MORE efforts are needed to bridge the digital divide in the country. While there has been progress in laying the enabling environment through infrastructural development, information and communications technology (ICT) needs to be further harnessed to address critical human development concerns such as poverty, healthcare, education, environmental management and economic development.

These are some key findings in the summary of the Regional Human Development Report on Promoting ICT for Human Development in Asia 2004: Realising Millennium Development Goals.

The report explores how ICT can promote human development, and identifies the challenges that lie ahead for Asia towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals endorsed by world leaders in September 2000. It is based on research conducted in nine countries – China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Thailand and Vietnam – and took a year to be completed.

James George Chacko, programme specialist of the Asia Pacific Development Information Programme, said as far as Malaysia is concerned, effective partnerships are needed between the public and private sectors to complement each other’s role in helping to bridge the digital divide among the communities.

“The successful use and exploitation of ICT in accelerating human progress and to achieve the clear goals and targets set by the Millennium Development Goals rests on the perceived interests of all stakeholders, including the Government, civil society organisations, the private sector and individuals,” he told Computimes.

“All efforts thus far have been very sporadic, and there is an urgent need to scale successful pilots to more extensive applications,” he said.
More emphasis must be placed on a number of areas, James said, including strengthening the national institutional mechanisms to support the empowerment of women through the use of ICT and skills training,
supporting non-governmental organisations in terms of funding and training for Web site development and administration, building more multi-cultural and local content Web sites, and continuing to promote ICT-driven global partnerships.

Simultaneously, more efforts are needed to strengthen and refine the partnerships necessary to spur the Multimedia Super Corridor (MSC) to the next level of performance, he added.

According to James, there is also a need for proper indicators on ICT and the Millennium Development Goals by the Government. “In assessing the progress of ICT in the context of achieving any set of socio-economic goals, there would have to be an emphasis on availability indicators. The critical problem in anchoring ICT within the Millennium Development Goals is the choice of appropriate indicators and assigning weightages to these for composition.”

As such, suitable impact studies on the use of ICT to ascertain its
effectiveness and to provide useful policy input need to be undertaken, he explained.

James added that there is an urgent need to go beyond supply-linked indicators (such as those pertaining to the usage of personal computers, Internet facilities and density of telephones) to assess whether the technology is promoting the development process in the desired direction for which information on ICT applications, purpose of usage, agencies involved and the legal framework regarding adoption of ICT is needed.