IKED - News - ICT and Empowerment

IKED TOPICS

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ::
..:: 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, issues that matter for the diffusion of constructive ICT-use have been addressed on a number of occasions. A meeting of ICT ministers was held on November 30th – December 1st, 2006, in Ha Noi, Vietnam. Following work on the concluding Action Statement, for which IKED served as Secretariat, ICT ministers focused on the following:

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.

Further, the ministerial meeting encouraged new collaborative work on "ICT applications in the area of Human Capital Development and Capacity Building",. Drawing on the agreed mandates, concrete proposals have since been advanced by organisations in various countries. Among them, IKED prepared proposals and has been carrying out projects in the areas of "ICT, remittances and micro credit”, and in the area of “ICT and health".

There is a now a strong awareness that mobile technology brings enormous opportunity for better-diffused economic and societal progress across the board. Even among most countries officially classified as Least Developed Countries (LDCs), the number of mobile subscribers now well exceeds the fixed ones. Further, the potentially most beneficial impacts stem from the ability of cellular technology to reach beyond 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. There is also a realization, however, that complementary reform efforts and initiatives are needed to fulfil the potential for beneficial use.

Associated with this development, international collaboration is becoming framed less by government bureaucracies and more for the purpose of freeing up initiatives by local communities. Important is to enable the roll-out of high-capacity, low-cost mobile technologies pulled by real needs, and tailored to supporting content that matters for, e.g., broad-based learning, improved health, secure financial transactions, and reliable information.

IKED's engagement in these issues is multifaceted. For various major international fora, such as the annual Global Forum (held in Washington DC, November 8-9, 2010) or the World Summit on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, IKED participates in Advisory committees and organises teams to bring relevant perspectives and issues on board. 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 Malmö and Helsingborg, 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 from the other stakeholder categories mentioned above. Vietnam’s ICT Ministers’ meeting in Hanoi represented one follow-up to the event. The event also contributed to advancing various policy agendas, including the evolution of the Global Trust Center (www.globaltrustcenter.org).

Under the heading "empowering local communities", IKED continues to collaborate with ASEM partners to advance new initiatives with regard to:

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.
Effective and fair international remittances, to involve diaspora, international banks, local banks, and local communities, addressing security issues, costs and usage of funds, encouraging linkages to sound seed funding and micro-finance in developing countries.