South-East Asia

ICT has been recognized as a powerful tool for a country’s development. The focus of the study is to identify the current level of ICT adoption in the rural areas, the challenges the local agencies faced in delivering public services, and to recommend next course of action to improve the adoption of ICT. Twenty-two villages were involved in the study with total of 922 respondents. Fieldworks were carried out involving questionnaires and interviews. The findings show that ICT adoption in the rural communities is still very minimal and at its early stage.

A significant development in public service in recent times is the increasing application of ICTs. Governments have embarked on programs and projects that seek to improve the delivery of public services through the adoption of ICT in the public sector. While initially e-government initiatives were aimed at increasing internal processes and operational efficiencies of public agencies, now e-government projects are employed in an attempt to provide an integrated and connected services to stakeholders.

From 2007 up until early 2011 Spider supported various gender-focused initiatives that sought to uplift women particularly in the rural regions of the global south. This report offers an analysis of the impact on the lives of the women that participated in the projects. The publication covers five different projects carried out in six different locations.

This article attempts to quantitatively measure the various influences on mobile phone adoption at the bottom of the pyramid (BoP) in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Thailand. Based on an existing theoretical framework, adoption is modeled by fitting a logit model to a large sixcountry dataset. The study finds evidence for the importance of social influence in mobile adoption in two modes: one that exerts pressure on individuals to adopt, and another that helps to generate benefits via social networks that are tied in with economic and business networks.

Delivering mobile-enabled agricultural services (‘mAgri services’) to women in developing countries is a major market opportunity for the mobile industry that also offers substantial social benefits. The mAgri services market is nascent but growing—GSMA has tracked 106 active, global deployments by mobile network operators (MNOs) and third party providers. Women working in agriculture account for an estimated 556 million potential users globally, but are underserved as a unique customer segment.

This publication is one of the outputs from a project entitled "Development of e-business development services for SMEs in selected ASEAN countries and Southern China." The publication is based on findings from a desk study, a survey on the use of ICT by SMEs, six national stakeholders consultations, a regional workshop, two training workshops and four pilot projects. This publication includes a CD that contains, among other things, training modules in English and in six languages.