Anusha Rehman addresses UNESCO Mobil Learning forum in Paris

PARIS: Minister for Information Technology Anusha Rahman has been invited by UNESCO and ITU for the formulation of Policy to use technology for the proliferation of education, said a statement issued on Saturday.

While addressing this forum at UNESCO’s Mobile Learning Week in Paris, Anusha Rahman said, “ICT is the key enabler of socio economic development. The government of Pakistan, she said, under the "visionary leadership of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has accorded its highest priority to the development of ICT infrastructure and applications to accelerate the digitization in the country."

She said with the launch of 3G/4G the internet penetration in the country upped from 3% to over 15% in short space of one year.  Recently the present Government has issued a long awaited Telecom Policy, marked as landmark document by Industry experts for the incorporation of numerous measures to accelerate the digitization in the country.”

The minister for IT, mentioned during the course of discussion, “One of the potential business cases of ICT industry is to use the Mobile Technology as a vehicle to help bring high quality learning to people who did not have access to it. This can lead to devise strategies which can ensure that widely owned mobile devices facilitate the learning of groups that are underserved educationally, including economically disadvantaged families, women and girls, people with disabilities and people living in rural areas”.

She mentioned government’s endeavors to use the technology for the uplift of socio economic development through public private partnership. ICT for Girls project is one the endeavors in place under which thousands of Girls will be trained by Microsoft on coding and computing to increase their employability potential. She further highlighted that another project with the partnership of Cisco and Microsoft is in process where the young children from the public schools of ICT region will be trained in practical IT education. Reiterating her Government’s vision of providing affordable and accessible ICT  services to the masses, through USF billions of Rupees are being spent to provide telecom and broad band services to underserved and un served areas of the country.

She emphasized,” The focus should be to define the characteristics of high quality mobile learning content and models which will prompt the production and wide dissemination of this content.