So hello everyone. Once again, my name is Clara Chimo Koro and I'm the chief operating officer at my beautiful Africa, we Travel technology company based in Lagos in Nigeria.And it's such an honor to be amongst great women in technology, discussing about innovations and fourth industrial revolution and how it's shaping the new narratives in our world. And so my area of core competence is in building websites, um a web developer, but I also run a start up that is focused on the tourism industry in Africa. So our um area of you know, focus is basically to use technology to transform the tourism industry in Africa by deploying tools in technology to enhance processes and systems for companies that operate in that sector. It's quite um a daunting feat because in more developed economies, we have travel, technology has fully developed, you know, um niches in the travel sector, but it's new in Africa. And my car company is one of those that is truly championing that and what we aim to do to be able to reach a wider audience is to develop a summit, which we call a tourism and technology summit Africa series and what we do is we bring um people both from the technology sector and from the hospitality sector, the travel sector, the tourism sector together to discuss the technologies that are being deployed to make businesses operating in this sector is much more efficient, much more profitable, much more seamless.

And it's gaining ground. For instance, one of the greatest achievement in that area is the deployment of artificial intelligence for the use of hotels to be able to track their guests, to be able to personalize messages for their guests, to be able to keep the database of their guests up to date and reach them with messages, you know, continuously without um having to use manual deployment to track who comes into their hotel and how their guests actually feel about their self.

The deployment of A I tools have really, really done quite a lot in that area. And it's also raised their profitability because it's automated the systems to such a place where it has little or no human interference. And in Africa, a lot used to be done manually. But gradually with the consultancy that we're providing for a lot of companies, majority of them are already deploying some of the Softwares and also already telling their clients to download some of the apps that will make their journeys, their trips and the use of their services.

Much more seamless. When we talk about tourism and technology, a lot of people still find it a bit difficult to understand the correlation, especially in the parts of um the areas where we try to make people understand that there is a huge synergy between tourism and technology.

I mean, a little analogous, for instance, if you want to take a trip to Africa, you've never been to any country in Africa before. I guess the first thing you do is go on the internet and try to do some research. So where it becomes difficult is if there are no digital footprints of where you're going to on the internet, you have little or no information about the navigation process. When you get into such a city, for instance, there are no Google Maps or no ways apps to help you track your movement. So it becomes a lot more difficult. And in that regard that traveler might be forced to make another choice in terms of deploying their funds into traveling to another country that they can find more easy access to through technology. So essentially what we try to do is build up the momentum for companies to begin to adopt technology in their use of the daily business activities so that people can find digital footprints online when they make some research about how to travel to such a city or to such a country.

If it's for vacation, if it's for business, what this translates to it's that there's capital inflow. If people can find online, the services they need from your company and make it easy for them to use tools at their disposal to make bookings for those services. Another area that is becoming um very, very difficult to keep tab on is fintech in the tourism industry. Financial technology is extremely, very, very important. So I had a very um personal experience. Last week, I hosted a delegation from the Gambian Tourism Board and there was a glitch because they couldn't use the cards they came with from Gambia in our banks here in Nigeria. And they couldn't, they couldn't, you know, um access funds. It became very, very embarrassing.

They actually had to call a citizen of Gambia that they knew in the city there and in Lagos to be able to access some liquid cash to utilize for their trips. And that really made it very, very obvious that there is a gap in the area of financial technology. And this is what we're talking about if technology could provide solutions. So that when I travel from one country to another, I would not be scared of feeling stranded because I can't use my credit card access funds because of the network inter interconnectivity. That is really um a a huge, huge problem for some travelers. So in all these areas of points and um connections, we can't see that there is a huge connection between tourism and technology because when people say tourism, people actually just think it's only um when you're going for vacations that you're talking about tourism. When you get into the airport on a daily basis, travelers are coming in and moving out and almost three quarters of those traveling and coming in actually going to stay in hotels, make use of apps to utilize taxi services, make use of navigation tools such as map, map apps to be able to know their way around.

So when this becomes normal to people in the tourism sector, they can actually connect the dots and know that there is a lot that technology has to do in travel. Even when we use such um G DS services like Amadeus or um Saba in booking our services as travel agents, we realize the huge huge implications. If there is a a shutdown of those um portals, it makes it almost impossible to work. So there is definitely a huge connection between tourism and travel. And that's the um would I say gospel, we're trying to preach in Africa and that's why we buffer at the summit called Tourism and Technology Summit. And yes, we're getting quite a lot of huge um responses from people. And um for 30th of September that we're hosting this year on it's going to be a global one because we're going to get speakers from different parts of the world and we're going to stream those um you know, those speakers presentations globally so that people can actually learn about the new technologies that are operating for the benefit of the travel tourism and hospitality industry.

Thank you very much. I would like to um know if anyone would like to um share any information or questions so that we could actually um share more knowledge. Thank you.