First of all, our delegation would like to express our appreciation to HE Group Captain Anudith Nakornthap, Minister of Information, Communications and Technology, Thailand; HE Dr Hamadoun Toure, Secretary General of ITU; and HE Dr Ibrahim Sanou, Director of Telecommunication Development Bureau of ITU for successfully organizing this Ministerial Round Table. We thank the Royal Government of Thailand for the generous hospitality. We are certainly proud and privileged to participate in this historic Roundtable.

We join other delegations in this meeting in expressing our sympathies to our friends in Philippines who were adversely affected by the typhoon Haiyan.

We would like to support and welcome the adoption of the Communique of our Meeting, especially the 6 priority areas identified by the Communique namely:-

1. Investing in ICT Infrastructure;

2. Stimulating Innovation and Creative Use of ICT;

3. Encouraging Innovative Public-Private Partnership;

4. Promoting Sustainable Development through ICT;

5. Fostering Digital Inclusion; and

6. Achieving Digital Literacy and Building Human and Institutional Capacity.

Let me share with you some of the more salient features we have in Brunei Darussalam. At the Ministry of Communications, we want to forge a Smart Society. With the adoption of the Leaders’ Vision Smartly Digital, we all welcome ‘Smart’ as the accepted ambition now.

A Smart Society is where everyday endeavours and social and economic activities can be accomplished with the optimum resources – be it time, transportation and expenses. More importantly they can be done anytime and anywhere.

We realized that the underpinning enabler of this smart society is the ubiquitous access to and provision of broadband interconnectivity. More importantly is the effective usage of the broadband services.

We started in 2010 at by initiating Networked Readiness Index (NRI) Study in two Phases. The NRI were derived from three aspects, namely:-

i. Environment (market, political and infrastructure);

ii. Readiness (individual, business and governments); and

iii. Usage (Individual, business and government).

In a group of 144 economies we have achieved the position 63 in both 2010 and 2011. We have improved to 57th position in 2012. The main improvements came from individual and government usage. The NRI study also helped us to focus areas for improvement.

As a follow up to the NRI study Phase 1 and to improve our NRI, we held various government, business and society stakeholders workshops to identify and formulate Lighthouse projects. These projects are targeting simple ‘low hanging fruits’ with enormous self - sustaining high long term benefits.

It was very remarkable that the two highest priority lighthouse projects were:-

i. Public-Private Partnership For Improved Connectivity In Schools; and

ii. Enhancing trust in e-transactions through provisioning secure e-payment solutions.

We are happy to note that there projects are in agreement with the six thrust areas with our Communique.

Ideally, we would like to treat access to ICT (broadband services, access and network readiness) not as a sector but, rather, on the same enabling level as education and health. If we do this and are successful, the SMART term is not smart anymore but correct, efficient and proper.