In early February, almost 500 students thronged the auditorium of Karachi’s Institute of Business Administration to hear Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank Group, speak about the bank’s role in lifting people from extreme poverty to shared prosperity.
“Pakistan has to scale up investment in its people, focusing especially on youth, to ensure that every Pakistani can learn, grow and participate fully in the digital economy of the future,” he said.
With this, he also boosted Pakistan’s possible role as a powerhouse in the digital universe, echoing several other similar sentiments. While the country’s embryonic information and communications technology (ICT) sector has been the subject of much speculation, recent stories in various international media draw attention to its obvious potential.
Experts cite there are 1,500 registered ICT companies in Pakistan and about 10,000 new ICT graduates enter the marketplace each year.
The country, in context
Pakistan is not an information technology powerhouse — its share of global IT sales is only $2.8 billion (Dh10.28 billion), of which $1.6 billion represents services and software exports. This is only a fraction of last year’s $3.2-trillion global market.
“Yet, Pakistan’s IT sector is carving a niche for itself as a favoured place to go for freelance programmers, software coders and app designers,” Contributing Op-Ed Writer Bina Shah said in an August New York Times opinion piece.
“Energetic members of the middle class educated in Pakistan’s top universities have honed their skills at the many hackathons, start-up fairs and expos, digital summits, and entrepreneurial events at campuses, software houses and IT associations across the country.”
Pakistan’s freelance programmers’ market currently ranks third, behind only the US and India.
On a blog run by the South Asia region of the World Bank Group, Anna O’Donnell comments that with nearly 100 million youth under the age of 24, Pakistan will need to grow at about 7 per cent a year to absorb them into productive economic participation. Self-employment and entrepreneurship is a solution, she says.
She ranks the merits of freelancing communities on Facebook, co-working spaces, market incubators, accelerator programmes and angel investment networks.
“All of these pieces make up the innovation ecosystem that has the potential to help drive Pakistan’s growth over the coming decade. And it will be the participation of young people in this digital economy that will lead to socio-economic change in Pakistan, changing the way traffic tickets are issued, music is curated, houses are purchased and ride-sharing is done.”
The efforts, in concert
While the future is being touted as a great and glorious place, a slew of current efforts across strata and sectors bode well.
In the 2015 edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Information Technology Report, Pakistan takes 97th place. To put it into perspective, in 2012, it fell from 102 to 105 and in 2013 it slipped further to 111. Turning the tables around in a span of just one year and climbing up 14 places to make it inside the top 100 is a great indication of the country’s readiness and progress.
In October, the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government declared 2016 the Digital Year and announced plans to launch a comprehensive digital economy programme in the province, particularly aimed at empowering youth. “The provincial government has planned to focus on linking youth to the growing number of technology- and ICT-based job markets,” Shahram Khan Tarakai, Minister for Science Technology and Information Technology, said at the launch.
The minister said the plan — an initiative of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa IT Board in collaboration with the World Bank and Peshawar 2.0, a youth-led initiative to build a start-up community — would showcase the province as a technology hub. It would include investments in enhancing the skills of youth and emphasise support for young entrepreneurs to launch their own start-ups.
Even earlier in 2013, the provincial government, in partnership with the World Bank, had devised a strategy to link its youth with global employment opportunities and promote the empowerment of tech entrepreneurs. The province’s capital Peshawar is quickly emerging as one of Pakistan’s tech hubs.
In mid-February, Pakistan Software Houses Association (P@SHA) announced the launch of its Digital Pakistan 2020 campaign, citing the success of similar projects in countries such as India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Vietnam. P@SHA’s Chairman Syed Ahmad said the association will spearhead the campaign in collaboration with key industry stakeholders and called for support from the country’s ICT companies to get substantial results.
The association’s aspirations are ambitious. “The IT industry can address two of Pakistan’s major issues: creation of almost 300,000 new white-collar jobs for our youth, and an export jump to reach $5 billion per year by 2020,” said Ahmad.
