Bhutan

Steeped in tradition and culture, this Himalayan kingdom is cautious about engaging new technologies – it wants to ensure the unique Bhutanese way of life is preserved. But modern technologies are now finding their place alongside centuries old traditions.

Bhutan was one of the last Asian countries to connect to the Internet. In June 1999, the kingdom’s first Internet Service Provider was started, partly with support from PAN. It was called DrukNet. We visit Bhutan Telecom which operates the service to find out how wiring the country has begun to change how the Bhutanese people communicate and relate to the outside world.

“The full potential of the internet has still not been realised in the country,” says Thinley Dorji, Managing Director of Bhutan Telecom. “We of course use the e-mail a lot…and most of the times we now wonder how we ever managed without the e-mail facilities that we have now.”

We then travel from Thimphu to Samtse, south-west of the capital where the National Institute of Education is located. Faced with an acute shortage of trained teachers, NIE turned to distance education to train more teachers quickly. In the past, it was all done as correspondence courses. But a project started in 2003 introduced web-based methods. We find out how that is making a difference to the quality of education in Bhutan.

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Indonesia

We then travel to Indonesia to find out how the world’s largest archipelago nation is using ICTs to make higher education available to all. In Jakarta, we visit Universitas Terbuka – or the Open University of Indonesia.

It offers some 900 courses to more than a quarter of a million students who are scattered across some 6,000 inhabited islands. Until recently, courses were distributed mainly through the post, and sometimes using radio or television. But providing high quality and timely learning support remained a problem. The internet offered an interactive solution.

Three years ago, an action research project supported by PAN investigated how tutorials could be offered online. That marked a turning point. Today, many courses offer web-based tutorials.

“Online communication between students and tutors could increase their learning satisfaction as distance learners,” says Dr. Tian Belawati, Vice Rector for Academic Affairs of Universitas Terbuka. “And also statistically it increased their course completion rates, so they do not withdraw in the middle of the semester.”

The Indonesian experience has inspired PAN-DORA -- a regional PAN project that links distance learning practitioners across Asia. They are all trying to find the right balance between new and conventional media.

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Regional Project: ASEAN E-Mall

While still in Jakarta, we drop in at the The non-profit ASEAN Foundation is running a regional research and development facility to promote digital solutions for development needs. The ICT4D ASEAN Collaboratory was established in mid 2003, to reduce the digital divide within countries and between countries in the ASEAN region.

One key facility run by the Collaboratory is an electronic mall. It’s a shopping mall online, but with one difference: all the shops are owned and operated by development organisations or community groups across Asia. They are selling books, videos, handicrafts and other items to a global market.

“In PAN ASEAN E-Mall, development organisations can open an e-shop within one or two days,” says Eddy Bahfen, Project Manager. “We will provide payment gateway for them. So all they need to do is develop a shop and then we provide the 12 easy steps how to establish shop.”

Pakistan

We then move across Asia in search of one of the Asian artisans whose products are sold by the ASEAN E-mall. We arrive in the Hunza area in northern Pakistan. Here, where one million people are scattered in 600 small villages, we find an unlikely group of online merchants.

Mehar Nigaa and other women in her village produce hand-made and embroidered products that are sold on the ASEAN E-mall. This is made possible by the Karakoram Area Development Organization (KADO), which uses ICTs to improve people’s lives.
Women in Hunza are able to pursue these activities only because they have access to the Internet – which has ushered in a quiet revolution empowering rural women.

“Here we are trying to encourage women and facilitate women to benefit from the opportunities offered by IT,” says Javed Iqbal, the head of KADO. “That is access to high quality education, information, craft markets and career opportunities.”

We also look at a tele-health project by the Baltistan Health and Education Foundation, that now enables people in Northern Pakistan to consult top medical specialists in the capital Islamabad – right from their local hospital. The real-time consultation is made possible by a live satellite link.

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Cambodia

For ICTs to really benefit the grassroots, people need to be able to use their local languages and dialects. They need more content that is locally relevant or locally generated. This is the daunting challenge taken up by the PAN Localization Project.

To take a closer look, we visit Cambodia, one of the least developed countries in Asia. ICTs can help Cambodia catch up with the rest of the world – but only if language barriers are removed. That’s just what PAN Localization Cambodia is trying to do.

Its project manager, Sok Huor Chea, believes that developing a Khmer Unicode font is crucial. “We need IT to develop…but if IT is in English, Cambodian people are still handicapped. Through localization, people can understand…you can leap frog also to catch up with the world outside.”

We visit the National Language Institute, where a khmer Unicode has been beta-tested effectively and successfully.

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India

“Content is the most important,” says Prof M S Swaminathan, who ushered in the green revolution in India and now spearheads a major national effort to take ICTs to the grassroots. “Content must be a demand-driven, location-specific, value-added, generic information must be converted to location-specific information.

Several dozen Indian government, non-government and private sector organisations have come together to form the National Alliance for Mission 2007. Its ambitious goal: to take the benefits of ICT-led development to all 600,000 villages across India.

Going well beyond scattered pilot projects to a major rolling out of information societies, Mission 2007 will have far-reaching implications for the world’s largest democracy.


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Regional Project: DirAP