Internet and Bangladesh: A brave new world awaits By Shahriar Rahman

W ELL, that's one way of defining it. The cool way to describe it would be: 'The Next Big Binary Bang'. No matter what we call it, it's happening all around us, and as a nation that just stepped into the big league of the digital arena we are yet to rip its fruit. The driver however for this upcoming tech mayhem is internet.

Back in the day, internet used to be a fancy décor of PCs in offices and businesses for contacting their foreign counterpart. Now the scene is different. A country that had only a handful of internet connections in 1999 now has more than one fourth of its population tangled in the world of webs. More significantly, the number of internet users has almost doubled in the last 2 years. No one in the world thought this rapid a shift would occur in just 15 years.

Interestingly, most of the internet users in Bangladesh are having their first internet experience through small screened devices i.e. phones and tablets. Gender-wise, the internet adoption rate is still an issue we need to address. Out of every 100 people who connect to the internet every day, only 18 of them are female. But the good news is 65 percent of the internet usage in the country is now from non-metropolitan areas. It must be noted that telecom operators played a crucial role in reducing this digital gap.

Now let's look into the quality of internet experience of Bangladeshis. The average internet speed which used to be 8-10 Kilo Bytes per second (KBps) in 2002 has now become 200-225 KBps (As of January 2015). This leap was possible because of government's policy to reduce the price and aggressively rollout fiber optic cable to the furthest corners of the country. Speaking about pricing, 1 MBps internet used to cost Tk. 1,27,000/- in 2006. The price took a nosedive in the last 5 years and now it's just a fraction of what it used to be. Kudos to the government for understanding the importance of affordable internet.

Now let's look at the bigger picture: where are we heading? With the current rate of internet penetration the number of users will exceed 5 crore by the end of the second quarter of 2015. ICT advisor to the Prime Minister Sajeeb Wazed Joy has announced the government's intention to launch 4G LTE services by 2016. Thanks to the bearish internet price trend, 91 percent of youths of the country are expected to go online by 2017. The revised definition of broadband will bring the national average internet speed to 5 Mbps per user. Internet penetration is expected to be 60 percent in 2019 meaning majority of the citizens of Bangladesh will be using at least the basic form of internet. Indeed a brave new world awaits Bangladesh.

Sources:
BTRC Reports December 2014
Akamai Internet Reports Q3 2014
GSMA Reports Q3 2014

The writer is a sub-editor, Bytes, The Daily Star

Published: 12:00 am Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Mobile technology in health and agriculture service deliveries By Mridul Chowdhury

Photo: Star Archive

Acombination of rapid proliferation of mobile technologies coupled with improved connectivity has opened up innovative possibilities for ICTs in last-mile service delivery like never before. While the impact is being seen in many areas of service delivery, radical changes are taking place particularly in community-based healthcare and agriculture extension services. The following are some areas where there is significant scope for radical shifts as a result of the innovative use of ICTs.
Decentralisation of expert services
Experts are hard to find, particularly in the health and agriculture sectors. We cannot increase their numbers in the short term either. Another problem is that a large percentage of these experts tend to be based in cities, thereby making service delivery in rural and disadvantaged areas even more challenging. So we have to find a way to take the services of experts to these areas using whatever relevant resources we have at the community level and connect these areas with experts using various ICT tools.
In health, there are initiatives underway that connect certified rural medical practitioners (RMP), such as “pharmacists” (who sell medicines in rural areas, more commonly albeit, derogatorily known as quack doctors) or community-based health workers to doctors through technological tools. The RMP uses applications on tablets or smartphones to capture patient information systematically following medical algorithms and when submitted, the medical record gets transferred over to a doctor with a desktop who looks at the data, opens a communication channel to speak to the patient directly, instructs the RMP for further investigation if required, and writes down a prescription, which gets instantaneously transferred over to the mobile device of the RMP. This e-prescription can also be printed if the RMP has access to a printer.
In agriculture, initiatives are being taken to connect agriculture extension workers such as government Sub-Assistant Agriculture Officers (SAAOs), agriculture input sellers, info-mediaries at rural tele-centers and so on, to capture problems that farmers are facing in the fields and send these to an agriculture expert for review and recommendations. The recommendations can be transferred to the farmer via phone calls, text messages or voice messages.
The above mentioned are cases where certain functions of an expert are being “decentralised” to non-experts with some degree of relevant knowledge, under the direct supervision of experts. These new modes of service delivery will obviously not be able to address all underlying issues – but there are certainly some cases that can be effectively, particularly cost-effectively, handled by such remote consultation, thereby reducing chances of exploitation and mistreatment of disadvantaged people.

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Optimised workflow of field forces
In both health and agriculture, there are literally thousands of field workers who are the last-mile solution providers to the beneficiary. In health, community workers undertake a variety of activities which need optimisation, such as determining which households to visit and when, reporting on activities at regular intervals, disseminating messages, etc. Each community health worker is generally responsible for covering nearly 2,000 households, which makes workflow optimisation extremely important to ensure prioritised interventions based on need.
For instance, a project called mTika has been piloting the use of mobile phones in the optimisation of vaccination delivery services. This project enables digital recording of birth information of every newborn in the pilot area, and tracks whether the child comes to vaccination camps on time. Reminder messages are sent prior to a health camp, and if they do not show up targeted household-based investigation or advocacy can be undertaken.
In the area of agriculture, agriculture extension workers need to disseminate messages to hundreds of farmers regarding the time and location of training sessions that they regularly hold. In another ICT-based project, the farmers in the pilot location are pre-registered into an information system. As soon as a training session location and time are planned, an automated mass text message goes out to the farmers in that particular locality, thereby saving significant costs and time spent on letting them know about the event via physical visits.

Capacity building of field forces
In both health and agriculture, training of field forces is an extremely expensive affair. Now, various mobile-device based applications are being developed that enable community health workers and agriculture extension workers to update their knowledge as and when needed.
Health-related training materials are being digitised and put into the tablets and smartphones of community health workers for self-paced learning. Gaming applications are also being developed for learning through entertainment. Short videos that can be disseminated through mobile phones and seen at leisure or shown to beneficiaries are also being developed. This mode of communication enables a low-cost mechanism for training and capacity building.

Decision making
Another critical outcome of information being collected at the field through mobile devices is that the data gets automatically digitised at the point of collection, which can be sent throughout the entire management chain. This means different layers of management can use that data to make decisions and send appropriate instructions down the chain.
Health administrators can use dashboards for targeting interventions such as medicine supplies or health camps based on real-time data sent from the field. Agriculture administrators can use it to plan for possible shortages or surpluses in certain crops, forecast pest and disease problems in a particular locality and take measures accordingly.

Conclusion
Opportunities arising out of the proliferation and advancement of mobile technologies are endless. We will soon be entering a world where all phones will be smartphones, access to the internet will be ubiquitous and cheap, field workers will be equipped with technologies and diagnostics tools, and beneficiaries will be able to access information on demand – all this is bound to fundamentally change the nature of service delivery at the doorstep for the better in ways that we cannot even imagine today. What we are doing now is just a drop in the bucket in preparation for what is to come.

The writer is CEO and Founder of mPower, a technology-based social enterprise.

Published: 12:00 am Tuesday, March 10, 2015

Towards Digital Bangladesh By Zunaid Ahmed Palak

Photo Courtesy: National Mobile Application Awarness & Capacity Building

On January 12, 2014, the present government has elapsed one more year towards the destination of Digital Bangladesh. Though one year is not enough for a great leap in progress, I believe, within a year we could initiate a lot of things which would help us to materialise the Digital Bangladesh. I would like to depict a brief picture of the achievements of the ICT sector in 2014 and our initiation and attempts for achieving Digital Bangladesh in the last year.
Tele-density is an effective measure for calculating the progress of the ICT sector. In Bangladesh, mobile phone penetration and internet penetration got an accelerated momentum in 2014. On December 2013, the number of mobile phone users was 11 crore 38 lakhs which has increased to 11 crore and 98 lacs within a year. In the same time, the number of internet users has increased to 43 million from 35 million, which indicates a positive trend to the walk of Digital Bangladesh. The growing demand of mobile phone and internet is the outcome of launching of 3G network. The demand of bandwidth is also growing in time after the commencement of 3G networks for mobile phone operators. Realising the upward bound instinct of data usage, we came to an agreement with the SEE-ME-WE-5 consortium for getting the second sub-marine cable connection. Hopefully, Bangladesh could be able to connect to the cable within the first quarter of 2016.
At present, mobile applications is a popular platform for availing services and keeping this in mind, we have inaugurated 25 apps of the 100 selected that the government is planning to release on selected services provided by various ministries, divisions and directorates. Besides, as part of disseminating public services to the people through smartphones, the government has decided to develop another 500 applications. The ICT division in collaboration with a private company will develop the applications and an agreement has already been signed on August 2014 to this effect. To solve the 10 major problems of the citizens with the help of IT, the ICT Division organised the National Mobile Hackathon competition, the biggest ever hackathon in Bangladesh. Some 1,700 programmers, students, freelancers and professional app developers participated in the competition who were divided into 340 groups and from that gathering, 10 IT-based solutions were selected.
To create skilled manpower in the IT and ITES sector, Hi-Tech Park Authority has selected 100 IT graduates for delivering advanced training on Java and now they are under training at the Infosys Technologies Limited at Mohishore of India. Under the Leveraging ICT for Growth, Employment and Governance (known as LICT) programme, we have offered training to the 34,000 youngsters in which 20,000 are getting foundation training, 10,000 are receiving trade related IT Top-Up skill training and the remaining 4,000 are availing Fast Track Future Leader training with the aim to lead the IT industry in the near future. On the other side, we are going to provide freelancing training to 55,000 youngsters under the Learning and Earning project for making them capable of earning foreign currency as well as to generate self-employment. It's a matter of pride that Bangladesh ranked third in the online market place o'DESK and 13th in Elance (combined position is seven). Through freelancing, Bangladesh earned USD 21 million from the o'Desk and Elance in the last fiscal year. The Bari Boshe Barolok programme, implemented to create another  14,420 women freelancers, started in March 2014 and came to an end in February 2014.
Without developing the ICT backbone, it is quite impossible to create a Digital Bangladesh. For uplifting the infrastructure, we have connected 18,132 government offices up to the upazila level under the Info Sarkar and Bangla Gov Net programmes. 31 kilometres of fibre-optic cable connection has been imbedded from the Bangladesh Computer Council to the Bangladesh Secretariat and Bangladesh Secretariat has also come under the free WiFi coverage so that the officials could speed up their administrative works. Moreover, for a sustainable industrial growth of ICT, Hi-Tech Park is a crucial element and we are on the verge of a contract to appoint a developer in the Kaliakoir Hi-Tech Park. Furthermore, for generating dexterous manpower, ECNEC approved the bill of Establishment of Digital University at the premise of Kaliakoir Hi-Tech Park.
To make our school-going generation competent for the 21st century, we have installed modern laboratories in 3,500 schools across the country. The number of Union Digital Centres (UDCs) has expanded from 4517 to 5,275 and now, the people from remotest part of the country are receiving 200 public services through those UDCs. On June 23, 2014, Bangladesh launched the National Web Portal, the largest Government web portal in the world which contains 25 thousand websites. Mr Sajeeb Wajed Joy, ICT Affairs Advisor to the Prime Minister, inaugurated the National Portal.
Through the relentless initiatives of the ICT Division and the co-operation of private organisations, especially the trade and expertise bodies of ICT sectors such as BASIS, BCS, BACCO, ISPAB etc. we have crossed a remarkable path and hence, Bangladesh acquired some international rewards and recognitions. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina was nominated for the 'South-South Cooperation Visionary Award 2014' for her noteworthy role in advancing Bangladesh towards a digital system and expansion of education. For bringing fundamental changes in providing services to 'Citizen's Doorstep' in the pursuit of eGovernance, on June 2014, the Prime Minister's Office of Bangladesh was awarded the prestigious 'World Summit on Information Society 2014' prize at the WSIS+10 High-Level Event of ITU at Geneva. In addition, Bangladesh was awarded the 'Global ICT Excellence Award 2014' for its outstanding contribution in social development of the nation by using ICT.
The world is changing at a tremendous pace and the tool for changing the world is Information Technology. To keep Bangladesh in this track, the Prime Minister has declared Vision 2021 in 2008. Under her visionary and time-befitting leadership, Bangladesh has achieved noticeable progress towards the implementation of Digital Bangladesh in the last six years. I am confident that country will be able to transform itself into the Digital Bangladesh envisioned within 2021.

The writer is State Minister, ICT division, Ministry of Posts and Telecommunication

Published: 12:00 am Tuesday, March 10, 2015