Digital economy can foster growth and bridge divide

A participant of the Ministerial Forum on "Bridging the Digital Divide" takes a photograph with his iPad. ZOU HONG/CHINA DAILY

The Nigerian government is aiming to provide fiber connectivity to all 774 local government areas of Nigeria within four years, and is working to bring down government taxes and levies associated with rolling out broadband infrastructure.

"Chinese companies like Huawei have played an important role in helping our digital push," he added. Huawei has sponsored Nigerian students' information and communication technology training in China and it has also opened a technology hub in the country.

Gabriel Lim, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Communications and Information of the Republic of Singapore, said: "The more we use digital technologies, the more we should make sure that every citizen has the knowledge and skills to seize the opportunities provided by the technologies."

According to him, Singapore is stepping up its push to transform itself into a "Smart Nation", a nation where people live meaningful and fulfilled lives, enabled by technology.

"We must turn a digital divide into a digital multiplier," Lin said, adding that Singapore is trying to provide universal digital access for each citizen, ensure lifelong digital literacy through intergenerational teaching, and encourage citizens' active digital participation in contributing ideas that could make lives better.

Also, the digital gap is not just about network infrastructure, and education is of importance to solve this problem. Wu Zhaohui, president of Zhejiang University, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said leveraging digital technologies to make education more accessible is one of the keys to closing the gap.

Different from physical classrooms, digital or online education offers a way to boost teaching productivity. Education resources can flow across borders, and different levels of educational institutions can also cooperate with each other more deeply. Technological advances will give birth to a new human-machine collaboration system in education, which will involve personalized learning and intelligent interactive teaching methods.