ICT and Women empowerment program
I am the president of Women Agency Research Nepal(WARN) trying to mobilize NGOs and INGOs to grow agenda on ICT integration as a part of the development package in Nepal as well as in South-East Asia where development patterns especially in Rural settings are similar. I have published many articles in social media to young readers and their guardians to read so that rural communities start developing human capital. The numbers of readers are growing.
Most of the women in rural settings are inundated with religious beliefs from the past which holds them back. Uneducated masses continue to follow the footsteps of traditional processes laid down by ancestors blinded by religious leaders of their time. The uneducated lot lack motivation for social, economic and political transformation. The faith of the masses in religious dogma hinders their transformation and thus the development of the nation. These people don’t realize the importance of scientific thoughts and developments needed for social progress and preparation of future generations of workforce and leaders.
COVID-19 patients from all religious backgrounds, including deep-rooted Manubadi Hindus, Christians and Muslims, suffer from blind superstitions not founded on scientific knowledge, are unable to comprehend the complexities of this deadly disease. They tend to submit themselves to their notions of God, and crowding religious shrines infecting more people and spreading this deadly disease. They also cannot differentiate between misinformation floating on various print media, television, and social media.
Most of the South-East Asian countries have rolled out policies to integrate ICT in the development stream. However, much work could not be implemented, partly due to above reasons. Study shows women are better at using soft skills crucial for effective leadership and business performance. It is high time women specialized in technical areas took leadership in developing society and solving problems exploiting technology.
The major issues for the women upliftment are: How do we encourage women to high light on "New idea"? How do we inspire young college girls from South-East Asia? How do we counsel them? The women organization and stakeholders like government-supported ‘Mahila Aayog’ from regional countries should drive agendas demanding for effective and efficient working of government services in partnership with technological solution providers, including the concerned stakeholders.
Technical education of women
In traditional patriarchal societies, owing to the perceived insecurity and blind religious faith, girls are treated as child-bearing machines, often cursed as burdensome due to ill-conceived practice of dowry. Nature also conspires against the girls by coercing them to choose between being a mother and raising the children at the age vs. higher education. Nepalese society also suffered due to Rana’s tyrannical illiteracy promoting regime. The state-level graduation high-school examination board was established as late as 1950.
A large percentage of parents are reluctant to invest on daughter's education. Education in many patriarchal societies in South Asia and South-East Asia traditionally have the least priority. The process of illiteracy is perpetual: mothers do not get educated, and pass on the same value system to the next generation. Most mothers in Nepalese society never went to schools except for very few who mostly migrated from Varanasi, India.
I recall many girls were married by their illiterate parents when we were in class four, while I was asking my mother the meaning of marriage. By the time I was in class ten, many of my playmates were already married. When I started class eleven, my relatives and family well-wishers were pestering my parents to drop educating the girls. Instead, they encouraged to look for marriage-proposals from economically sound families.
Fortunately, my mother, who contributed significantly to Nepalese girls’ education and woman upliftment during Nepalese struggle against Rana’s regime, encouraged all six daughters to study in the science-stream. She also persuaded other guardians to encourage their daughters to take science-subjects. Slowly, but certainly, the society has changed owing to the courage of parents like my mother. Years of hard work has inspired generations of female IT entrepreneurs. May my mother's wish for progressive investment in education, innovation and IT came true?
My journey in Technology
Due to my mother’s encouragement, I landed up in IIT Kanpur – a premium institute of technology in India. We were only two girls in a class if four hundred boys. Batch '77 had no girls, and that batch used to be called ‘Bachelor Batch’. All the girls from India also had a similar background: courageous parents fighting against the social norms and traditional marriage institution.
Our journey in pre-dominantly male-dominated technological institutes and later in the society was quite hard. However, determination and hard work have put the girls where they could contribute to the society in a big way to break the taboo, the traditional social norm, and the glass-ceiling. Many of them went to finish their doctorates, became entrepreneurs, and became leaders in academia and international industries. In the process, they became role models to the future generation of girls. I will just take examples of few of my college-mates from IIT Kanpur, who made the difference.
During my stay at IIT Kanpur, met Asha Goal, an M. Tech student in Computer Science Department of IIT K in 1970 who later completed Ph.D. degree. I met Anjali Joshi at IIT K, currently a Vice President of Google. I met Jayathi Murthy, currently Dean of Engineering College in University of California at Los Angles, USA.
It was not easy to break the barriers. I feel that girls of two decades 1965 - 1985 went through similar experiences, whether in India or any of the regional countries. The story of my struggle and hardships is no different from most of the female students in the region, who faced similar resource constraints and cultural barriers. We do have some such experiences to share from Nepal too. I would encourage young college students of South-East Asia to know the struggles and the problems we faced. Despite these hardships, we could make a significant impact in the society.
I have taken liberty to place the weblink of the above friends of mine on my Facebook page. I intend to put more such success stories and interviews in future on my LinkedIn page, blog, and Facebook pages. YouTube link of this interview video for further details in order to encourage young girls to get inspired by these personalities. I also need help from IIT K Alumni members to provide success stories and interviews of women leaders from academia, public sectors and private sectors from 1970s onwards, who can inspire the young college girls. We would like to learn from regional countries too. I would like to receive suggestions from our IITK alumni members.
Interleaving Focused Expertize
Modern projects are very complex, have numerous inter-dependent and inter-related activities, involve heavy investments, require high level of technology and need effective management of voluminous resources. They cross geographical boundaries, corporate channels, traditional systems and cultural diversities. Modern projects have inbuilt difficulties, uncertainties and risks. Today, IT professionals working on such projects require technical and management skills for realizing the project objectives, within the specified time, budgeted cost, and predefined quality specifications, by leading the project participants, efficiently, effectively and ethically.
One of the major problems in current days technocrats and academicians is their lack of understanding of social issues, lack of understanding of current technology on future of ecosystem, and lack of collaboration with social scientists. While our engineers possess technical expertise, they often lack project management skills. The clients lack understanding of the technical side while trying to procure technology. The clients and solution providers very often run into problems often resulting into project failure damaging the organization.
To orient the engineers with the project management tools, Engineering Council of Nepal should organize extra professional trainings for academia and professional practitioners. All these drawbacks should be resolved by interleaving theoretical knowledge with experiential learning. The academia and graduates should be provided with adequately budgeted complex projects for experiential learning. The academia circles are exercising only theoretical knowledge will not serve the purpose for true ‘Human Capital Development Program’ in Nepal. In the context of Nepal, collaboration with private sector is needed under the current scenario.
Anjali Joshi, my friend from IIT Kanpur, is the Vice President of Google is an alumnus of IIT Kanpur. The whole of South-East Asia, has not been able to cash her strength and rest of IIT Alumni, Google and various information-processing tools for disaster sensitive areas. The disaster management of all the South-East Asia should join hands to exploit the strength of working with national and international experts and companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft where large numbers of IIT K alumni, especially women employees, are holding key posts. People like Sudha Murthy should encourage young girls in innovation and entrepreneurship development.
Nepal should be focusing on country-specific expertise. Nepal is highly vulnerable to natural disasters. Disasters such as extreme droughts, floods, landslides, fires, and epidemics affect the nation annually. Nepal's geographic location also makes it extremely susceptible to seismic activity from the nearby Indian and Tibetan plates. On top of this, citizens perpetually go through political turmoil. The earthquake of the year 2015 and blockage of cooking gas and 70% import from India for four months caused havoc to our society, GDP and future of educational growth. Policy makers should focus on developing youth forces from ICT sector to specialize in technology to solve such vulnerability. They should be promoted by policy makers to sell their specialties in other parts of the world.
Promoting IT companies and Human Resources
Indian IT industry grew partly due to the tax holiday policy. The current government is focused on collecting taxes only ignoring the problems faced by companies affecting employment generations in the country. The decision makers at the policy makers lack knowledge about the capacities of companies to be partners in the development stream of the nation, revenue earning and employment generations for the citizens.
Human-resource development and adoption of technology development have become urgent for a country like Nepal. Human resources are needed to implement technology for the good governance system driven by well-functioning HR systems. For good human resources development, the educational policy of the Education Ministry has to be reviewed and reformed. Ministry of Education, Ministry of Health, and Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare should work in close coordination engaging rest of the concerned stakeholders.
Community-based programs
Community-based programs are already expanding. Several villagers in some parts of India and social organizations pooled in funds to set up a small health care center with two beds, oxygen facilities and an ambulance, helping in early testing, isolation and timely treatment for COVID-19. The villagers who had to visit other towns or villages for medical facilities could now get it in the village itself. Any area with a positive case would immediately be declared as a containment zone and sealed. For the next 14 days, regular screening and contact-tracing should be done in these zones.
To infuse responsibility in the rural community, they should be educated that they are the biggest stakeholders. Local volunteers should be developed and encouraged in control strategy to restrict the transmission of the disease. They should develop confidence in the scheme. Unlike other governmental schemes which take years to materialize, they should be actively convinced. Even religious leaders can be roped in, wherever it is necessary. In countries like Nepal, religious leaders carry tremendous weight. Treating deep-rooted religious beliefs and the religious leaders as punching bags is also counter-productive.
Having emergency health doctrine in place is important. A health doctrine will help avoid adhoc, knee-jerk reactions. This doctrine should be adapted in phases depending upon the intelligence. The doctrine framework should include research on future probable pandemics, intelligence on experiments on viruses in irresponsible nations. This must include inter-state strategies and not just intra-state. Currently, it is inadequate.
5G for inclusive development
As per an ITU Report, by the end of 2019, ninety three per cent of the global population could access the Internet through a 3G or higher-quality network. If the evidence of adoption of 5G networks in developed countries is any indication, unless planned properly, 5G is expected to worsen the current digital divide, as developing countries are likely to take much longer to implement 5G networks; these countries will be forced to make the best use of the existing infrastructure and networks to provide universal and affordable access to ICTs. About half the world's population access and use the Internet. The other half cannot, and do not. Most of the unconnected are those who live in least-developed countries, and landlocked/sea-locked developing countries. Although over one billion new internet users have been added globally over the last four years, digital-divide between countries, communities, and people connected, continues to rise. Enabling all the world´s population to access and use the Internet, and bridging the digital divide remains a challenge that needs to be addressed, if the world community is to achieve the ‘United Nations Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) by 2030.
Nepal started 4G service in the year 2017. For a country like Nepal, with the demonstrated unwillingness to invest adequate resources in utilizing ICT tools, achieving the SDG goals within the stipulated time remains a big question mark. Investment in modern technology and human capital development targeted to delivery of quality health services in a sustainable and equitable manner has been a challenge in Nepal. A host of factors have impeded the access, quality, and utilization of health services, particularly for the marginalized and disadvantaged sections of the population.
It is high time the government brought in policies and programs aimed to encourage the use of current state-of-art information and communication technology, which can be instrumental in solving societal problems, inadequate healthcare, uncoordinated education, and abject poverty, to name a few. Government needs to review essential healthcare services being provided by public health institutions, their progress, effectiveness, sustainability, equity, efficiency and quality of care, and take appropriate measures to ensure inclusion of marginalized and disadvantaged populations in the healthcare provision. 5G system can provide instantaneous connectivity to billions of the Internet-connected devices. It provides the speed, low latency, and connectivity to enable a new generation of applications’ services and business opportunities that have not been seen before.
Nepal should learn lesions from regional countries. As the dangerous COVID-19 strain continues to spread outwards from the eastern city of Wuhan, China, experts from other parts of the country are now being called in—literally using 5G cellular technology—to support growing diagnostic and treatment efforts. A Chinese telecom equipment provider has launched a remote 5G diagnosis and treatment system between West China Hospital and the Chengdu Public Health Clinic Center of Sichuan University. 5G technology deployment could be expensive and would require special planning for designing delivery systems in a manner to include desired value adding activities to benefit the society.
Investment on human capital development introduced by engaging all concerned stakeholders is equally important in order to align with the strength of mobilizing 5G network in the value chain. Team-functioning with team-performance measurement tools and engaging all concerning stakeholders in collaboration has to be coordinated with smart devices and smart communication infrastructure system. Decision makers in Nepal need to adopt right policies and engage professional experts to execute professional delivery in crisis areas. Governing system for such effective and efficient service delivery has to be in place.
For the implementation of systems like 5G network in Nepal, the government has to invest heavily on medical infrastructure and human capital development for effective functioning with smart devices, smart networks, and smart health infrastructure systems. So far, the reason behind poor service delivery is partly due to the problem of structural and institutional structure in the governing body of Nepal. Digital divide is evidenced not only in developing societies, but also between countries. In 2019, nearly 87 per cent of people were using the Internet in developed countries, compared to 47 per cent in developing countries. Talking of Digital divides within countries, men, urban residents and young people are more likely to be online than women, rural dwellers and older people. Digital gender gap, in terms of the Internet penetration, is more pronounced in developing countries, as compared to developed economies. Divides often stem from insufficient or slow connectivity, the cost of connection and a lack of relevant content in local languages. These barriers are therefore often related to age, gender, disability, socioeconomic status and geography.
Efficient and affordable ICT infrastructure and services, combined with enabling policy and regulatory environments, allow businesses and governments to participate in the digital economy. It facilitates increasing nations’ overall economic well-being and competitiveness. Around twenty countries have made Internet access a fundamental or citizen right. Amidst opposition from several powerful countries, recently the UN declared that it considers the Internet to be a human right. Addition made in Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights provisions “promotion, protection and enjoyment of human rights on the Internet” and another recommendation that provisions the rights of those who work in and rely on internet access, is also applicable to women, girls, and those heavily impacted by the digital divide. Availability of affordable ICT infrastructure and services, and the right digital, language and implementation skills like teamwork, individuals and businesses can participate in the digital economy. Digitally connected people and communities are empowered because they can access information, online health services and life-saving disaster warnings. For the goods and services acquired, they can make mobile transactions, stay in touch with loved ones, increase productivity and obtain better-paid jobs that require digital skills.
The need of the hour is to ensure 5G networks are inclusive, affordable to all, and serve the public interest. 5G technologies and their application need to work towards accessibility and opportunities for minorities. In Nepal, over the last decade, smart phone ownership across the entire population has largely increased, as evidenced by the present percentage of mobile broadband users at over 55 percent, out of the 74 percent broadband users. Cost has always been one barrier to more options for internet access, more so to the disadvantaged population.
For implementation of systems like 5G in Nepal, the government has to invest heavily on important priority sectors such as educational and medical infrastructure. Service sectors should develop a sustainable business model by engaging potential users groups for effective functioning with smart devices, smart communication networks, and smart health infrastructure systems. So far, the reason behind poor service delivery is partly due to the problem of structural and institutional structure in the governing body of Nepal.
Governing system for such effective and efficient service delivery has to be in place. Decision makers in Nepal need to adopt right policies by engaging professional experts to execute professional delivery in crisis areas and this very unfortunately happening in Nepal. Citizens have to be mobilized towards building prosperous nation in order to be able to afford 5G system and future technology products.
Ensuring delivery of quality health services in a sustainable and equitable manner is a challenge in Nepal. A host of factors have impeded the access, quality, and utilization of health services, particularly for the marginalized and disadvantaged sections of the population. It is high time the government planned to introduce the use of current state-of-art information technology to solve societal problems, such as healthcare, education, and poverty. Government needs to review essential healthcare services provided by public health facilities, their progress, effectiveness, sustainability, equity, and efficiency, quality of care, and inclusion of marginalized and disadvantaged populations in healthcare services’ methods.
Conclusion
It’s important that governments and policy makers recognize that minimizing social and financial disruption should also be a central goal of public health policy. Nepal urgently needs to develop human resources in order to recover economy due to the impact of 2015 Earthquake and COVID 19 pandemics. Superstitions belief systems from religious institutions are counter-productive for scientific thoughts needed for the upliftment of masses. All the expenses going to towards superstitious rituals should be better utilized in health and education system. The solutions come from technology too, and uneducated mass should be made aware of this and promote STEM education for girls in schools and colleges connecting them through LinkedIn, YouTube and rest of social media with women who have been recognized. Nepal should be mindful of its earthquake-prone ecosystem and landlocked geography in promoting the industry. Information technology is one such technology, which can promote the industrial well-being along with education and healthcare. Information technology, especially 5G is crucial for the connectivity needed in educational growth, healthcare, women empowerment and social upliftment.