dividing the poor up into the urban poor and rural poor to look at solutions for both but another way of looking at it as well is the poor in conflict zones and non-conflict zones and I was wondering whether you had any thoughts in terms of how to use technology to solve the problem of poverty in conflict zones I could jump on that one Okay Something I was working on just today actually I think good question A lot of the solution I was mentioning to you is something that we're looking closely into this idea of creating a Wi-Fi a curriculum that can be delivered off of a small low cost highly portable device pushed out to very inexpensive highly portable devices in a very rich format with a learning management system of LMS that will keep track of what materials are people studying how far along are they and then being able to provide results back everybody knows it's better to have a teacher in a classroom but it's sometimes it's best for students not to go and convene in an area you know all together you've heard of shelter in place there's also learn in place during areas of situations of high conflict if you can enable a learn in place environment then you've solved a lot of the problem and so some of these technologies in learning are really exciting for the for the emergency environment again the ability to store vast amounts of content push it on the local wireless systems low cost devices that can deliver rich content and provide a learning management system so you can track results he's thought about that there was my name is Zubhanshu I'm from India any of the panelists could answer this could you throw some light on connecting the 3D printing technology with the telemedicine to provide cheaper health services to the remote areas of like any developing country like Indonesia for example thank you okay before you answer that let's I want to take the woman's question in the back and then that will be the last question and we'll ask the panel to answer both Selamat Sari my name is Ina Dubinsky and I'm with the International Broadcasting Bureau I just was in Indonesia last spring and in many conversations with my father fellow journalists actually they confirmed a well known thing that one of the major gaps between the poor and the affluent is access to education and to information and that's what we are working on with our Indonesian partners you probably know that Voice of America has more than 440 affiliates in Indonesia so we expand their access to information to multiple platforms to deliver news and information to local audiences and we see huge impact so that's the venue we are pursuing and we'll welcome your input and actually we are planning another tour to train journalists in February so you are very welcome to attend our seminars and to speak to Indonesian journalists thank you okay panel 3D printing and it's in fact on rural health and then access to education through through the media just to brief word I spent some time the other evening talking about 3D printing and have spent a lot of time studying it I think for those of you who are not familiar with it you should know that major experts and scientists are saying it will have a greater impact than the industrial revolution and then the digital revolution so we're not talking about a quack notion and what basically it will and the things it can do you know it can print hips and machines and rockets and all of these other things the key is of course the scanning and the program that tells the printer what to do and getting the materials to do it but you can buy one now for under a thousand dollars it can print human livers my reaction to that was I'll drink to that but but I don't understand it it is going to be transformational so what's it going to do it's going to allow dispersed production and that necessarily has an impact in rural areas it's relatively simple it's accessible it exists and for emergency situations for medical and health care it may allow providing things there then right away that would simply have had to come by bicycle or cart or truck or whatever else from hundreds of miles away but its impact is not just going to be in health it's going to be in understanding and creating that same process we were talking about before where people develop things and they can make them so I think 3D printing is very exciting I'll stop there I would just say I was at a this elite seminar for the top 100 supply chain managers in the world and they had a 2 hour deep dive on supply on 3D printing and I learned a lot a couple weeks ago it's actually been around for a long time and I would agree with everything you said there are real issues though they're real limitations and they tend to be sort of regulatory and how you manage the rules around it because it can do incredible things but that's also a problem this area if you're into cutting edge policy dig into open a book on 3D printing it's going to be very fascinating but they all agree that it would transform their businesses completely did anyone want to address the ladies? sure thank you team good and I will come to your seminar just send me an invitation I think the biggest challenge we have in Indonesia in terms of education is inequality access to quality education to give you an example the top quintile of Indonesian richest families 60 percent of their kids go to universities the lowest one? 1 percent so you can see the huge difference once you go to a different economic class in terms of access to education so it's a big challenge for us and I think one of the key challenges in terms of educating Indonesians today one is how to inject more scientific and digital literacy into the curriculum so that's one challenge and it's not there yet yeah and secondly how to educate our kids to 21st century skills you know and again it's not there yet MBC had a program once to try to mobilize the diaspora to provide computers for Indonesian schools and we have one of the largest educational system in Asia we have about 50 million students in Indonesia you know that's a huge system and a lot of our schools especially in the rural area and remote areas don't have enough computers some don't even have electricity so I think the job of the next president of Indonesia is to ensure that every school is has not just one computer but a set of computers and it's not so expensive if you count the budget but what is more important is not just making sure that they have computers and the kids know how to type and use the computer but how to use the computers as educational tools right and this is where one area that I think we can work on a lot more you know using computers to teach the students something rather than the kids just knowing how to type on the computer because in most schools that's what what I see happening so thank you all I'd like to thank our speakers and thank you for coming I'd like to thank the ambassador he's obviously got a very bright future I think he owes great thanks to his wife Rosa who is I like the comment on quality I'm sure I think we've all heard a version of that but you are a lucky man Dino you've got great people supporting you I think we will really miss you here in Washington and when you come back in whatever whatever hat you're wearing we hope you'll come to CSIS and spend some time with us and we hope to see you in Jakarta so thank you all for joining Can I just Can I I'll go when I was here in year 2000 he was a lot skinnier back then now you know he's more you know what do you call it more more thick and a lot more zeros to his bank account because he's a successful consultant but Ernie you are a dear friend and I read your analysis on the Banyan publication and I'll always learn something new and I think I will never forget the cooperation that we did in organizing the Indonesia conference which was very very well attended and was it last year yeah yeah yeah so again so thank you very much for is it this year yeah this year this year I'm I'm old so I lose it feels like last year we're both in the same year yes so again thank you and I hope anything that you need from me from Jakarta I'll always be available and again thank you for the great work that you've done in promoting CS America's relations with Asia but particularly with Indonesia thank you Ernie thank you


The group under the auspices of the Northern Conscessors' Movement with 592 amalgamated social cultural groups have called on Preston-Bola Amitunibu to create the Ministry of Northern Nigeria Development to address the infrastructure deficits, social economic challenges and insecurity affecting the region. The president of the NCM, Comrade Awal Abdulai Mithikor, while addressing a press conference in Kadruna. The Northern Conscessors' Movement have critically evaluated the social economic challenges of the North. We found it appropriate and make bold to demand for the creation of Ministry for Northern Nigeria. We have come to the conclusion that the creation of Ministry will address infrastructure deficits and challenges of decades of neglect. Once created, emphasis will be placed on specific project implementation as education, health, security, agriculture, economy, environment, women and youth development on skills acquisition activities and management, etc. We want to reiterate and call on all ensemble to support the Northern Conscessors' Movement in the creation of the Ministry for Northern Nigeria. We maintain the population of Northern Nigeria is estimated to be over 60% of the North total with over 75% below the age of 35 years which has given the not political advantage. While calling on the President Bola Tunibu and all stakeholders to ensure the Ministry is created. The economy of North is bastardised, education in North is bastardised, health care is bastardised, agriculture is nowhere to be found, hence it means North and Northerners to be impoverished and make us completely poor and vulnerable. Today our wives have got themselves engaged in prostitution, not because they want to, but because of hunger. Our children are going out there to become thieves and criminals, not because they want to, not because their parents want them to, but because of hunger and poverty. Insecurity has created a lot of problems. North that is known to be vibrant, Northern Nigeria that is known to be economically powerful, agriculturally enhanced, our youths and women are known to be vibrally intelligent, but today we are the most impoverished, we are the most poor, we are the most backward and the North is engulfed in all forms of...


The way we frame an idea is extremely important. For example, in the conflict in the Middle East, whether we refer to land as occupied territory or disputed territory makes a world of difference in terms of how we see the conflict. When it comes to the interface between Christianity and Judaism, one of the central topics is the topic of the Torah. And what I'd like to look at is how Christianity and Judaism see the Torah very differently. Christians often refer to Torah as law, LAW as the law. And that comes from the way the Greek scriptures, the Christian Bible, translates the word Torah. It becomes the Greek word nomos, which means law. Now, what's interesting is that when Jews translated their scriptures into the vernacular, we didn't translate the Torah into Greek. We translated the Torah into Aramaic. And this is the official Jewish translations, the Targum of the Hebrew Bible is into Aramaic. And the word Torah in Aramaic is orisa. Some people might pronounce it orita. And there's a tremendous difference between the meaning of this word and the meaning of the Greek word, nomos. Nomos, again, is law. Orisa is really related to the word or, which means light. And I often ask students to meditate on the valence of these two words, how they feel. How do we feel when we think about these two words? If you close your eyes for a moment and think about what does the word law sound like? And what does it feel like? And then how do you feel when you hear the word light? Now it seems to me that the word law is a fairly cold term. You can be driving in your car and find a sign that says, you know, speed limit 80 miles an hour or 60 kilometers per hour, that's a law. It's not very sexy or warm or dynamic. So the word law is often associated with something that is fairly cold. It's not dynamic. It's not very warm. We're often thinking about instructions and commandments and do this and don't do that. And that is often the way people react when they hear the word law. The word light, on the other hand, is the exact opposite. The word light is very warm. It's not cold. It's very spiritual. It's very life-affirming and life-giving. And it has a very, very different feel than the word law. So whether we think of Torah as law or light makes a world of difference. So we see, for example, in the Christian scriptures, Paul has a relatively negative assessment of Torah. Paul refers to the Torah as a ministry of death engraved on stone. Paul speaks about the commandments of the Torah as commandments that are useless, as unprofitable, as a curse. And so Paul consistently tells his readers that you are no longer under the curse of the law. And that's essentially the way Paul looks at and views the commandments and the Torah as something that's not positive, as a law, a burden, something that is really, he says, is against us. Whereas if we look at the way the Torah itself speaks about Torah and the commandments and the testimonies and the statutes that are in it, we find the exact opposite assessment. For example, the longest chapter in the Bible is chapter 119 in the book of Psalms, which has 176 verses that are one long, beautiful love poem to the beauty and the importance and the centrality of the Torah and its mitzvot, its commandments and its hukim and mishpatim and testimonies and statutes. And the author of this psalm speaks about how they are the center of his life and that they're more precious than gold, they're more sweet than honey, that his entire life is drawn just to be in contact with these teachings. And then in chapter 19 in the book of Psalms, we're told Torah Tashem Tamima, that the Torah of God is perfect, it restores the soul. So when we go through the entire literature of the Hebrew Bible, we find literally that the Torah itself and its commandments are seen as the most important, beautiful, special thing in the world that God gave us as a gift. And therefore, the Torah says that it is to be kept forever, eternally, throughout your generations, unto a thousand generations. Paul, who has a very negative assessment of the Torah and its commandments, never speaks about them positively. So Paul insists that you're no longer bound to keep them. He says that you're at liberty if you want to keep them, fine. But Paul insists that your salvation is not based upon whether you keep the commandments or not. And so we have two very, very different views of what Torah is. And what is interesting and significant now historically is that as more and more Christians begin to study the Hebrew scriptures more seriously and try to understand the roots of their own faith, they're discovering that there is a wide chasm between what the Hebrew scriptures say about the Torah and what their own Greek scriptures say about the Torah. And many, many Christians today are moving in the direction of greater appreciation for the Torah itself, more of an interest in the Torah, more of an interest in living according to the commandments of the Torah, there's more of an embrace of the practices of the Torah, even in the Christian world because they feel that there is some discrepancy between what God originally revealed publicly to three million Jews standing at Mount Sinai and what this one person, Paul of Tarsus, is claiming that he received as revelation.


So the boating public needs to know they have to stay away from this aircraft. It takes them quite a while to turn around and if they're in the way they're going to have to change course and we're going to lose valuable time. As they're coming out they're bringing their boats back out onto the water. We're still out there and we're still providing assistance and aid to the firefighters. So from that vantage point we have air support, air assets coming in. I was in awe in my many many years in law enforcement. I've never seen this many law enforcement agencies, fire agencies all come together for one single purpose and it was just overwhelming. There was tears coming to people's eyes, you know, it was beautiful.


She has asked for alcohol-related referrals. What they actually want to know is, what do you mean by alcohol-related? She mean people who were drinking alcohol themselves, people who had come to A&E as a result of being assaulted by someone who had been drinking alcohol. Does she mean people who have hurt themselves on things containing alcohol? Like, you know, there's a lot of different ways that this could be interpreted. That's just one thing you need to kind of keep in mind is, like, be specific about what you mean when you're thinking about making a request.