RPS — Page 18 of 39 — LIRNEasia


Five years ago, we celebrated the first of our alumni entering a PhD program.   And today we celebrate the first of our alumni completing a PhD.  Congratulations to Dr Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara who did wonderful work in the short time he worked with us.  He is now on the tenure track at Louisiana State University.  As a lapsed academic I cannot but be proud of Dimuthu’s achievements.
Image of the panel at the Sri Lanka launch of AfterAccess Asia in Colombo on 22.05.2019 Sri Lanka performs poorly on digital indicators, awareness of internet and related services does not translate to use, and the majority of social media users in Sri Lanka think that blocking social media during times of national unrest "is the right thing to do".
AfterAccess: ICT access and use in Asia and the Global South (Version 3.0)
I write with some sadness.  After 13 consecutive academies and conferences, we are compelled to take a year’s break.  There is no money for CPRsouth in 2019. IDRC continues to value our work; but changed priorities (no longer is “future leaders” a thing) means that they did not allocate funding for us this year. Given my time constraints, I could only try for a single funder who would pick up the core funding including travel.
Screenshot of the article as published on the Foreign Policy website The biggest barrier to policing social media is language. Based on a draft LIRNEasia white paper on neural language processing. Published in Foreign Policy.
LIRNEasia proposed simple, immediately actionable ways to promote independent living by persons with disabilities (PWDs) in Nepal.
Uncertain of the answer, I thought I’d write about it. Since Cable published their latest pricing league tables earlier this year my inbox seems to have a magnetic effect attracting ‘news’ from joyous announcements by the providers of the cheapest data in the world to harsh commentaries on the inaccuracy of the data being published. Following Cable’s release was A4Ai with its league tables published in March 2019 with prices for 100 MB, 200 MB, 1 GB, 2GB, 5GB and 10GB as a percentage of average income (GNI per capita reported by the World Bank). Both pricing leagues are relatively recent albeit more nuanced in some ways in comparison to the more seasoned data annually released by the OECD (with the limitation that this is only for the OECD countries) and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). Do we need this many pricing league tables for what appears to be the same thing?

It’s not all about rank

Posted by on March 27, 2019  /  0 Comments

Method. Method. Method.   But it seems that rankings and the publicity that ensues takes precedence.   Any methodology, for it to be meaningful, needs to be transparent and to the extent possible ensure comparability.

SDGs for the private sector

Posted by on March 18, 2019  /  0 Comments

The World Benchmarking Alliance (WBA) invited LIRNEasia for its Digital inclusion roundtable, held in Mumbai on the 7th of March 2019. The objective of the meeting was to assist the WBA in defining indicators and methodologies (that will be published by the end of 2019) for (1) Digital Inclusion, (2) Food and Agriculture, and (3) Gender Equality and Empowerment, by which private sector will be benchmarked against. The event hosted by the consulate to the Kingdom of Netherlands in Mumbai, started off with an address by the Consulate General and the Executive Director of the WBA. The criticality of the WBA’s work towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and progress made was reflected upon. After two key notes that followed, the gathering was divided into 3 groups, one for each  of the benchmarks that delved deeper in to the subject matter.
GSMA recently published its 2019 Gender Gap study . In addition to measuring the gender gap in 18 countries based on  its own country-level surveys, GSMA goes on further to extrapolate the gender gap to 10 more countries using ‘third-party and publicly available survey data we considered robust,’ including AfterAccess data for four countries: Cambodia,Paraguay,Peru,Rwanda . These gender gaps are further used to quantify how much of a business opportunity exists if as many women (as men) are connected, but also if all women were to spend as much on mobile and internet services as men. The estimated opportunity in total is as high as  USD840b over five years.  Huge.
Presented by Rohan Samarajiva at Data Governance event at Royal School of Public Administration, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, March 4, 2019.
Presented by Dr. Sujata Gamage at Forum for business Innovations, NIBM National Innovation Center on March 01, 2019
Presented by Prof. Rohan Samarajiva at the Asia Liberty Forum in Colombo on 28th February 2019.

Imagining a Feminist Internet

Posted by on February 25, 2019  /  0 Comments

It is the same ‘internet’ that we all hope for and are working toward: one which is accessible to all, safe, secure and open, and provides equal opportunities for all groups, minorities, etc. Perhaps with some degree of nuance added.
Presented at "Imagine a Feminist Internet: South Asia" on 21 February 2019 in Negombo, Sri Lanka
A 4-day residential course on ‘How to Engage in Broadband Policy and Regulatory Processes’ was held at Hotel Jal Mahal, Pokhara Nepal (16th- 19th February 2019). This is the ninth of a series of short courses funded by Ford Foundation. The first two courses of this series mainly focused on producing knowledgeable consumers of research who are able to engage in broadband policy and regulatory processes, whereas this course along with the previous courses in New Delhi, India, Nagarkot, Nepal and Marawila, Sri Lanka incorporate how to produce policy-relevant research into the syllabus. Call for applications: English Syllabus of the course can be accessed here. Photos of the Event Course Report The presentations of the course are below Day 1 Session 1 – Introduction to workshop Session 2 – Communicating to Policy Makers Session 3 – Comparative Data and Introduction to Web Resources Assignment 1 – Fine-tuning and Framing a Policy Proposal Session 4 – Introduction policy/legal research, including case study on ICT policy & regulation in federal states   Day 2 Session 5 –National Broadband Networks of India, Malaysia, Indonesia and Australia: Comparative study Session 6 – Broadband laws and Policy regime in Nepal (Electronic Transaction Act, Telecommunication Act, Draft IT law and other relevant policies Session […]