Presented at The ASEM Conference on Globalisation and ICT 10 12 March 2003 Malmö and Helsingborg Sweden Harnessing ICT for Development: Facing the Challenges, Closing the Divide, Grasping the Opportunities Tran Ngoc CA NISTPASS Vietnam A conference organised by The Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden in cooperation with The International Organisation for Knowledge Economy and Enterprise Development, IKED. For inquiries, contact: info@iked.org
Harnessing ICT for Development: Facing the Challenges, Closing the Divide, Grasping the Opportunities Tran Ngoc Ca NISTPASS, Hanoi, Vietnam Paper to be presented at the ASEM conference ICT and globalization, Malmö, Sweden, March 10-12, 2003 The context: globalization and its challenges Studies have shown that Information Communication Technology (ICT), by increasing the access to information and augmenting the process of information exchange and thereby by minimizing transaction costs, offers the potential to increase efficiency, productivity, competitiveness and growth (Stiroh, 2002). In the context of globalization, it has been argued, the ability to harness this technology improves the capability of developing countries to withstand competition from multinational corporations (Pojhola 2001). At the same time, ICT poses a potential threat that if unable to harness this new source of wealth, the developing countries will fall even more behind the developed countries and accentuating the inequality across countries. Analytically, the contribution of ICT could be viewed at two levels; (a) on account of the growth of ICT and (b) on account of ICT diffusion. The former refers to the contribution in output, employment, export earning etc on account of the production of ICT related goods and services which are confined to just one sector of the economy. The latter refers to ICT induced development through enhanced productivity, competitiveness, growth and human welfare on account of the use of this technology by the different sectors of the economy and society. In another word, ICT could be a productive sector and an enabler (tool, platform) for changes in the whole socioeconomic setting. To grasp the opportunities raised by ICT and avoid the pitfall of the changes created by ICT, like digital divide, all depend on the efforts of every economy/society, with participation by many actors of which the government is taking the lead, with more attention to be paid to the non-state sector. Closing the ICT divide: challenges and opportunities ICT has brought both opportunities and challenges: speed, simplicity, immediacy, ubiquity, possibility of leapfrog in some areas (but not all). ICT also has strong impact on domestic governance: the way the whole society is run will be changed. This new setting is argued by many authors as the new socioeconomic paradigm with totally new ways of working, living and interacting among different members of the society (Freeman, 1990). In relation to this new setting, there is also the competitive power associated with 1
information: those who have and those who have not. Because of the information dominance by some and related dependency by others, there are some concerns: notion of the position of the weak (including nations, groups of actors, community of players and individuals). To utilize the ICT opportunities, there should be E-readiness of each society/economy/actors to adapt to the new challenge. Without this readiness, countries/economies/firms/actors will fall into a weak position. The ICT divide is the most critical implication of ICT development: closing or widening the gaps is the decisive factor for development/growth or decline. However, there is a gap between the concept of e-inclusion and the reality. One of the obstacles for the insertion into the global economy to the global game is the dilemma of ownership (for example, in intellectual property, especially in software business). This would lead to a need to develop non-proprietary path such as Open Source Systems. Besides, there is a believe (Graham, 2002) that the inclusion of community in public policy is fundamental to the achievement of an Information Society. But there is a gap between citizen expectations for a government response to community participation (which is the main nongovernment domain) and what it is that governments are actually doing. To deal with these challenges, among other things, one should pay attention to relationship of technology to cultural and social change (or social and cultural shaping of ICT). New technologies are also an expression of a shift in culture, not only the cause of it. Before new technologies can be imagined, someone has to view the possibilities of the world with new eyes. The Internet was originally a set of technologies that resulted from being able to see how information theory could be applied to increase cooperation among communities of researchers. Vietnam: a latecomer perspective There is a basic vision to be taken into account: ICT is an enabler, not only a sector. ICT Master Plan created by the Ministry of S&T in Vietnam so far dealt mainly with ICT as an economic/productive sector (with targets on software exports quantified in money term, numbers of people to be trained, etc.). 1 The Plan itself has been approved only recently, the task force to draft this Plan is coming mainly from techno-economic domain rather than sociological background, leaving with some fractions in the society remained unsatisfactory. In addition, there has been some fragmentation in dealing with ICT development in Vietnam. There has no been a systematic and regular approach to promote ICT for development with strategic and long term, consistent policy framework. For some period, each government agencies (at central and provincial levels) seem to do whatever they think suitable (or not doing anything at all). To address this issue, the newly set up Ministry of Post and Telematics (MPT) has come into scene in 2002, hoping 1 Revising the ICT Master Plan. VCIT project. 2000. 2
to orchestrate these efforts under one comprehensive guidance and umbrella. It is too early to tell if this attempt successful. In a broader frame, an ICT society concept has been touched upon in several efforts when dealing with Knowledge Society, Information Society 2. So far, these drives seem focused mainly at the top level of technocrat elite and politicians, with not so vigorous translating into practical actions below. Interestingly, the Party Commission for science, technology and education is the one who leads the advocacy for using more ICT to develop the society towards direction of knowledge-based economy. The same view is shared by many technocrats in ministerial levels and their departments. When it comes to lower level of the society, it seems that the concept became more vague, or less consistent, less understood by ordinary citizens, even with some skepticism. One issue has been paid some attention to in Vietnamese research circles is ICT for poverty alleviation. The question Can ICT contribute to the poverty alleviation, or is it just an imagination? has been discussed to some extent, including in mass media. Officially, according to the World Bank view, ICT should and could play a pivotal role in the poverty alleviation process (examples from around the world have been cited as evidence of how ICT could bring about remarkable results for economic growth, export performance and poverty alleviation. 3 (This view is again strongly emphasized in the thematic report of the World Bank: Accelerating the Development: ICT in Vietnam. June 2002). There are several examples, the experiences of India in using ICT for systematic and equal property and taxation management; or the telecentre project and business registration on-line in Thailand 4. In a similar vein, the Bank supported Technical Assistance and Training Program (TATP) in Indonesia for using ICT to support SME. 5 Experiences of tele (or Internet) villages using mobile phone for basic connection with fees applied in Bangladesh 6, or Cambodia are typical illustrations of this opportunity. Generally, Vietnamese actors, like some ministries, have a more cautious view. It is quite difficult to pose the issue of ICT-based Knowledge society in the context of one of the poorest countries in the world. Still, in reality, many organizations are implementing various plans for using ICT in their business and production. The Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (MARD) began some activities in this direction: develop ICT projects for agriculture and rural areas development, especially in using ICT for linking activities in remote community areas. 2 Conference on Using Knowledge for Development (or K4D) organized by the World Bank and MOSTE (Hanoi, November 2000) is one of such attempts. 3 Examples of how ICT development in Estonia, Chile, Singapore, Korea, Taiwan, and Malaysia could turn them into a higher income based economies have been provided. 4 More details of this kind of projects in Thailand are provided in ICT for poverty reduction. Examples of programmes/projects in Thailand. NECTEC. 2002. 5 This three-year project provides cost-sharing grants to SME to make ICT cosulting and training services more affordable and accessible. Activity has spanded over 6 cities (Jakarta, Bandung, Semarang, Surbaya, Medan and Makassar), provided services to more than 600 SME, and trained more than 4,000 people (TATP: successes to date. Indonesia s technical assistance and training program. Report by Hickling Indonesia. Jakarta. 2001) 6 See for example Village pay phones and poverty reduction. Insights from Grameen Bank initiative in Bangladesh. Bays, von Braun & Akhter. Bonn. 1999. 3
At a more grass root level, the practice shows that the application of ICT for rural development has been gathering pace. Project "Electronic farmers" (E-farmers) in An Giang province is just one examples. Introduction of Internet into the level of communes is the backbone of this project. This project, in fact, is the replication of the ASEAN e-farmers project that started in some other ASEAN countries (Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand). Overall ASEAN project hopes to bring ICT opportunity to more than 200 millions farmers in the region. In the Vietnamese Southern province of An Giang, the project aims to create 42 Internet access points in many post offices and local authority at the commune level. This is to serve first the people with good education working in this area, such as those having higher education, mainly working in agriculture, healthcare and education. Hundreds of staff working in communes on S&T related issues are being trained in how to use PC and access Internet, organized by the Department of Science and Technology and provincial university. This is actually similar to the ideas of Knowledge Village Centres run by MMSRF (India) with IDRC support. 7 More generally, using ICT for wealth creation has begun to lead to some action. The tool advocated by the World Bank Institute was introduced to Vietnam in 2000 8. Several attempts to draw up plans for setting up rural community centres of excellence, or knowledge units relying on ICT, have been tried by different actors: government organizations, NGO, multinationals. 9 Still, business sector involvement in ICT faces some problems. A range of problems can be mentioned. First, the understanding of the role of ICT/EC (E-commerce) and benefits/damage of IT/EC among the business community is one concern. The application of IT/EC in companies has experienced many difficulties. There are still comparatively costly and sometimes unreliable technological infrastructures; insufficient legal infrastructures; the concept on security sometimes still dominates the agenda; there is lack of incentive policies for ICT businesses, especially for small business; and other socio-cultural factors). Other issues concern the mode of government to understand the needs of the companies on IT/EC: although the government has goodwill in supporting businesses, there is not a suitable mechanism to deliver this goodwill. There has not been a workable channel for a dialogue via which the decision makers can understand what people expect from them. There are some notable points regarding human resources for companies in using IT/EC. Overall, the social environment of ICT application is remained to be improved. ICT-based wealth creation is not only a software production and export, which seems to have remained a dominant perception so far. Vietnam is not yet India/Bangalore. The target of exporting US$ 500 million worth of software products by 2005 seems unreachable. ICT should be, and interestingly, is already being used for much broader 7 Arunchanarm. Knowledge Village Centres. Pan Asia Networking all partners conference. Vientiane, Laos. PDR. March 2003 8 Knowledge Assessment and using Knowledge for development, with strong emphasis on ICT. See also the concept in World Bank. Knowledge for Development. Oxford University Press. 1999. 9 HP is attempting to develop this activity together with some local partners. 4
areas of business, such as searching export markets (for seafood, art and craft products); increasing productivity (in light industries such as paper making); design and better manufacturing organization (in textile/garment). E-commerce is used in service industries such as tourism, hotel, airline and banking. Traditional industries and technologies are being upgraded and helped with the assistance of ICT. One of the most remarkable examples is Bat Trang ceramic village, where family-based traders and craftsmen use Internet to do their transactions and marketing on-line. This should be seen as the way ahead in a comprehensive use of ICT for development. More philosophically, the notion "ICT for all" must face the reality of the inclusion concept. Civil society and community development in Vietnam has a special format of existence. The dominance of specific social mentality and awareness is another problem. It is quite often that people tend to think of ICT as "some one else s work", especially that of the government. With this attitude, people tend just to wait for the government to do something. Meanwhile, the government does not seem to be the leader yet, at least not to the desired extent. Eventually, it goes back to private initiatives. In business, activities tended to undertaken by the community/private sector efforts, where the majority of the ICT companies are working. Imbalances in priority setting are another issue: more government efforts are go into big things (high-tech parks; software exporting, etc.), and less on creating knowledge centers using ICT for the purpose of improving productivity and production performance. The way people are involved in making policy and implementation is also notable. The mentioned ICT Master Plan has been designed with participation of mainly technocrats, with few representatives of private sector, or grass root community organizations. There are many individuals who have not even heard of this document. As a result, the Plan looks more like a production and/or industry plan, and less like an ICT Plan for the whole society. In general, the Vietnamese society is still very much an isolated society or underdeveloped society in terms of information openness. In this regard, there is a big gap between Vietnam and other economies, especially with the more advanced economies of ASEAN. In addition, this information gap exists also between different layers within Vietnamese society, between the ICT-related domain and the rest of the society, between rural and urban areas, etc. As such, the digital divide is a real challenge, even within the country. To address this issue, there is still lack of real bridging mechanisms between the ICT domain and other domains of the society: government - business community - people. A forum/media where everyone could be heard on the issue is also lacking. Translating good policy into good actions is another notable issue. As mentioned above, there is a lack of comprehensive mechanisms to carry the very high level of excellent documents (like Party Resolution 49 on ICT development) into practice. The problem of implementation and law enforcement is as usual a difficult one in Vietnam. Besides, one can also observe a hidden resistance to change exercised by different stakeholders for various reasons. This could be due to lack interest of interest in change, or merely inertia, 5
people s customs etc. Thus, for instance, a very important task is to tackle inertia and lack of interest in the public administration if one should implement effectively e-government. Without changes of non-electronic public administration (system of reporting, way of managing human resources, etc.), e-government and ICT could easily turn out to be of little use. Towards an action plan: some points for thought In order to change radically the point of view on the use of ICT in society, it is necessary for Vietnam, as well as many for other similar developing economies in Asia, to consider information as real source of knowledge for development rather than a threat. This would lead gradually to lessening the suspicion or hesitance toward information, to reducing the information monopoly, to increasing the information transparency, and the wide sharing of information, as well as to closing the information divide in the society. At the same time, there should be a strong and clear view on the predominant role of knowledge economy, and of the intelligentsia (knowledge workers). This would lead to all directions and extent of ICT development. Without solving this basic question, all actions seem to be superficial. Bearing this awareness in mind would help to create more so-called ICTfriendly policies with regard to issues such as security (firewall, checking), costing, etc. There should have been an overall vision of using ICT for development from the perspective of the interests of whole economy, rather than specific one for only few industries. In this context, the telecom industry should accept immediate reductions of its income for the sake of overall benefits of the whole economy and society, including spillover effects for the telecom industry itself. The issue of economies of scale in this case should be investigated thoroughly. In principle, the more people using Internet thanks to reasonable cost (not necessarily cheap, but acceptable in local standards) of access, the better for the industry, and other benefits would come later, like subscriptions, chain reaction of critical mass of users. To compensate for this loss of business, the government could consider to introduce some incentive scheme (like an ICT Promotion Fund) to support the telecom sector, and using it as a social carrier of the beneficiary (social enabler). The concept of ICT development is not as a techno-economic sector, or science and technology activity (and because of that, is responsibility of only MOST, Ministry of Industry and now Ministry of Post and Telematics), but as a new paradigm of comprehensive development of all socioeconomic activities. As a result, in accordance with the magnitude of this development, there should be an appropriate supportive system. Even with the creation of a new ministry, this one should not monopolize the scene but only to promote it. To make sure that this is the case, the government could consider to set up a kind of Infocom watchdog organization (a Council with representatives from various activities, like ministries, associations, private sector, community networks, etc.) to provide a kind of counterbalance mechanism. 6
To have synergy of actions, one measure to avoid duplication and waste of resources is to carry out an overall comprehensive inventory to assess all foreign invested, or aid funded projects, programs related to ICT development, to evaluate their impact as a basis for new assistance in the future. This work can be conducted as a joint effort of MPI, MOST, MPT, and international organization like UNDP. To increase the dialogue between important stakeholders, it is useful to create the forum for enterprises to discuss with the government on IT and software development (similar to general forum on business, or Private Sector Development Forum where foreign organizations discuss related matters with Vietnamese policy making organizations). This Forum should not only a place for state owned enterprises, but for all, even more importantly for those from the private sector and ICT-related multinational corporations, which are active in Vietnam like Fujitsu, Alcatel, HP, Siemens, etc. To create an ICT for development media/forum for people who can voice and exchange their ideas in a more official way. This had been attempted by the UNDP, which organized the National Consultation Policy Dialogue on ICT for Development. However, it seems that this Dialogue is again a government-to-donors channel of communication, rather than with NGOs. Another measure is to increase international exposure of people involved in ICT development via different people-to-people (non-government) contacts where they can form different international media on ideas exchange and can develop concepts of the information society in a more specific context. The various international organizations could be key actors in promoting this. 10 One of the important actions is to tap into and link with various kind of international and regional network of networks to compliment and share cost with other mechanisms in supporting ICT for development. Schemes like InfoDev of the World Bank, ICT4D of the IDRC, the UN ICT Task Force are just few examples. The European Union programme on Asia IT&C is warmly welcome in the Asian economies. But the first impression from some people is that this programme is not very applicant friendly, it involves a complicated process and procedures of application and more importantly, it is more a drive from EU economies to apply with some limited role of the partners from Asian economies 11. Without contacts in Brussels (knowing the labyrinth), Asian organizations definitely would be difficult to be a lead applicant. Maybe in this context, it could be an option to turn this programme into something that involves more initiatives from Asia. 10 One example is the support provided by Japanese government as host for Asian Regional meeting on WSIS in Tokyo January 2003. To this conference, in addition to official delegations of governments, the organizing committee also invited a group of delegates from NGO, particularly from less developed economies. Without this support, lack of resources would certainly exclude this group of people voices from the discussion of a real global information society. 11 At least by looking at the statistics published the programme secretariat. 7
References Freeman, C. (1990) Graham, G. (2002) MOSTE (2002). IT Master Plan. Version 7.0 Pojhola, (2001). UNU WIDER. Stiroh, K. Productivity, IT and the new economy. WIDER ANGLE. World Institute for Development Economics Research. February. World Bank. (2002) 8