I have been asked to present at the “Expert Consultation on the Asian information superhighway and regional connectivity” in Baku, Azerbaijan. Here is my presentation: Unleashing Infrastructure Synergies Across Sectors.
LIRNEasia CEO Helani Galpaya speaks at World Press Freedom Day 2025 – South Asia Regional Conference
LIRNEasia CEO Helani Galpaya was a featured speaker at the World Press Freedom Day 2025 South Asia Regional Conference, held on May 4, 2025, in Nepal. Joining the event virtually, she contributed to the opening policy dialogue – press freedom in the AI era: a regional lens wide-ranging discussion which explored how AI intersects with democratic values, legal frameworks, and freedom of expression in South Asia.
LIRNEasia shares regional lessons on data governance at SDPI forum in Pakistan
Aslam Hayat (Senior Policy Fellow LIRNEasia, Country Researcher for Pakistan), and Pranesh Prakash (Policy Fellow LIRNEasia, Co-Principal Investigator), drew on research carried out under LIRNEasia’s ‘Harnessing Data for Democratic Development in South and Southeast Asia’ project to discuss aspects of data governance in Pakistan and other countries. This was part of a forum hosted by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) in Pakistan, under the theme, “Public-Private Dialogue (PPD) on Data Governance in Pakistan.
LIRNEasia presents their work on AI-driven poverty mapping at a premier AI conference
Pinpointing where poverty is most severe and tracking its changes over time is crucial for helping communities effectively. However, traditional benchmarks like household surveys and national censuses often fall short—they’re expensive, slow, and infrequent.
2 Comments
Rokonuzzaman
It’s time to look into competition policy to mobilize fund from private investment to turn the potential into reality. We would like to see some work from LIRNEasia from market development perspective for developing competitive transmission infrastructure across Asia. It seems to me that instead of encouraging public money for such projects, we should rather encourage public institutions to come up with investment friendly predictable policy.
Rohan Samarajiva
There is the little problem of money.
But leave that aside. Laying terrestrial fiber across multiple Asian countries will require multiple authorizations, not only from national governments but also from sub-national ones. And one authorization not given, the whole project is dead. The opportunities for extortion are extraordinary. Therefore, no private multi-country terrestrial cables will be laid.
No alternative to what we propose.