DigitalDivide.org
announces an Indonesian initiative launched in July 24, 2007
Habibie Center, Jakarta
Investor Group Against Digital Divide
Investor Group Against Digital Divide (IGADD) is conceived as a global coalition of investor institutions, now in formation, whose purpose is to close the Digital Divide. It aims to recruit onto its advisory board the chairmen of the world’s major global technology corporations operating in emerging markets.
On top of its agenda is high-speed internet: to reduce the alarming disparity in broadband penetration. Some countries give their citizens full access to the powerful learning experiences made possible by fast internet. Other countries isolate themselves and their citizens by making the internet unavailable, too expensive and unreliable. Broadband, increasingly, is the precondition of anyone’s empowerment in today’s global age. It could be called a fundamental human right for the 21st Century.
Indonesia -- the first target of IGADD’s strategies -- is an example of a country where broadband is virtually absent. With less then one percent of its citizens benefiting from high-speed internet, Indonesia lags behind all other major emerging markets in this regard. With the cooperation of the government, IGADD will formulate a plan for 20% broadband penetration by 2012. The key: public and private sectors must find a way to share costs, risks and benefits of achieving this goal.
To crack the code for bringing broadband to Indonesia, IGADD hopes to brings together the financial and technological resources and know-how of the world's most skillful telecommunications, IT and finance industries. IGADD’s challenge is to build a plausible scenario that stakeholders can rally around. Once having achieved this aim, IGADD’s next step would be to make sure broadband applications emerge that empower millions of citizens.
IGADD already has strong roots in Indonesia. Formulated in Jakarta three years ago, it will finally be launched at an event July 24, 2007 at the Habibie Center, which will serve as its Indonesian secretariat. The leading technological institute in Indonesia, called Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB), will be its operational partner. The launch event is a “call to action,” in which important noncommercial stakeholders -- the ICT minister, heads of intergovernmental agencies, and universities, will ask the private sector to offer its “best thinking about how the goal of “20 by 12,” 20% broadband penetration by the year 2012, can be achieved.
DigitalDivide.org is the founder of IGADD, one of its three core Indonesian partners, and it is establishing the international base for IGADD at the University of Washington’s Human Interface Technology Laboratory. DigitalDivide.org expects to mobilize international support for IGADD’s Indonesian operations and then extend the innovations established in Indonesia to other Southeast Asian nations.
Taking advantage of the market-friendly orientation of the current Indonesian government, IGADD will support public-policy formulations developed by the government's new National Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) Council. Although IGADD's strategies will be guided by commercial goals, it will also help achieve social goals. It will draw from best practices in ICT deployment in China, India, and other Southeast Asian countries to generate jobs, create educational opportunities and encourage small business growth in the Indonesian heartland. To this end, IGADD will stimulate investments in new research facilities in Indonesia, new strategic alliances, and new public/private partnerships that combine international and domestic resources.
IGADD will be chaired by a prominent Indonesian business leader, Dr. Ilham A. Habibie. In this role, Dr. Habibie continues in the legacy of his father, a former president of Indonesia, who has long advanced the notion that technology is a key to the development of Indonesia and even to its capacity to thrive as a democratic beacon for the Islamic world.
Like Habibie Center, ITB was crucial to the conceptualization and implementation of IGADD. A particularly prominent role is being played by its ICT Research Center, led by Dr. Armein Langi.
DigitalDivide.org was founded in 2002 by a group of Harvard and MIT researchers led by Professor Craig Warren Smith and Grameen Phone founder Iqbal Quadir). IGADD's framework originated at a DigitalDivide.org meeting held at the Harvard Club of Jakarta in late 2004. This meeting was sponsored by the Intel Corporation and attended by major IT, telecom and banking stakeholders doing business in Indonesia.
