Robert Piper

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Doreen Bogdan-Martin:

Is this thing on? Can you hear me?

Technical Moderator:

Yes, we can loud and clear. Thank you. Welcome to the latest episode of the UNconnected, a podcast series about information and communication technologies and development with Doreen Bogdan-Martin, Director of the ITU Telecommunication Development Bureau.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin:

I am delighted to have with me today, Robert Piper. Robert is the Assistant Secretary-General for development coordination at the United Nations. Robert has more than 30 years of experience in international development, humanitarian response and peacebuilding at the United Nations. He currently leads the Development Coordination Office, known as DCO, at the UN. DCO serves as the Secretariat for the UN Sustainable Development Group, UN SDG, which is a group of 34 UN agencies, funds and programmes working on development regionally and globally. And of course, ITU is proud to be an active member of this group. DCO supports UN country teams across the world and UN Resident Coordinators who liaise between headquarters and the field. As you may know, over the recent years, the UN Development System and the UN Resident Coordinator system have undergone significant changes with Robert and his team to thank. These updates to the system, so to speak, are helpful in enabling digital cooperation – something ITU cares a lot about – that has become so vital to sustainable development efforts around the world, especially during this pandemic, with connectivity being vital in terms of employment, health care, education, and much, much more. So glad to have you here with us, Robert. Looking forward to your thoughts on opportunities for digitally enabled development to drive sustainable development impact on the ground. Welcome, Robert.

Robert Piper:

Thank you, Doreen. Happy to be here. Very.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin:

So Robert, let's dive into our first question. Could you give our listeners a sort of crash course on some of the main features of the revamped UN Development System, including the UN Resident Coordinator system?

Robert Piper:

Sure, Doreen, you've touched on a lot of it in your introduction, but let me have a go. I think firstly, what is the development system of the UN– it's 30+ agencies that work in different fields, from health to taxation, to climate and so forth, that are spread across the world in teams, as you say UN country teams. We serve 161 countries and territories. We are about 100,000 people, we manage about 20 billion US dollars a year in development funding, and we essentially work as a team to support governments today to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. This machine, this federation of agencies has grown up organically over the last 75 to 100 years, each agency with their own field of expertise, born at different times, and each under somewhat different governance arrangements. So health ministers created their health agency, the World Health Organisation, telecommunications ministers created their own agency with the International Telecommunications Union, and so on and so forth. So it is a federation, a big federation, making a huge difference across 161 countries and territories. So what's the revamped piece of this? Well, our architecture is somewhat out of date. It represents a 1950s view of the world, which is organised very neatly along sectoral lines, agriculture, health, education, and so forth. But in the 21st century, it's very obvious that the big priorities for our governments have moved on from those purely sectoral fields, and a much more horizontal in nature. Think of climate, think of youth, think of rural development, think of inequality, access to justice, these types of themes do not sit in any sector comfortably. They require multiple sectors to come together to work to be successful in supporting a government. So the revamped UN Development System that you refer to in your question, is the effort we've made over the last few years, to re-engineer our UN family so that at the country level, we are no longer remembered for our purely sectoral intervention, but we're able to come together as a group around these multi sectoral issues. And of course, that's what the Sustainable Development Goals are all about. They're all about integration. They're all about these cross sectoral themes. They're all about coming at a problem from every possible dimension, whether it's on gender, whether it's on poverty, whether it's on climate. So this is our system, and it is revamped, because we've been pouring a lot of energy into re-engineering our creaky 1950s architecture to deliver on 21st century problems and that work at the field level, as you said, and I'll stop here, is led by UN resident coordinators who were appointed by the UN Secretary-General to lead these teams and to bring them together on the issues that matter.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin:

Terrific. Thank you. So that's, as you said, a real re-engineering effort with 161 countries, 100,000 people, that's impressive. And of course, I think from the ITU perspective, we can relate to this sectoral nature as you have described. And even in our own work, which of course is focused on connectivity, we see how connectivity can no longer be its own single silo. And so I guess turning to my second question, over the course of your long career, have you observed more of a growing role for connectivity? Especially when we think about how the SDGs can be achieved? And do you have any thoughts about the importance of digital networks and services, and the achievement of the SDGs?

Robert Piper:

Absolutely. I'm going to show my age. In the mid 1990s, I was serving in Fiji in the South Pacific. In Fiji, I was working for the UN Development Programme, and Fiji was an economy that everyone, all the economists said, you know, it’s pretty much unviable in the sense that it was so far from markets. Geographically, physically surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean, that it could never really compete in the marketplace in a traditional sense that it needed to kind of reinvent itself around tourism and services and so forth. And I remember waking up one day and realising that suddenly, this distance that Fiji had from these main markets had suddenly almost overnight become its comparative advantage, thanks to the internet. Because suddenly, it was possible as people went to bed in the U.S. or Europe, Fijians, well-educated English speaking, they were getting up for the working day. And they could indeed, as doing back-office, work on drafting, architectural, what do you call them, blueprints, providing back-office telephone services, processing insurance claims, all of these things could be done while the American market slept.. And suddenly, that distance became an incredible competitive advantage. All thanks to connectivity. I wrote my op-ed in the Fiji times in 1996, I guess, 1995. And I was absolutely, at that point, already, very much an ambassador for connectivity, as I realised how this was such a game changer in my world of development. Since then, of course, the examples have absolutely multiplied. So we have these incredible positive opportunities that connectivity provides to accelerate our progress on the SDGs. Jumping as it were, leapfrogging on technology, the opportunities to move services around the globe to access markets, of course, remotely, and so on and so forth. There's a negative side to this, that's also been very obvious to me over the course of my career, in the sense that if countries miss out, if they get left behind in terms of that connectivity, then they are yet again, disadvantaged, and that growing inequality across the globe will be exacerbated. We've seen it during the COVID crisis, how much that connectivity was such an important driver… of how COVID impacted different communities around the globe, different countries, if you were lucky enough to be educated in a school that could go online, if you were lucky enough to have a job where the services could be provided from home, if you were lucky enough to get access, medical services and advice or even social services digitally, this was a very, very different experience. And so for the great majority of the world, sadly still, that connectivity issue is an indicator of that disadvantage, of that inequality, of that injustice, in a sense of your access to opportunities. So yes, indeed, over the course of my 30 years+ I've watched how crucial connectivity and the digital economy has become for everyone's… for our development efforts for every country on the planet.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin:

It is quite amazing. As you said back in the 90s, when you think of the mobile phone expansion and in the internet boom, that it led to this sort of ‘’death of distance’’ as you described it. But of course, the negative side as we saw, as you rightly mentioned in this pandemic, without having connectivity, that digital divide has become the new face of inequality. So we really do need to double down and get those that are not connected, connected to the internet. If I could zoom in for a moment on some of the challenges or the problems, because we're seeing it's not just an infrastructure issue, can you share any thoughts about what you think needs to be done to bring, let's say, the skills and other resources beyond just the infrastructure component to enable connectivity to be life changing?

Robert Piper:

Yes, I mean, this is your area of expertise, above all, is ITU. I think I've watched over the years, governments resisting sort of these markets, in a sense in these innovations hanging on to monopolies. And that's held back countries terribly. But I think that is less and less an issue by now. But it took a long time. And that lag, I think we, you know, many people in developing countries have paid a very high price for, I think, within countries we are in as always, in this sort of vicious circle, where remote areas that don't generate much income, as it were, apparently, or tax for sure, for the economy, the least interesting for our government support to extend the sort of digital connectivity out to those remote areas. We have markets that are relatively unregulated perhaps, or high risk, that are keeping investors from moving connectivity out to where it's needed. We have issues around, of course, schools and their access to connectivity, or the quality of those schools and the levels of literacy and computer literacy, economic literacy that is being taught in those schools. And so indeed, as we said, as you pointed out, it is a bit of a continuing kind of exacerbator of inequality. Kids are not born with the same opportunity to access the internet, to access the digital economy, to get all that it has to offer. Adults do not have equal access to that digital economy, either if they're in the informal sector, if they're in remote areas, and so forth… they are kind of chronically disadvantaged. So I think there's also, of course, the areas around regulating and that the dark side, if you will, of the digital economy. And that continues to be something that is a challenge and the governance globally of the digital economy, the global digital ecosystem, as it were to make sure that all countries in the world have an equal voice in how that shared common resource is governed, how it is managed.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin:

Terrific, thank you. Thank you for that. It is so important, as you said, for all countries to have a voice, all stakeholders to have a voice. And the issues around trust safety governance, as you noted. If I can zoom back to your office, and ask what would your office like to see more of in terms of how UN agencies like the ITU can engage and also be engaged by the resident coordinators? And perhaps a follow on to that, what value-add could ITU and its stakeholders of the digital ecosystem bring to you to help implement the SDGs by working more closely with the RCs [Resident Coordinators] and of course, the UN country teams.

Robert Piper:

As I said, the great issues of the day that are captured in the Sustainable Development Goals, issues around climate, issues around inequality, issues around poverty, issues around youth and cities, these issues will not be tackled if we do not include elements of the digital economy, the digital divide, the digital literacy. These are key pieces of the puzzle, we just won't solve these great problems without making sure that this part of this industrial revolution is included in our solutions. So we look to organisations like ITU, and ITU is quite unique in its expertise in its constituency that it represents, to bring that perspective to bear, to bring the expertise that you have, having served countries, every country on the planet, to be able to advise governments on how to tackle the digital divide, how to expand their digital economy, how to make investments happen, how to regulate the good and the bad sides of this digital explosion. But we also look to ITU to bring that constituency in to the room for the conversation. Because these silos that I described at the beginning of our conversation, these 1950s sectors that everyone's set in, of course, also chronic problems in the developing world and in the developed world, in terms of the way governments run. So when we look at rural poverty, for example, and we recognise today, how important it is that the digital economy is brought into that conversation about how to alleviate rural poverty. We have to have the telecommunications providers in that country involved in the conversation around rural poverty. They are not, typically. They are also working in their country in their silo. So ITU is a source for us have great expertise, but also a network of actors throughout the globe, that need to be brought into the conversation around these great themes of inequality of climate in every single country context. So we count on you also, to be able to do that. It's difficult. 161 countries and territories is a lot of ground to cover. We know ITU needs to prioritise where it can and can't operate. But we're thrilled to have seen in the last three years since we introduced these reforms, a doubling in the number of countries where ITU is actively engaged with the rest of the UN family. And that's good news for us. It's good news for the SDGs. It's good news for the telecommunications sector in each of these countries, as we see these relatively siloed ministries coming into these mainstream conversations around poverty, around climate, around the youth, around inequality. So that's what we're looking for. And I think we're starting to see some pretty extraordinary results.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin:

Thank you for that. And I think it's also of course good news for us at ITU and for our constituency. Obviously, lots to cover for a small technical agency, but we're so excited to be working closely with you, and you can count on us. So thank you for that. One last question, if I may. And I'm putting this question to all of my interviewees. Robert, what was your first mobile device? And how did it change your life?

Robert Piper:

So I believe I got my first mobile phone in the late 90s. So I'm thinking it must have been 98, if not 99, maybe so, I'm not sure. I was working on the emergency response, part of the UN Development Programme, the emergency response area. It was a work phone originally, not a personal one. And it made a huge difference to my work, but also in a sense to my work-life balance to it to some extent. Firstly, of course, on the professional side, it made it possible for me to be in touch with people very quickly, very easily, and to keep track of rapidly changing developments. But also, it in a sense gave me a little bit more freedom outside of work, to be able to know that I am contactable that if something happens, I don't have to be beside my phone at home, I don't have to be at my computer to be informed relatively quickly that I'm needed for some purpose or other. And in a sense, I think that was rather a positive thing… and giving me some peace of mind in a sense that I was still contactable, even when I was having leisure doing something other than work, which wasn't often enough, but it did happen. So I think that would be perhaps my early experience, of course, then it sort of penetrated my personal life much more as the rest of my family got phones, etc. But I think that at the very beginning it was it really was around my work in the area of emergency response for the UN.

Doreen Bogdan-Martin:

Excellent. Thank you for sharing that. Robert, I really want to thank you for spending this time with us and of course for sharing your stories, your insights. That concludes this episode of the UNconnected podcast. Until next time, let's all stay connected. Thank you. Goodbye.