IKED - News - ICT and Empowerment

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..:: ICT and Empowerment
The issue how to pave the way for more productive and widespread use of ICT is at the top of the agenda for many countries around the world, including for the poorest of societies in Asia, Africa and Latin America. This is also an area in which countries are looking for international cooperation involving all the key actors - governments, businesses, local communities, NGOs, international organisations - as a means to find viable ways forward. Development assistance remains very important, and can be the key for funding needed infrastructure or for facilitating training programmes, but real progress requires room for bottom-up initiative and genuine buy-in from multiple stakeholders.

So far, the United States has often been viewed as the leading country in terms of offering favourable conditions for investment and in capturing the benefits of the information society. Gradually, however, other regions and countries display important progress. Today, it is particularly cellular technology that presents a major opportunity for enhanced roll-out of ICT and a range of much needed new applications. In this area, the technological leaders and most dynamic innovative search for progress appear to reside in European and Asian countries.

In the context of ASEM, i.e. the “Asia-Europe meeting” which represents a process of dialogue and cooperation that brings together more than 40 member countries of the EU and East Asia, have addressed the issues of ICT-use on a number of occasions over the last few years. On November 30th – December 1st in Ha Noi, ICT ministers addressed the following issues:

ICT policy and regulatory environment.
Enhancement of enterprises' capabilities to make use of ICT.
Cooperation on research and education facilities.
Empowering local communities in the use of ICT.

The ministerial meeting, which addressed “ICT applications in the area of Human Capital Development and Capacity Building”, examined and agreed on projects of future collaboration. Concrete proposals have been advanced by organisations in various countries. Among them, IKED was engaged in preparing proposals for the ministerial in the areas of ICT, remittances and micro credit, and also in the area of ICT and health.

There is a growing realisation in developing countries that mobile technology brings an enormous opportunity for increased efficiency as well as more equitable and better-diffused economic and societal progress. Real leapfrogging is under way. Among the 49 countries officially classified as Least Developed Countries (LDCs), already a few years ago the number of mobile subscribers exceeded the fixed ones in more than half of them. Further, the potentially most beneficial impacts stem from the ability of cellular technology to reach beyond that of other communication tools because it is more accessible to the illiterate and those without keyboard skills, inherently multi-lingual, and can cross cultural and educational barriers more easily than other means of communication. It is relatively easy to use, relatively cheap, light, and can be personalised. Following recent technological advances, it will also soon be marked by low energy use. Battery recharging can, for instance, be managed from local, renewable sources. With technical compatibility on the advance, it is becoming a gateway for many poor people to accessing the Internet. At the same time, there is also a widespread fear of increasing gaps between those who have and those who do not have access. There is a realisation that a number of complementary reform efforts are needed to realise the potential, and that actions must be taken swiftly in order for communities not to be left behind.

All these opportunities and perceptions account for a rare opportunity for international cooperation that is framed not only to fit government bureaucracies, but designed for the purpose of freeing up initiatives in local communities. Most important at this juncture is to allow for an articulation of their needs so as to enable the roll-out of high-capacity low-cost mobile technologies pulled by, and tailored to addressing, their real needs.

IKED’s engagement in these issues is multifaceted. In various major international events, such as the 2008 World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship in Dubai, UAE, or the 2008 Global Forum in Athens, Greece, IKED participates in the advisory committees and organising teams to bring such perspectives and issues on board. This is further elaborated in the events section of this website. In the ASEM collaboration, IKED’s engagement in the specialist meetings on ICT goes back to the conference organised jointly by IKED and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Sweden March 2003. The theme of that event was “Globalisation and ICT - The Role of Government, Private Sector and Civil Society in an Information Society for All”. That topic summoned a range of participants, not only from government services but also among the other stakeholder categories mentioned above. Vietnam’s ICT Ministers meeting in Hanoi represented one follow-up to the event. The IKED conference also contributed to advancing other important policy agendas, including the evolution of the Global Trust Center (www.globaltrustcenter.org).

Under the heading “empowering local communities”, IKED continues to play an active role, in collaboration with ASEM partners, to advance concrete new initiatives as regards:

ICT and elderly care - collaboration to engage families and local communities in the role-out of digital tools to enrich old age and facilitate care of the elderly.
Diffusion of ICT through a project summoning key stakeholders - ranging from diaspora, international banks and local banks to local communities - to improve conditions for remittances, addressing security issues, reducing costs and improving usage of funds, including through linkages to seed funding and micro-finance in developing countries.