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 as well as 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
behaviours and social networks as well as of business practices and government
functioning and services.

Although Pakistan
has achieved some tangible progress in the areas of teledensity, internet
growth, computer and mobile phone usage etc but still it remains far behind the
international standards in understanding and implementing ICTs for development
in the areas such as health, education, agriculture, and national integration.
While world has moved from E-Government to Mobile Government and from ICT for
development to ICT-enabled 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, Pakistan has not
been able to effectively use ICT in development projects involving huge public
money despite being part of a number of international initiatives such as MDGs,
WSIS and others.

ICTs also have built-in capacities to enable the
developing societies to bridge the development gap on a fast track pace. During
the recent years, a number of developing countries have shown remarkable pace
of progress using the vehicle of ICT4D. Pakistan
has a huge potential and can still take advantage of ICT revolution in
development process if it makes a road map about the use of ICTs for all in the
areas of education, health, agriculture and governance.

Pakistan,
today, remains at a crossroads but can still recover from the damage done in
past due to its slow progress on this very important aspect in development. The
country can catch up with developing world if some best international practices
of using ICTs for Development (ICT4D) are applied under a joint action campaign
by all relevant stakeholders.

ENTRY IS OPEN TO ALL

Chair: Brig (Retd.) Mohammad Yasin, SDPI Senior Advisor, Center for Capacity Building (CCB) and Study Group on Information Technology and Telecommunication

Mr Ammar Jaffri, Former
Additional Director General, Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), and Renowned
ICT Professional, Islamabad