[open-government] A report on Open Data developments in Myanmar

Mon Jan 13 03:54:09 UTC 2014

Hi,

I had a chance to visit the Yangon earlier this month, and spoke to some people in the ICT community on the potential for Open Data in the country. Here is a short report.

Waltraut Ritter
Opendata Hong Kong

Myanmar - Developing a Knowledge Society from Scratch
The Worldbank
Knowledge Economy Index ranks Myanmar as second lowest among 157 countries across
all key variables relating to ICT, innovation, education and economic
incentive/institutional regime; Transparency International’s 2013 Corruption
Perception Index lists Myanmar in the bottom group of countries, and the most
recent Internet World Statistics (2012) shows that internet penetration is
around 1%, although with the entry of two international telecom operators, Telenor
and Ooredoo, rolling out voice and data services nationwide starting this
month, these figures are expected to move up fast. The growth of internet
access in Myanmar will predominantly be mobile internet access. 7% of the
population use mobile phones; the lowest cost for an Android smartphone (with
Myanmar font) is 60-70 USD and a SIM card with data services cost between 5 and
130 USD, depending on the channel through which one gets access to a SIM. Huawei’s
smartphones are the market leader at the moment, followed by Samsung.
With the opening of
the country in the past 2-3 years, what are the prospects for building the foundations
for a knowledge society?
Recent reports and
studies about Myanmar (ADB 2012, Cheesman 2012, McKinsey 2013) describe the backwardness
of everything related to information, from information laws, information
access, ICT infrastructure to internet governance.
Building the soft
infrastructure, capacity, skills and mindset is another challenge.  Nwe Nwe Aye says that the government in
Myanmar is still heavily circumscribed by secrecy and lack of transparency, and
that there is “no sense of political rule as a participative process”* A culture
of an authoritarian society is hard to throw off, and technology may act as a
catalyst, but there are quite a few countries with excellent ICT infrastructure
and non-existing or low civic rights and public transparency as well.
Reporters without
Borders and the Burma Media Association claim that “the structure of the new
Burmese Internet as modified in 2010 gives the authorities more surveillance
options, while reserving the fastest and best-quality access for the government
and military”. They say that Burma’s use of Blue Coat technologies (the Silicon
Valley tech company providing internet censorship equipment and services such
as Deep Pocket inspection) in government agencies raises questions about
internet filtering policy and surveillance.
The Asian Development
Bank (ADB), which resumed operations in Myanmar in 2013, is advising the government
on ICT strategy and public administration reform. Following their tender for
the development of an e-Governance Master Plan, it was just announced a few
days ago that IT services provider Infosys will be appointed as adviser for the
1.5m USD project, which also includes a six month training for 100 engineering
students. Building ICT capacity is the basis for information and data management
across the public sector, and also the basis for any Open Data initiative. All
major global tech companies are preparing their investment plans for the
country, many of them coupled with education or civil society collaborations. 
Myanmar has an active
civil society working on various aspects of information society, from press
freedom to civic-driven public libraries, such as Beyond Access, an organization that aims to transform the country’s
vast network of 5000 public libraries into connected information and service
hubs, MIDO (Myanmar ICT development
organization, which organized the first internet freedom forum in Yangon last
year), and the Myanmar Blogger Society,
which now collaborates with telecom provider Ooredoo. These networks and organisations
could play an important role in building the soft infrastructure of the future
information society.  Another initiative
with potentially wide reach is the introduction of Wikimedia Zero, whereby the
Wikimedia Foundation through a partnership with Telenor, gives free access to
the “sum of human knowledge” (Jimmy Wales) without incurring data usage
charges. 
The legal side of
Myanmar’s information and internet governance also needs to be reformed.
Currently there exist a number of outdated but still valid laws, such as the “Burma
Official Secrets Act” from 1932, instated by the British Colonial regime, which
is part of the ongoing discussions on constitutional reform ahead of the 2015
elections. (http://wvw.burmalibrary.org/docs15/Burma_Code-Vol-II-ocr-tu.pdf, p182-189).
This year,
however, there is a great opportunity to introduce open data initiatives in
Myanmar: the country is conducting its first nationwide census in 31 years.
Supported by UN organisations, the data collection will take place in March and
April, and provide a sound basis for all further socio-economic development.

Reliable information has been a
scarce resource in the past decades, and the country data compiled by various
international organisations such as UNDP, ITU, and Worldbank has many gaps or only
shows estimates, e.g. the country’s population ranges between 52 and 64
million, and for Yangon the guesses are that there between 3 and 5 million
citizens. Data about livelihood, economy, exact size of the many ethnic groups
in the country are vague. The latter is widely discussed in the media in the
preparation of the census  http://www.mmfreedom-daily.com/?p=13669.
Ethnic groups are worried that the census survey may not reflect the real size
of the different groups due to classification problems. 

For the Open Data community,
engaging with the Myanmar government, public sector organisations, and civil
society, could help to build an inclusive knowledge society, where the benefits
of data, information and knowledge are available for all. Such an engagement would certainly not be a short-term project.

*in: Nick Cheesman
et. al. (ed.) Myanmar’s Transition: Openings, Obstacles and Opportunities.
ISEAS Singapore 2012
Thanks to Htaike
Htaike Aung of MIDO (Myanmar ICT for Development Organisation) for information
on internet governance.
January 2013
Waltraut Ritter,
Knowledge Dialogues and Opendata Hong Kong, waltraut at opendatahk.com
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