The New York Times ran a poignant story about the travails of children unable to go to school in Indonesia. Today, about 13 million people across 12,500 remote villages have no access to the internet, said Setyanto Hantoro, president director of Telkomsel, the country’s largest telecommunications company, which is cooperating with the government to provide service in far-flung areas. Among the areas where Telkomsel is working to bring access are Kenalan, where the three girls study by the road, and the village of Bah Pasungsang, where as many as 20 students a day climb trees to study. But those efforts will not be completed until 2022, Mr. Setyanto said.
Once, the countries breaking up the Internet were China and assorted developing countries; those lecturing them not to do so were rich countries which were members of the OECD. How the world has changed. The Trump Administration is taking the hammer to the Internet. Australia is joining in a big way: With each passing day, the World Wide Web is becoming an outdated name. Facebook warned on Monday that it would block users and news organizations in Australia from sharing local and international news stories on its social network and Instagram if the country passed a proposed code of conduct aimed at curbing the power of Facebook and Google.
LIRNEasia has been entrusted with the task of developing recommendations on how best to regulate Sri Lanka’s water and sanitation services, now a high priority for the government. Because WSS involves all three levels of government, and because many different parts of the state have to be coordinated for effective performance it has been decided that the recommendations should draw from public consultations across the country. The first of these was held on the 27th of August 2020 in Kurunegala, the seat of the Provincial government of the Wayamba Province. Water consultation intro.
For the longest time, US negotiators of international resolutions, statements, etc. which had something to do with the internet, used to quibble over capitalization of the word. They insisted on uppercase Internet because they said it was one single thing and therefore should be capitalized. Negotiators from countries like China and Iran, obviously disagreed. They preferred internet.
We are inviting Proposals from potential Bidders to conduct a nationally representative study on Impact of COVID-19 on households and the workforce in Sri Lanka. The full RFP can be downloaded here. Please also see our Technical Proposal Template, Financial Proposal Template, Contract Template and Sample Locations before submitting the proposals. Deadline for submissions is 23 August 2020.
I received a cold call from a member of the public today. He began by explaining how he found my mobile number. COVID-19 had got him thinking and he wanted my advice about career progression. Somewhat befuddled, I asked why me? He said that he recalled seeing me on TV talking about new work opportunities.
We like to think we can foretell developments in the industries we study. I can recall meeting a Jio operative at Abu Saeed Khan’s home in Dhaka before they launched and chatting about what was to come. We all agreed that Reliance would disrupt the market. All I could come up with was that voice would most likely be free, or very cheap. That was nothing very insightful, because that was where the technology was at that time.
Key considerations and recommendations for public health officials in developing wearable contact tracing solutions during COVID-19
Ramathi Bandaranayake presented the following paper at the 3rd International Conference on Gender Research, held July 16 – 17 2020. The conference took place virtually due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The paper discusses the findings of our qualitative research related to female online freelancers in India and Sri Lanka. Bandaranayake, R., Iqbal, T.
LIRNEasia entered the disability space because we recognized the transformative potential of smartphones, from our work in Myanmar. It is reassuring to see that this is what PWDs are saying in the US as well. They also talk about well-meaning outsiders proposing solutions to problems that do not exist. That also resonates with our thinking and the way we allocate the resources that we have. We spend a lot of effort to understand the problems that are important to the PWDs in the countries we work in.
A great deal of our work starts off with rigorous demand side research; knowing what, how and why users engage with digital technologies provides us with a solid evidence-base to make our policy recommendations. For example, the nationally representative data that we had collected through our AfterAccess surveys in six Asian countries, provided us with a solid evidence base to argue for various policy changes as soon as the pandemic hit. https://lirneasia.net/AfterAccess-COVID19. But going forward with current projects getting off the ground, and in the midst of designing new ones, we’ve had to think about what the pandemic, lockdowns, social distancing, etc.
This policy brief details guidance on making decisions in a pandemic.
Sometime in March 2018, the Sri Lankan government blocked access to Facebook, citing the spread of hate speech on the platform and tying it to the incidents of mob violence in Digana, Kandy.
Disasters wreak havoc and destroy full-scale infrastructures, homes, schools, hospitals, communication systems, and disrupt access to food, clean water, electricity, and transportation. Individuals with disabilities are disproportionately affected in disaster, emergency, and conflict situations due to inaccessible evacuation, response (including shelters, camps, and food distribution), and recovery efforts (Robinson, 2020; Samant Raja et al., 2013; Stough & Kang, 2015; Wolbring, 2009). The primary focus of this study was reviewing literature on PWD and DiDRR (Disability inclusive Disaster Risk Reduction) specifically involving Asian countries to find gaps in inclusive crisis communication Additionally, the study explored other relevant literature all of which is discussed in the literature review. Thereafter, the method involved synthesizing the findings to propose a conceptual architecture for ICT-enabled assistive technology in support PWDs facing crisis situations.
For those of us who have been thinking about e commerce and the reasons for people not taking to it in large numbers for decades, the COVID-19 related lockdowns gave much to reflect on. Below is an excerpt from something I wrote in the first weeks of the Sri Lankan lockdown in the Daily FT and also in Sinhala. E commerce vendors in Sri Lanka were having a hard time making sales. And these were companies that were dealing with items that do not go bad. The demand that spiked in the past weeks was mostly for goods such as dairy, fruit and vegetables that require care in storage and transportation.
The new normal for education would necessarily involve a heightened awareness of and a focus on sanitation and social distancing. Will the new normal include transformative use of ICTs for learning? Our research shows that it depends on how well policymakers learn from the experience of organically formed teacher-parent-student networks in using ICTs for teaching at a distance during the COVID-19 pandemic. Use of ICT for teaching is different from the use of ICTs for learning. Teachers have been increasingly using multi-media, e-blackboards, learning management systems and student management systems for efficiencies in teaching, but the effectiveness of teaching is in the learning experienced by students.