Brief Concept Paper on ICTs
Brief Concept paper on ICTs for ALL Pakistan Vision-2015 Introduction
The last decade has seen information and communication technologies (ICT) dramatically transforming the world, enabling innovation and productivity increases ,connecting people and communities, and improving standards of living and opportunities across the globe. While changing the way individuals live, interact, and work, ICT has also proven to be a key precondition for enhanced competitiveness and economic and societal modernization, as well as an important instrument for bridging economic and social divides and reducing poverty. The extraordinary achievements of ICT has made it possible to look forward and imagine the next transformations enabled by ICT—transformations 2.0. The pace of technological advance is accelerating and ICT is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous and intrinsic part of people’s behaviors and social networks as well as of business practices and government activities and services. In Pakistan although we have achieved some tangible progress in the areas of teledensity , Internet growth, computer usage and use of mobile phones etc but still we have remained far behind the International standards in understanding and implementing ICTs for development specially in health, education, agriculture, governance and national integration. While world have moved from E-Government to Mobile Government and from ICT for development to ICTenabled transformations like Internet banking, Building communities around digital highways, ICT’s growing impact on poverty reduction, ICT for an effective social strategy, Localization 2.0 etc, we are still confused in applying ICT in development projects spending huge public money. As a state Pakistan is answerable to a number of international initiatives in 2015 like MDGs , WSIS etc. Are we still planning to be in the bottom of ranking or at least want to be at a face saving stage. ICTs also have built-in capacities to enable the developing societies
The last decade has seen information and communication technologies (ICT) dramatically transforming the world, enabling innovation and productivity increases ,connecting people and communities, and improving standards of living and opportunities across the globe. While changing the way individuals live, interact, and work, ICT has also proven to be a key precondition for enhanced competitiveness and economic and societal modernization, as well as an important instrument for bridging economic and social divides and reducing poverty. The extraordinary achievements of ICT has made it possible to look forward and imagine the next transformations enabled by ICT—transformations 2.0. The pace of technological advance is accelerating and ICT is increasingly becoming a ubiquitous and intrinsic part of people’s behaviors and social networks as well as of business practices and government activities and services. In Pakistan although we have achieved some tangible progress in the areas of teledensity , Internet growth, computer usage and use of mobile phones etc but still we have remained far behind the International standards in understanding and implementing ICTs for development specially in health, education, agriculture, governance and national integration. While world have moved from E-Government to Mobile Government and from ICT for development to ICTenabled transformations like Internet banking, Building communities around digital highways, ICT’s growing impact on poverty reduction, ICT for an effective social strategy, Localization 2.0 etc, we are still confused in applying ICT in development projects spending huge public money. As a state Pakistan is answerable to a number of international initiatives in 2015 like MDGs , WSIS etc. Are we still planning to be in the bottom of ranking or at least want to be at a face saving stage. ICTs also have built-in capacities to enable the developing societies