Maldives is an archipelago nation in the Indian Ocean where the two main industries are tourism and fisheries. The Maldives government faces the challenge of providing services and opportunities to an extremely dispersed population over two hundred inhabited islands. In recent years, the government has increasingly recognized the important development impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) to overcome barriers of social, economic and geographical isolation.

The government is keen to develop ways to broaden and strengthen the economic base, and to develop the human resource base in a complementary way. This has led to a commitment to explore ways of utilizing ICT and increasing ICT skills in the communities, especially among the young, to reduce the country's economic and employment dependency on the fisheries and tourism sectors.

In order to create an enabling environment for ICTs to flourish in the Maldives, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is providing a Preparatory Assistance (PA) that has as one of its prime objectives to assist the Maldives government in developing a national ICT policy through a multistakeholder consultation process. Part of the strategy for developing this policy involves building the capacity of high-level government officials and decision-makers through ICT awareness raising.

In line with this strategy, the Asia-Pacific Development Information Programme (APDIP) hosted a specialized ICT Policy Study Tour in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 4-8 August 2003 for a selected group of Maldives government officials. The objective of the study tour programme was to expose these officials to the development of organisational, national and international ICT policies from both a global and a Malaysian perspective.

The programme involved presentations by APDIP ICT policy specialists, study visits to the Malaysian Ministry of Energy, Communications and Multimedia, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission, and field trip to the Multimedia Super Corridor. At the end of the programme, a session was dedicated to brainstorming, thus providing a forum for exploring relevant issues and resolving concerns regarding the actual formulation of a national ICT policy.

The intended outcome of the study tour was to equip the participants to make a solid and substantial contribution to the national ICT policy multistakeholder consultative process that will be conducted by international specialists under the UNDP PA.