BDT Director's Corner: Speeches

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Ladies and Gentlemen 

• I would like to welcome everyone and my friend and colleague ASG Mariano.
• Now, it is an honour to be part of this event today to celebrate innovation, collaboration, and commitment towards advancing gender equality through open-source solutions. 
• Today we celebrate something exciting: the winners of one of a series of innovation challenges organized under the “Open-Source Software for Sustainable Development Goals--OSS4SDG" initiative. 

• Today, we are looking at how to tackle Sustainable Development Goal 5, Gender Equality.
• I am proud of our collaboration with the UN Office of Information and Communications Technology and the Directorate-General for Informatics of the European Commission.
• What was this Hackathon challenge? 

• Participants had the opportunity to develop open-source solutions that address equality and safety by building upon existing open-source projects and Digital Public Goods.  
• The challenges included tackling gender-discriminatory language, addressing gender-based violence, combating misinformation, and addressing safety concerns faced by women. 

​Why should we feel excited? 

• In looking at the extremely creative solutions in the challenge, I feel highly excited for many reasons: 
• Digital innovation presents a huge canvas of opportunity. Open source is a pivotal technology. The teaming of open source with the digital public goods environment is a huge emerging canvas of possibility on which many ideas can make their mark. We are just scratching the surface of what this mix may involve. The resulting ecosystem will be enormous. 
• Digital innovation can address important and urgent problems as we see here the protection and safety of women and children. The digital environment should be a protective and secure environment. 
• Digital innovation reaches out and redefines. Today, we see not merely protection in the online space but clear digital ideas for the protection of women in the physical space. These ideas are sending signals. In this ecosystem, we will see new, and startlingly powerful ideas and combinations of ideas emerge. 
• And I have a personal motivation, too. I have a deep interest in the innovation process and your ideas tick all the boxes for me. 

• When I took office nearly 12 months ago, I had a vision that locally enabled, innovation-led digital development was key to moving forward. After seeing these wonderful entries, I am even more convinced now that it is the case. 
  

• Here, we are seeing the digital innovation process at work, and it is teaching us how to make it happen. It is catalytic. On the right canvas, we see it running, jumping, and flying. Most of all, we see it sparking. New ideas spark other new ideas. Most of all, when you innovate, you give permission to others to do the same. 
• Today, sees a great example of partnership. And a great example of creativity. We will need to harness both in the massive—and positive—wave of digital transformation we will experience in the future. 
  
  In closing 

• Please let us celebrate the milestones that we have achieved that are evident here today. Five finalists were selected based on creativity, innovation, relevance, applicability, and user experience of the solutions developed and today we will hear and award the best three solutions!  
• Congratulations to everyone involved! 
• You are the game-changers and part of our march towards equality in safety. When we consider the emerging digital public goods/open-source ecosystem, we know that we are onto something special and impactful. 
• Thank you!