We can carry on the discussion knowing that our readers will already have read of our earlier transcript. We can move on to more substantial discussions on how to collaborate.

Absolutely.

Would you like to explain a little bit for the context how does the champion, ambassador, partner, and the various role do in the iamtheCODE?

Yes. That’s a very good question. As I told you, iamtheCODE, I created it. The idea was to mobilize government, private sector investors, but also philanthropic foundations to start looking into SDGs, looking into the sustainable development goals.

Nobody had this sort of multi-stakeholder approach. Everybody is doing their own thing. Everybody is working silo. Everybody’s trying to raise fund by themself. Everybody’s just trying to do by themself.

I realize I was a recipient of aid in all of these big UN conversations. I just realized that it’s time for us to sit down and work together, collaborate. In my country, in Senegal, in Africa, they say, "If you want to go far, you need to..."

"Go together."

[laughs]

I believe that if we really put our heart into it, then we can all work together. When I started to put this together, I said I needed to find people. iamtheCODE is based on people, products, and processes.

Real, clear, tangible ways of measuring impact. I believe that if you have the right people...We all have connections, between you and me and...What’s your name again?

Aurora.

We have probably 400, 500 followers, all friends of people we know. [laughs] Just you, by yourself, you can fill the room. People is not a problem. People is really not a problem. People buy into things if they see that it’s working.

We need real products. Products that are expensive can’t reach the poor or the marginalized communities or people with different languages, different skill sets, different gender, different race. We need to think about empathy when we building solutions.

As I putting processes together, what are the processes we need to put into place to make this work? We need to have clear, tangible, measurable M&Es impact to do that. We start putting processes together, meaning lesson plans, the right curriculums, the right technology companies, the right companies to fund it, the right government to put the money into it. Real clear processes that help this to happen.

The processes like how do you make it happen? Once we put these together, we need to find people to do it. I want to find champions, people who really care about situations, not just for publicity’s sake or for press op, but people who really cares.

They need to care about the situations. Then I try finding ambassadors, people who can go and talk about this. We don’t put money into PR and marketing because I believe if you are doing something good, it will talk for itself. [laughs]

That’s what I believe, and that’s why iamtheCODE for the last two years we never had any PR stuff, no PR. People just are going and talking about it. People always say to me, "Oh, why don’t you talk to ’WIRED’ magazine? Why don’t you talk to ’Guardian’? Why don’t you talk to these people?"

I think that if they want to find us, they will. I think if somebody goes and say, "Have you seen iamtheCODE?" They will come to us. That’s what I believe.

I believe that blowing your own trumpet without having any impact doing anything, it doesn’t matter because at the moment, anybody can go and say, "Fake news." What I want you to do is, tomorrow when you say to me, " Mariéme, show me your work," I want to look at you in the eyes and say, "This is my work."

I don’t want you to come and say to me, "Show me your work," I say, "Maybe. I don’t know." I don’t want to do that.

We had that during the dot-com already...

I want to make sure when you say, "Mariéme, show me this. Where is my money going? How is impacting people?" I want to make sure I show that you that clearly.

OK, so your "ambassadors" are in fact people who send these messages?

Yeah. Send clear messages, and then we invite people on our board. If in fact we understand who they are, we invite them on the board so they can see how iamtheCODE is working.

They can give us their ideas, but they can also help us shape iamtheCODE because we don’t know everything, and that’s something we’re very humble and vulnerable to know that we don’t know a lot of stuff.

I personally don’t know a lot of stuff, so I have people who I ask advice all the time, "How do you think we should improve this? How do you think we can write this? How do you think we can raise funds? How do you think..."

People always advise us. When I see people like that, we invite them on the board, and so they are part of the organization themselves, and then finally, we just have people who literally like talking about iamtheCODE and based on my story as well, because it’s a very unique rare story.

Where I come from, everything I suffered in my life to arrive here is very rare, so some people go and say, "You should talk to Mariéme, you should help her," and so that’s how iamtheCODE came about. Right now, that’s what we’re following. We’re following our truth.

We’re not diverting into any social media hoo-ha or hype. We’re focusing on the context, what we’re trying to do here. We have a very big mission. By 2030 we need to show one million women and girls to learn how to code. We need to show this. This is our credibility on the line.

We need to show this in a very systematic way and contextualize it, make people understand what it is. That’s where we are right now, and I think that we want people to understand this mission. It’s very rare that for an African person, but also an African organization is leading the way like this.

They’re mini coding programs, mini-mini programs trying to do things, but I think we’re in a unique position right now, where whoever join iamtheCODE, whoever support iamtheCODE, there is no way you will not see the impact, because you can see that.

You can see the girls who are 11 years old. In 2030 they’ll be 24, 25, and there’s no way you can’t see the return on investment. There’s no way. If you really put the heart into and say I will do this, you can see the results. You can do this with businesses, businesses can employ the girls. Remember, we’re targeting marginalized communities, communities that are forgotten.

If the slogan in the United Nations is "Leave no one behind," this is it. This is what you need to back. You need to back organizations like this that will not leave anyone behind, because we are not scared in going and meeting gays and lesbians, the marginalized, the disabled, the blind.

We’re not scared of meeting those people, because we think they are the future. We think that they’ve been forgotten for many decades. So many millions of dollars and billions of dollars. People are making money out of poverty, seriously. Now, if we want to be sincere with the sustainable development goals, we really need this.

We need to go and tell them, and I want to go to the United Nations and tell them exactly what I just told you. If I have to drag myself one day to stand in that podium and tell them, I will because I don’t think they’re hearing this message. I’m talking with everybody’s like, "Oh, Mariéme. You should go and talk to them. You should go and tell this."

No, I want to go to talk to the government, to the private sector, to investors, and so we can stop this narrative of leave no one behind, but there is no action because they do micro-actions, small conversations, write a report about it, a small partnership, or give funding to an organization that is known.

Why do you think Bill Gates and Melinda Gates are taking on the global goals. Because they have a reach, they have a platform, and they’re moving from the aid industry...If you look at it -- I was thinking yesterday -- it’s the same process.

They’ve working in the aid industry for how many years, and now they’re thinking that if we grab the global goals, we can change the narrative. We can make it better. That’s what they’re trying to do right now, and I think it’s a good cause for them to use their platform, but also I’ve learned from the mistakes.

Learned that maybe in the past we didn’t know that much, but now we’re giving voices to people. I’m a goalkeeper. I was the first one last year, that’s why I came here. This year, they’re going to have more goalkeepers, so I think that we need more people to do this work, but we need funding to do it. We need good partnerships, we need credible organizations.

I refuse partnerships, I refuse money, I refuse people dumping me their money, because I don’t want to be anybody’s slave. I don’t want to jump into a bad partnership. My credibility’s very important, so I want to make sure that I want people who will help me. When they give us their money, they can help us, help other people. That’s what my mission is right now.

What about your "champions"? Are there partnership programs in African countries? Which countries are you working with and which countries are you planning to expand it?

The way Africa is working for us, we have technology hubs, as I mentioned. They are tech hub, they’re 442. These tech hubs, I’m just going to record myself a little bit, because sometimes I say something and I forget what I said. [laughs]

I will send a copy of this transcript to you.

These 442 hubs, they were created around 2007, 2006 times. Kenya was the first hub. They are creative spaces just like C-Work in, was it in Taiwan?

Yeah.

Many of them, creative spaces, co-working spaces.

Which program was that?

This program, in 2009 when President Obama became president, he was the first president to actually help Africans to understand about...to help us tell our message because he’s Kenyan.

At the same time, he doesn’t want to just show that, "Americans, actually I just care about you guys," but he also wanted to show that he cares about Africa as well, and he was understanding his culture, where he came from.

This is sort of apps for Africa started. I travel in many, many countries to go and find the next African innovator. I did some work on climate change issues, business challenges. These created this tech ecosystem, and now we have 442 across Africa where it’s self-run by people.

What we do, we don’t reinvent or replicate. We go and add value. That’s what we do. All these organizations, for example in Uganda, in Madagascar, all of these countries, we go and add value. We go and tell people, "What do you think is working? What do you think is not working? How can we add value?" We just add value.

We add value physically by either helping them find funders, we look into the solution they’ve actually build, if this could be replicated or customized for Taiwan, or for China, or for whatever.

People like Jack Ma, for example, he’s been benefitting from this network. Facebook is the same. Many organizations are benefitting from this tech ecosystem.

10 years ago, if you asked me if people could have done that, would they care about Africa, I don’t think so because Africa was not ready to showcase impact, but now we have amazing solutions, African inventors who are building solutions.

What is missing is the understanding of social issues because when you live with social issues, you don’t see outside. What we’re trying to do at iamtheCODE is actually to come in and organize hackathons. They are two-days events...

They’re themed on SDGs?

Themed SDGs because we don’t want people to just go and organize SDG hackathons. They may not know how to do impact, but we bring the value in there. We bring the computer kit with Raspberry Pi, we have eight technologies we use.

OK. Do you have a formal partnership with the LEGO company?

We have formal partnership with LEGO. LEGO, the digital director, he’s just left now, but he used to invite me to LEGO offices. He used to sit on our board. He still sit on the board, and so LEGO don’t create partnerships but what they do, they can give you products, so they gave us products.

It’s like product donation?

Yeah. They gave us products to use. When I went to Japan, I met SoftBank. They are interested in working with us to do the Pepper, the robot, so I went to see them. I had discussion with them.

They have a nice curriculum, but I would like to go again in Tokyo to see if we can actually have a corporate curriculum for Pepper.

We have the Kano Computer Kits, as you know. We work with them. We’ve been using their product for very long time now. I’m part of the conversation with them all the time, and I have a share within Kano.

The idea.org, as you know, is done by the palace, so all of these technologies are free. They’re being used, but we have now decided to create our own content, our own curriculum, the blended curriculum we want, and we want to put this on a Raspberry Pi, either Raspberry pi or another board.

It doesn’t have to be Raspberry Pi because what we think, in the next two, three years if we have this, it will be the biggest breakthrough in history on how people are learning really, because not only you have the young girls and the young boys from these communities, these marginalized areas of the world while learning, but also doing amazing work.

In Liverpool, I had a young girl who came. She was very sad the first day she came, so she came and said to me...We invited her to come to the hackathon, and she was having some conversation, and then I said...I found her very shy. She put her glasses on, she didn’t want to speak to anybody, she was with her dad.

I said to the dad, "What’s happening?" He said, "Well, she’s been having identity crisis for quite a long time." I said, "OK, no problem." She sat down and I start talking to her.

She built an application for anti-bullying, but also to tell the world how you can actually have an identity without people bullying you. She created this solution by herself within two days, 24 hours.

What I learned from this exercise is that with iamtheCODE, we can impact people within 24 hours. This young lady sat down, she built her own solution, she had this in her heart, this issue of identity. She wanted to come out as a young girl and she couldn’t do anything.

She built a solution. I said to her, "What was the catalyst of for you to do?" She said, "Because in my school, I’m being bullied all the time. At the same time, people don’t like me because I’m very shy," but she’s very smart, very clever, and I said, "Why do you want to do this?"

She said, "I want to create a safe space for young people to go in to code their identity, and I have got the solution right now, and I want to develop this solution because you see, Donald Trump’s wife is talking about anti-bullying but she’s not doing anything about it. You know?" [laughs]

What’s the solution?

She built it herself. I’ve got it on my system. It’s the solution she built, and so she hasn’t found a name for it yet, but it’s beautiful website design.

She wants to take this further, and so I think that we should use solutions because not only that solution is addressing reducing inequality goal number 10, but also creating conversations around these situations.

She was like, "That’s why we have many young girls who are committing suicide, and boys, and things like that, because we’re not addressing these." I’m trying to use the SDGs as a way of not only educating people but informing them but also transforming.

We have something I always talk about in my talks. We try to educate, inform, and transform because I think that if you educate people, you can transform their minds in making an impact. That’s what the solutions are right now, and it’s very exciting. Whoever wants to do this with us, it’s very exciting.

As I mentioned in our previous conversation, I have a regular column in Taiwan’s "Business Weekly," where every three weeks I write about something that I want to call the business leaders to attention, and to take some action.

For example, the last one was about...We use machine learning to stop water leakage by allowing people to detect water leakage early.

That’s a partnership with the Taiwan Water Corporation and the president’s office through this three-month event we call Presidential Hackathon. The people in New Zealand discovered this work, and then the team is now in New Zealand helping them to combat climate change by using AI to detect water leakage.

The one before that was a partnership with MIT Media Lab. They have those self-driving small vehicles that are tricycle, the PEVs. It’s all open source, so we co-organized a hackathon in my office. My office looks like this, where we can just have orders. This is my office in Taipei. It’s built by a hundred or so social entrepreneurs.

You can have a hackathon here.

This is drawn by people with Down syndrome. It turns out they’re great artists.

I can tell you, because we’re working with ADHD. Have you seen them, the organization?

No. The ADHD foundation?

Yeah. I should connect you with them. They are a big organization called the...They are helping not children with Down’s syndrome, but they’re creating some people’s superpower for...I’ll show you, too.

Digital superhero academy?

Yes, superpower. You know that. I’m sure you know that ADHD. ADHD, they are...

They are attention deficient.

Yes. They’re a big organization in Liverpool, and they’re helping children do exactly this.

That’s great.

Because they are very smart. They’re very, very smart. I should connect you with them.

No, it’s great. This is, for example, how the partnership looks like. You just see those PEVs roaming in the Social Innovation Lab.

That’s really cool. This like a children chair?

Yes, it’s called a PEV. [laughs] They’re self-driving. The point is that it’s open source.

Self-driving?

It’s a self-driving tricycle. People can just go crazy with them and change, for example, to add emotion, to add where it’s looking, to allow people to understand this new species better.

That’s amazing.

Like co-domesticate each other, like we and wolves co-domesticated into dogs and modern human, and the idea, the call to action was for business leaders in Taiwan too, when they think about AI, think about extended intelligence that the crowd in AI can learn from each other instead of the usual narrative of AI replacing jobs, and things like that.

It’s amazing.

It’s like machine intelligence co-living with collective inteeligence. I would love of course to...

You are the minister of digital economy?

I am minister of digital affairs...

Have you met some African Ministers, digital economy ministers?

I just attended two meetings. One is in Edinburgh, it’s called Social Enterprise World Forum. It’s co-hosted by the Scottish Government and the British Council.

Next year, I’m going to be in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia, so I talk with many people who works in that region.

There’s a guy called Howard who works in... His company’s called Solar Ear, solar as in solar panel, and ear as in hearing aid.

He started in Botswana, and they teach people with hearing loss using sign language to teach them electronics so they can build their own hearing aid, and it’s solar-powered so they don’t have to pay for the battery ever again, and so it’s very reusable.

It’s amazing.

The people did assembly themselves, just as you said, that the people own the technology. They set the agenda as I attended...

You know that in Africa we don’t have any sign language, one of the things I’m trying to get people to invest. You know that we don’t have our own...

Sign language.

Yeah. I went to Brazil, and I met...some of the girls came to our hackathon. They don’t have the normal sign language so they use different sign language. We are leaving people behind, because they cannot understand...

Yeah, Howard was talking about that, because they have to build translators between the different sign languages.

They can’t understand, so they can’t...I’m just going to show you. They can’t understand anything, because they don’t have actually the right software. People are not even including them in the conversation, so they’re left behind in Brazil.

My girls are using...They came to the hackathon, they’re using all these sign languages, but they’re being left behind.

That’s something I would love to work on as well.

So interesting, ADHD.

We are also talking with the people in the SDGs for... It’s a think tank, SDG for Africa. They do the SDG index for Africa and...

How do you read that?

It’s SDG Center for Africa (SDGC/A) with the support of University of Columbia.

Where are they based?

Here in New York?

Actually it started in Rwanda; the headquarter is in Kigali.

All right, because I know them all.

Do you know Dr. Belay Begashaw?

Belay Begashaw. That’s the name.

He should be the former minister of agriculture or something like that.

Which country?

Ethiopia.

Addis Ababa. There are key organizations right now who are working on SDGs. I was going to show you this. There are key organizations, hundred percent you should speak to, and then I’m happy to make the connections for you.

Yes.

They are the data people. I don’t know if you know, but what iamtheCODE does on the data side is tracking the data for some of the part of the data.

Yes, I’m aware of that.

Their organization is built around the data. It’s the data...how do you measure all the impact of SDGs or how do you create your national roadmap. I know at Taiwan you guys are being advancing in doing that.

Yes. The way we’re helping is largely on the SDSN so far. I went to Vatican for SDSN meeting with Jeffrey Sachs and friends, because it’s academic, so Taiwan has no problem attending.

We have key Africans in Kenya who are really amazing, super amazing. From the data collection to the visualization of it. You absolutely need to speak to them, and if you do any funding or anything, you can see the impact because they are there for them.

Do you know anyone working in eSwatini?

In where?

eSwatini. Swaziland.

Previously called Swaziland.

In Tanzania?

Near South Africa.

It was called Swaziland.

I know Swaziland.

They’ve changed the name of the country. Now it’s eSwatini.

I know the minister of ICT in Swaziland.

They’re Taiwan’s only diplomatic ally in Africa right now...

Really?

...so any work we do physically, we need to start from there.

From Swaziland?

Yeah, because we don’t have embassy anywhere else.

Why did you choose Swaziland? You can choose my country, Senegal.

We’d love to!

This is the foundation. It’s called the ADHD Foundation, and so they help children with ADHD, and they’re based in the UK. They’re super amazing. They just won an award, and so they help children with ADHD.

They give them superpower. They don’t call it disability. They call them superpower, and so they are smart, and so right now, they want us to do a hackathon with the smartest people in the room.

I think they will be interesting in your program, but for Swaziland, I know people in Swaziland, but Swaziland, Lesotho, all those small countries are very interesting in partnering.

Taiwan is a country that Africa likes, but the Chinese government have scared them a lot about Taiwan, and so many African governments are scared in taking Taiwanese money because they’re scared of Chinese withdrawal.

I understand that.

We’re not scared because we don’t get any funding from China. [laughs] It’s a bit political but people like Jeff Sachs, they don’t have a good brand in Africa. Their aid is very top-down, talking down to Africans, and so now you have Africans, people like us who are coming and saying, "We’re the intellectuals."

I really think Africa needs to set your own agenda.

We’re setting it now. We have really amazing people but I think you need to speak to Philip Thigo. I don’t know if he’s here. I’m going to see today. He’s from Kenya. The president of my country is great. The president of Ghana is also good. He’s here.

They’re countries where you can really find a small partnership, and iamtheCODE could be the route for you, a small route. Usually, they don’t like doing...The way Japanese work in Africa, I think that’s how you guys should work.

Japan, they don’t like big publicity, but they are doing, for example, they invest into small organizations, and then they will let everything spread slowly, like TICAD, they have a big fund for Africa, but they don’t give the money.

The money is not yet into the African government bank account, but what they do, they will find a partnership with UN Women, or iamtheCODE, or things like that to help those people with specific projects. That’s how the Japanese, very serious people, that’s how they work.

The way we have been working now, we’re not so much with Africa but with the ASEAN countries and New Zealand and so on. It’s a model which I call warm power, meaning that we solve a local issue like the water leakage with some people there.

We open innovation. There’s no patents. There’s nothing like that. We make sure people they own the technology, they can either upgrade it without connecting back to Taiwan, and then once they own the technology, of course they brand it themselves.

We’re totally OK with that, and of course we hope that they keep contributing back on GitHub or whatever. I think that’s the...

I think that’s a good idea.

That’s the main idea because it’s in the SDGs. I mean, the...

17th.

...the goal, in the 17th, is about to make sure the innovation is accessible to all, and I think this is based on...We choose partners very carefully by their ability to produce reliable data. Once they show the ability to produce reliable data, now we just transfer whatever local solutions we have.

What is good about what you’re saying is important because the Europeans and Americans what they do, and this has been the big mistake they’ve made for the last, I will say 15 years, they haven’t educated data scientists. They haven’t created a pipeline for data scientists.

We want to create...We have 75 people who are data scientists in Africa today, so when they come to Africa, they want to talk about data collection, but Africa has got a data, plenty of data. They have metadatas everywhere. Africa is data. Everywhere. I was data when I was young.

The data exists but what doesn’t exist is, who’s going to teach them? Who’s going to teach people Excel? Who’s going to make the open data for people? Who’s going to help them understand what data is? They own information. We don’t have these sorts of schools.

Taiwan has been the top one on Global Open Data Index for a few years now, so...

I know, but I’ve been saying this to people. I’ve been saying Taiwan. They say, "Taiwan." I said, "Yeah, Taiwan."

I think this is really in line with our value because we believe that only when the people themselves own the data, like this, all the Taiwan Air Quality, these are collected by more than 2,000 people each using the air quality sensor in their home balcony and so on.

None of this paid by the government. It is entirely citizen science, and because of this, in other places in Asia, people will want to suppress this from the government because it threatens legitimacy.

For our government, we just join them and so we say, "In the places where you’re missing, we going to set up in the offshore wind turbines where there’s no way that the home makers can go there. We will set up our complementary systems there."

This is fascinating. I don’t know if you know, but I sit on the board of the World Wide Web Foundation?

Yes, I know.

One of the biggest work right now we’re thinking about is how do you get Africa connected in the next 12 years to the SDGs. Citizen data scientists, that is why we organize hackathons, to help them understand how do you collect the data.

The biggest issue for us, in Africa, is how do we make sure the national statistics of government -- all the national statistics in 54 countries, Africa -- how do you educate them to understand data collection, number one? Number two, how do you have them open the data so they don’t feel scared?

Like in Uganda, in some countries, they see data information, fake news, all of this, because no one has done a workshop or training, even send them to Taiwan for five days for you to teach them about...

We’re seeing a lot of adoption of IT, but in the terms of Digital Transformation, as you can see, the communities are really key.

Nobody has ever done that. We have some data conferences now and then, but it’s just telling. It’s not like teaching them.

It’s about empowering people to co-create.

Yeah, it’s just empowering. I think one of the things we should think about is to have even a hackathon, or an event in Taiwan, or somewhere in Africa. Ethiopia is good or Swaziland, where we have an event, and where we invite Africa data champions -- I know them a lot -- to come. That would be something great.

That’s great. I tried to doing something like that in an event in Burkina Faso, but I had to appear as a pre-recording, because Burkina Faso...

Cut the ties.

...allying with Taiwan just a week before I’m scheduled to talk... [laughs]

[groans]

...so we’ll have to start again. [laughs]

We’re now talking about Swaziland.

No, but you have me now. Don’t worry.

That’s great, so let’s make that happen.

The reason why they cut ties, sometimes, is because they’re scared. There’s no representative for you. Because I know Taiwan. I know how to talk about Taiwan in a more scientific and technologic way. That’s what I do.

African government, they haven’t been to Taiwan. I don’t want them to see Taiwan as just like a funding country...

I know. But what we’re now saying is that...

It’s more the technology...

...we can be all all working on the 17th global goal.

They need to understand the potential.

The potential is this: Because Taiwan is not a player within the UN dashboard, we can be the referees.

Exactly.

We can work with you on collaborative governance, for example, around distributed ledgers.

That’s true.

We can also be of assistance in accountability mechanisms, so that everybody keeps his word in a fair way.

The other interesting thing I think we can also do is -- one of my thinking right now is that I’m trying to speak to some people here -- hopefully by the end of the week, we can get something. Is to focus on the blockchain.

The reason why I love blockchain is because you can bring so many people to create their own blocks without nobody claiming credit for it. Remember, these African presidents, they like claiming credit for things they haven’t done.

I know.

If we create our own blockchain platform -- and I think this is what we need to do, urgently -- to create a blockchain platform on SDGs.

The project of air measurement that I just mentioned is called Airbox, and it’s integrated with IOTA blockchain system, so that whenever they store in the super computer that Taiwan government offers, if they take a snapshot, store it in a public chain so people will know that government will not change the number the day before the election.

This is very important because there are so many different sources going on. With people like the Distributed Ledger Technology Laboratory, that’s Taiwan, the Cheng Kung University. They work on Tangle identity, they worked on distributed environment data storage, they’re working on many other things.

I’m sure that it can be extended into statistics tracking, mineral mining, whatever.

We need the blockchain. Right now, it’s very important that if we can get a blockchain platform on girls’...The reason why we need the blockchain platform because even girls’ education...Let’s take girls education. Very simple topic.

Yeah, you need to have those paths into blockchain systems for governance to work.

40 years, Audrey. Nearly 50 years, girls’ education hasn’t worked because I was one of them. I’m 44, so girls’ education, nobody in the world cannot tell you why girls’ education is not working. There’s investment, there’s awareness, and Michelle Obama, Malala, all of them, "Let’s invest on goal number four, SDG Four, girls’ education."

You ask them, "Why do you think girls are not learning? Why do you think STEM education, why do you think girls are not going into classes? Why do you think girls are dropping out?" Nobody can answer you. Where is the money going? The classrooms? Is it for curriculum? Literacy numeracy? Nobody knows.

You go to government, remember, we’re talking about macho government who don’t understand girls’ education is important, literacy numeracy, getting the girls into a school. They don’t understand the social issues, so 45 years now... I’m nearly 50 years old.

No, I don’t see you.

It’s true. Nobody can tell you where is money going in girls’ education, so I decided that this week, wherever I’m going to go, I’m going to tell them, "Stop talking about girls’ education, to either fund girls’ education or do something about it."

I need to understand one block, which is the investment, the second block is the curriculum, and the practitioners, the teachers. How do we get girls to learn? There’s no need for Malala Yousafzai to stand up and say, "There’s 130 million girls who don’t have access to education," if you can’t give me the solution.

That’s right.

At the moment, you’re going to hear this a lot this week, like, "Girls’ education, girls’ education," and then on Friday when we leave... forget about it.

There’s a platform I want to show you. It’s called Dodoker. It’s a Taiwan social enterprise. For example, they had a partnership with Yunus Social Business Center in NCU. Basically, what they do is that they use either the Ethereum blockchain to track international fund.

For example, this is Nepal after the flood. People really want to donate, and if it’s just any other crowdfunding platform, it would just be in bar with people talking and things like that.

Different thing that they do, the value proposition is that they use the blockchain to track where exactly has the money has gone and flowed, and it’s not in cryptocurrency. They’re still tracking fiat money, but it’s just they require the accountants in many different points to obey some very simple protocols.

The point is that nobody has to bear this very expensive KPMG audit or things like that. They just follow some multiparty protocols, and you end up with pretty pictures like where the money has flowed, where did it go, where did it pass?

Even if the website goes away, you can reconstruct it very easily in a few lines of code where it’s going. Very importantly, they cannot change the record. They cannot go back and say, "I did that," or, "I did not do that."

I think that’s what is important. For example, if you look at one of the things I’ve been checking for the last couple of years, UNESCO, they’re the only organization, it’s not credible.

If you google UNESCO now and ask how many children don’t have access to education, the same data, 130 million, they’ve been using this for nearly five years.

It’s like a clock that stopped?

It hasn’t changed.

So it’s right twice a day.

The data hasn’t changed, and so I ask them, I ask the minister, I met her, I said, "So who is collecting this data? Are you sure? Until now? 130 million?" It’s the same data. Bill Gates use it. Melinda Gates use it. UNICEF use it.

Everybody is using the same data, so I went and challenged them. I said, "Are you sure? Surely can I have a look at this data? How is this collected? How did you make up this number?" None of them can tell me, and I don’t think they’re trying to cheat or anything.

I just think that no one has ever planted this seed in their head to say, "Actually, it could be maybe 160 million. It could be maybe less than that," but there is no system.

Do you mean there’s no accountability mechanism for people to answer where the number comes from?

I sincerely believe from my heart that the blockchain platform will be the best way to show if the number has gone up or down. We need to have a conversation about this 130 million because it’s going everywhere, on infographs, on the reports, everywhere.

It’s been happening for the last...Every year. It’s like the World Economic Forum Gender Report. Every year they had...It’s all the 10 years, another 5. I sat with the lady who’s writing it. I said, "What is the methodology behind what you say? Because sometime you said to me it’s gonna be like this year, and then next time it’s gonna be like...You’re scaring people. Is this like a mechanism of scaring people?"

She said, "No, but we collect the data to the consultant and to the countries." I just think that if we have a blockchain platform to track and then to help these people understand, the 130 million will go up or down.

At the moment there’s no mechanism for this to go down, and if you google it right now, if you go to UNESCO website, it’s the same data, over 65 million. I have no idea where this data is coming from, and I think this...

The reliable data partnerships, I think this really is it.

It has to come from an organization, credible organization, like our organization to get this done. We see the girls everywhere, but I don’t think those girls are...I was a missing data. I’m part of the missing millions. I never had a birth certificate, so I don’t think you can really count me in if I didn’t have a birth certificate.

I’m part of the missing millions of the data, that’s why I don’t understand where the data’s coming from, from UNESCO. But they have this missing million report done by the...I think it’s an organization. It’s not OECD, but there’s an organization in London.

I went to see the lady. I said to her, "Missing millions? How many are we missing now?" [laughs] That’s why I think it’s very urgent that we actually put a blockchain platform together about these topics. Urgently.

When I was in Vatican they also talked about this issue, because people will not actually voluntarily build such a system if not for the fact that they know everybody else will recognize it.

With Africa, it seems to me that everybody need to join in a fair fashion, like forced open innovation, so it will not be dominated and changed by some people.

Also, these people...For example, in my country it’s not mandatory to register your child. You don’t have to, because some women have 13 children or 10 children in some remote place of Africa. They only start thinking about birth certificate when the child is maybe 17 or 18, but it’s too late.

This is one of the goals. I thought people agreed to change that situation?

They don’t have the motivation to?

[laughs] No, they don’t have a motivation, but also there’s no mechanism. My learning about the whole thing is that if you don’t have the eggs, you can’t make omelet. This is my thinking. My thinking is if you don’t have the eggs, you cannot make an omelet.

These people, they have the talk, they have the platforms, but they don’t have the eggs to make anything. Then the ego is so big, and also the lack of empathy and compassion that are also relating to people is not there, so all they think about, "You know, OK. Maybe it’s gonna work."

Senegal don’t even have a census. Every 10 years in the UK we have a census date, but in Senegal, it’s not even mandatory to do the census. I took this to the government of Kinshasa. If you go to Kinshasa, how many millions of people are you? One guy said 87, the other guy said 67, the other guys 57.

It depends on who does the counting. [laughs]

I said to him, "Who’s counting?" and I said, "OK. Who is the minister of planning?" I said, "Minister of Planning, est-ce que vous faites...?" "Oui, mais, you we doing this, we doing this." I ask these difficult questions. It’s not because they don’t know how to do it.

At the ministry of planning there’s no system into place to do this, or they’re not asking the Africans, the young people who design the census app. When I went to help Kofi Annan and did the apps for Africa, what I did is that I helped them understand about census, and so we designed our own census app. How do you take the census app to give it to the government?

Why do you think human trafficking is high in Africa? It’s because a young girl can be taken from their country without nobody knowing. That’s how I was trafficked as a young girl. Traffickers, they can traffic easily if you don’t have a identity or birth certificate.

I said to my government, "If you have an SPCC in the UK of somebody missing, a data somewhere, you can track people but they can’t track anyone. That’s why there’s millions of people missing around the world, because there’s no tracking system.

If you don’t have a passport, you don’t have ID card, you don’t have address, who knows? You are homeless, you’re walking on the street.

Sans-papiers.

At African Ministers of the Digital Economies...We used to call them ministry of ICT, and now the African Ministers are called African Ministers of Digital Economy. I know two who I should connect you with. They’re really amazing. One of them is in Belgium, Alexander De Croo. I’m sure maybe he’s here. He’s from the ministry of Belgium.

Also, Cina Lawson from Togo, she’s a woman. A brilliant woman. She is now bringing a new solution like mapping census. She’s trying to start slow, because that’s a whole process, and she doesn’t have the funding for it. I think she’s looking for funding to do those typical big projects in her country...

I’m happy to get to know them.

Things like that. She’s a minister of digital economy in Togo. Brilliant. She used to live in the US and used to work for the World Bank, and she’s now gone to Togo to take that post. They have these ideas brooming and they want to do that, they want to do this. They have these ideas small projects that will help them. It’s not there yet, but they have all these ideas.

One is from Togo, and the other gentleman is...

From Brussels, but he’s doing lots of work now on SDGs in Africa, in Francophone Africa, because we have a...

He’s not African.

He’s not African, no. But I know minister of ICT, minister of digital economies in Africa, I know most of them. If you need contact with them to either learn from them or suggest some ideas...

As I said, all we want is to, for example, start a conversation about the real people need there and also empower people. This movement that I refer to over again, which I’m a part of, is called g0v, and you can check the story. I think it’s in g0v.asia, but the idea is very simple.

It’s that if we say anything in government in Taiwan that is not doing well, for example, the budget, or legislation or whatever, instead of complaining about a service or website, we just go and put our shadow version by changing "o" to a zero, so you don’t have to google. It’s very easy to find.

For every government service you can change o to a zero and get to the shadow government which is always open data and interactive. This is the first g0v project. It’s a visualization of the national budget so that people can click through each one of them and have a real discussion among themselves.

It’s so easy.

The great thing about g0v is that because most of our work is creative commons, meaning that we relinquish most of our copyright, so by the procurement cycle comes, the government just merge it back, so it just become government service.

It’s amazing.

This year...

The website is what, gov...

g0v. You can go to g0v.tw, but there’s many other chapters, g0v.asia...Yeah, g-0-v. Yeah, it’s a 0, .asia, and also .tw of course.

We should have this .africa. We should have this for Africa.

Yes. Whenever we travel, like when I go to Italy there’s now g0v Italy, [laughs] because as you can see, you don’t need a license from us. The logo is not trademarked. This is just a idea, and you can basically join however you want.

This summit has 23 countries coming, and they all share in the same way of -- what we call -- forking the government, taking a government service, making it better, relinquish the copyright, be the government.

This is amazing, because we had Kenyans. They did something where they develop a solution where they can check the salary of the ministries in Kenya. The lady who used to do that, called Ory Okolloh, she used to be the Google Policy Manager, a very, very good lady.

Now she’s working for Omidyar Network doing some investment. She was the first tech activist to talk about the expenditure of every month parliament.

The Omidyar Network people will also participate in the g0v summit.

That’s good. That’s very good.

In the 2017 World Congress on IT, actually g0v had its own track inviting Stephen King to come over to talk about how to spread this methodology.

This is good.

So they were aware of the community.

They’re aware of it. That’s fantastic. Omidyar is good. I met him on the plane the other day.

That’s great.

This is fantastic. How can I help with this one?

Basically, this message is very easy to spread, because this is literally just a domain name hack. Anyone in any country who is willing to improve how their country does better accountability, they can just start registering a domain name by their own.

If we want to do one in Senegal or in other countries, how do we do that? We just register a domain name?

Yeah, you just register a domain name. You don’t even have to ask me. You just register a domain name, and then we make sure that your work becomes very visible in the international platform.

One of the thing we focus on mainly for the government sector of iamtheCODE is designing policies. Most of these African government -- they’re going to come here, you’re going to hear them out -- they have probably frameworks, you call them. Or they have wishes, I call them.

They have wishes to improve girls’ education or climate change.

If you really look into the implementation, it’s where the problem is. Then, the money that goes in sometime get diverted. What we want to do with the government, mainly, is to help them design the right solutions.

We design many of them. We want to design the right solution, but also bring accountability into girls’ education.

That’s the most important thing.

If we can do that, that would be perfect.

I think we can empower, because that’s your message. The student will think, with iamtheCODE, I am the one to make changes. I don’t have to wait for the government to build a code.

IamtheCODE, which is why I think this resonates with the g0v message, which is always when we find ourselves complaining "why nobody does it?" We can remind ourselves that we can be that nobody. Just go and do it. That’s the main idea.

This is a wonderful idea. This is great. I don’t know if I’m free on the 7th. I’m going to...

Maybe one of your friends can come, or you can get someone to visit Taiwan.

I’m going to Kenya, but I will...

Maybe you can ask one of your acquaintance to come and visit.

I will see if they can come. This is going to be very, very good. If I can come to Taipei, I will definitely come. I don’t need a visa to come to Taiwan, so I came already. This is wonderful idea.

This is good.

Through this civil sector and social sector collaboration, we don’t have to be institutionalized through, for example, the Taiwan government or the Taiwan Foreign Service. It could be entirely empowered by the grassroots people.

We make sure that the right people, the right technology, the right open-source projects appear there just in time, but it’s all for you openly to use or not use. I think this is one of the best way that we can do this kind of collaboration is around digital decolonization.

No, I understand. I think it’s fantastic. I think for us this week...

Are you leaving today?

I’m leaving tonight, yes.

You’ll be leaving tonight. That’s fantastic. I think there are ways of working together. I’m happy to make intros for them to know that there’s another side of the conversation.

Cina Lawson, she’s brilliant, from Togo. I think she will like this because she’s very well respected now by the president because she’s very transparent and very tough woman. Also, the minister of education in Kenya. Have you met her yet? Amina Mohammed?

No.

She’s also a brilliant woman, and so they all like iamtheCODE. They try to help us raise funding and get the conversation going.

They’re always sharing the examples of iamtheCODE, so she’s also now the lady to...She used to head the World Trade Organization, Amina Mohammed, and then she was the Foreign Affairs Minister. Now she moved to becoming the Minister of Education in Kenya. Brilliant woman.

I think they will love to...My advice is always to find a way of having a conversation between yourself as a minister. That’s probably best conversation, and then talk about tech.

My advice is, wherever you go and meet African minister, focus on the technology you can bring, not on the relationship of Africa and Taiwan.

I understand.

The technology, that’s what Africa need now. That will give you a door to be part of the conversation and help them design solutions because they’re very desperate. We have innovation in the continent. Slow innovations are starting up, but mainly, like I said, the processes are always a struggle.

The ideation is there, the wishes are there, they all want to do something big. The Rwandese government for example, they want to digitalize all the birth certificate. I helped the Mozambican government with e-government solutions.

They all have projects like this they’re working on, or they want but sometimes the just don’t have an example, a very simple example, not too much, not too expensive to do it. Usually it’s just big ideas and they don’t have...If you can come in, if Taiwan and yourself can come in as a tech partner...

A facilitator really, and just facilitate the local people, local girls to understand the technology and maintain it.

My advice is to always have a partner who is non-governmental, not just NGOs, but some of the NGOs are partner with government. The reason why people are partners with us because we’re not scared in saying no to government.

Always try to find an organization that is independent thinking, they can do their own thing. Sign NDA and MOU always before. Make sure that everything is clear before.

Unfortunately, there are some occasions where African government sign a partnership with a Chinese organization, and then if they hear Japan or Taiwan or Malaysia is getting involved, they give up the deal.

I know.

You lose money.

I know.

You need to be careful on that. Those are my advice. For us, we’re happy to partner with you as soon as possible. Like I said to you, we would like to double up our curriculum. Anything you can help us with, we’re ready to work with you.

I will relay the message. You or someone you trust, if you attend a g0v summit, I will introduce personally to the people to meet on the technology front.

We want to partner with Taiwan on the tech side. I’ll be very proud to have some of our solution designed with Taiwanese investment. I’ll be personally happy with that.

I will also write, in my future Business Weekly columns, a little bit more about the collaborative nature of the Taiwanese civil society.

They’re very nice people. I think they are doing amazing work, but when we went to do the SDGs in Taiwan, they were very impressed with us. If you can talk to them, by all means.

I think this could be a great partnership. I think it could be a very good example for an Africa tech ecosystem to show them that they need to get out of their comfort zone to learn from...

I think Taiwan is very, very well-positioned to have a footstep in the continent, because the relationship China has with Africa is not what China could have. It will not be a conflict of interest. For us, it’s mainly if the African government can look into the technology you guys have and SDGs and double up them software and hardware.

The SDGs is this neutral collaboration zone. We’re not competing against anyone.

No, I agree. That’s great.

That’s great. It’s very good meeting you.

Thank you. [laughs]

Thank you.