ISLAMABAD: Digitization offers innovative employment prospects to the 23 percent of Pakistan’s population that falls in the 20 to 34 years age group and can add $60 billion to the Pakistan Economy within the next 7 to 8 years. Overseas Investors Chamber of Commerce and Industry (OICCI) has prepared a Digital Report 2022 titled, “Recommendations for Digital Transformation in Pakistan”.
The OICCI Managing Committee presented the OICCI Digital Report 2022, titled, “Recommendations for Digital Transformation in Pakistan” to the President of Pakistan, with an objective to set the country on its digital journey. The report covers suggestions on e-commerce, fintech, IT exports and web 3.0 technologies etc.
The President showed his concern on the decline in business confidence influenced by the highly challenging political and economic situation during the past six months. He also appreciated OICCI for taking the lead to present recommendations to digitize the economy.
This report offers key recommendations to the policymakers on the various facets of the digital transformation of economy including suggestions for digital infrastructure and connectivity, government, private sector, and mass digital usage, emerging web 3.0 technologies and digital regulations to accelerate innovation in Pakistan. According to a research report, a 10 percent increase in broadband penetration results in increasing the GDP by 1.4 percent.
The report notes that in recent years, there has been tremendous development in Digital Financial Services. However, Pakistan is still a cash-based economy with less than 5% merchants accepting digital payments. Besides promoting digital mode of payments, the government also needs to encourage international e-commerce companies to set up regional offices in Pakistan. Indonesia worked on similar lines and now the e-commerce market size is worth $30 billion which is expected to reach $54 billion by 2025 and supports 26 million jobs directly and indirectly.
According to Ghias Khan, President OICCI, digitization can also help inclusion of the underserved population of society such as the far-flung areas of the country. Around 23 million children in Pakistan are out of school and we have less than 1 physician for 1000 people. To help Pakistan overcome these issues it is important to digitize the education and health sectors in a phased manner, preparing National electronic health records, and arranging capacity-building workshops for the professionals.
As per Abdul Aleem, CE and Secretary General OICCI the digitization can bring a lot of efficiency to government services, boost productivity and help improve ease of doing business (EODB). Philippines can be a good example where public service delivery was digitized under the E-Government Master Plan (EGMP) which helped the country, ranked 95th position in EODB 2020 rating, registering an improvement of 29 notches. The government should take the advantage of modern technologies such as Machine Learning, Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence to improve competence in public departments, document the economy and increase the tax revenues.
