Sharing successes — and failures

The Philippines has found success by making ICTs a key part of broader development efforts, said Mario G. Montejo, Secretary of the Department of Science and Technology. “In all our initiatives, ICTs are embedded either directly or indirectly,” he said, giving two useful examples: One was a “Smart Agriculture” programme that guides farmers when to plant, fertilize and harvest, based on site-specific weather data. The results were that less water and fertilizers were needed and that farmers could lower their costs, improving productivity and efficiency. The other example was disaster preparedness put in place since the deadly 2013 typhoon. Hundreds of data centres were used to gather and analyse data. “Because of the improvement in early warning, we suffered zero casualties despite many recent disasters,” said Mr Montejo.

Underscoring the value of countries sharing best practices, Mr Sovaleni said that Tonga had learned from Japan’s experience on disaster management and put early-warning sirens in place, which had helped save countless lives in the disaster-prone area.

But sharing successes isn’t always enough.

“It’s important to share best practices, but also information about failures” so that we can all make progress, said Areewan Haorangsi, Secretary General of the Asia-Pacific Telecommunity (APT). Participants around the conference hall nodded their heads in agreement.

Jaume Salvat Font, CEO of the Aggaros ICT consultancy and former CEO of Andorra Telecom, said that governments need to focus more on end-user services and business needs in order to create more successful policies. “If we want to be happy with the results, we have to do something different,” said Mr Salvat. “The experience of the user is the most important thing. Policy and regulation need to keep pace with technological change. This is why many countries’ policies have failed.” For instance, he continued: “If an operator is interested in investing in rural areas, they should get an advantage in heavily populated areas — to compensate for the added business risk.”

The Secretary-General of Malaysia’s Ministry of Communications and Multimedia, Dr Sharifah Zarah Syed Ahmad, reinforced the need to put the end user first when designing ICT policies. That’s why Malaysia has introduced “citizen-centric” data collection, which aims to work with people on the ground to co-create and co-produce the data. Dr Syed cited Malaysia’s “Connecting the Unconnected” programme, which solicited early feedback from rural populations before launching. She said they are always asking the question: “To what extent do we engage the people who are the users of ICTs?”

Malaysia’s demand-driven approach to ICT development also includes fostering ICT entrepreneurship, something many countries are striving to do.