Publication: Enabling Digital Entrepreneurs
Loading...
Files in English
1,025 downloads
Published
2016-01
ISSN
Date
2016-01-14
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
In the developed world, the emergence of utility-based cloud computing is shifting focus from technical barriers to the business environment challenges facing digital entrepreneurs. This shift reinforces the growing importance of implementing effective policies that foster the best climate for digital service incubation, growth and successful development. However, in many rural areas and developing countries, even basic infrastructure remains a challenge, from the hardware, the network, the content, the ICT eco-system, to the skills on both consumer and business sides.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“van Welsum, Desirée. 2016. Enabling Digital Entrepreneurs. WDR 2016 Background Paper;. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/23646 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Digital Object Identifier
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication ICT as an Enabler of Transformation in Ethiopia(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01)Over the last two decades, Ethiopia has achieved remarkable progress toward social and economic indicators. Analytical evidence shows that development projects with a significant information and communication technology (ICT) component have a higher potential to achieve greater outcomes on the ground than the ones not supported by ICT. This is why the Government of Ethiopia sees ICT within the broader context of its socioeconomic development objectives and believes that it should take advantage of today's most innovative and reliable technologies to accelerate the rate of economic growth and alleviate poverty in the country. The Government of Ethiopia has requested the ICT sector unit of the World Bank to prepare a comprehensive report on how ICT can be used to achieve a true transformation of the Ethiopian economy and society. Therefore, this report explores how ICT can be leveraged to foster the development of an ICT-enabled industry and the private sector in general, to enhance public sector performance, to develop the agriculture and health sectors, and finally how all these efforts can lead to the emergence of an open innovation ecosystem. This report takes stock of current and recently-launched ICT initiatives in Ethiopia and develops sector-specific recommendations based on international best practices that help leverage the transformative power of ICT to improve the social and economic well-being of citizens and achieve rapid and sustainable socioeconomic development. The report explores following topics: background in chapter one, presents fostering the development of ICT-enabled industry and the private sector in chapter two. Chapter three deals with enhancing the performance of the public sector. Chapter four is developing the health sector. Chapter five deals with agricultural and rural development. Chapter six helps in creating an open innovation ecosystem; and chapter seven presents recommendations for ICT-enabled transformation in Ethiopia.Publication Digital Dividends Walking the Walk(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01)The World Bank’s 2016 World Development Report explores how digital technologies are impacting growth, jobs and public services. The internet and other digital technologies profoundly affect the lives of billions of people. The Report examines how they can be a force for development, especially for the poor in developing countries. The report explores the impact of digital technologies on economic growth, on social and economic opportunity, and on the efficiency of public service delivery. It analyzes the factors that have enabled or hindered businesses, people, and governments to benefit from these technologies. The report also identifies the policy reforms in the information and communication technology (ICT) sector, complementary reforms, and reforms in the development community required to maximize the impact of digital technologies on growth and development.Publication Will the Digital Revolution Help or Hurt Employment?(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-02)What will technological change deliver in the coming decades? And what can we do to determine the outcome? Technological change in any given society is never smooth and always negotiated. Although both perils and opportunities await, the ultimate result depends on our choices today. Governments, businesses, and individuals have shown that adapting to changing circumstances can alter the consequences of apparently ‘inevitable’ changes. And developing countries can be profoundly affected by changes seemingly limited to the advanced economies; they must adapt to what is actually a global technological playing field. The World Bank’s recently issued World Development Report 2016: digital dividends focuses on strengthening the ‘analog complements’ of the digital economy, including adapting skills to get the most out of the digital revolution. Countries whose governments can facilitate innovation, strengthen education and skill building, and build up the social safety net may be the most likely to benefit from the coming changes.Publication Gender and Digital Development in Thailand(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-09-26)The wave of digital transformation has swept across the globe, with its pace significantly accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic, which expedited the adoption of digital technologies by several years. However, this rapid digital metamorphosis is not without the risk of escalating gender inequality. The digital divide, defined as "the distinction between those who have access to and can utilize digital communication services and those who are excluded from these services", exhibits a gendered aspect. This gender digital divide reflects the inequalities between men and women in terms of access to and usage of digital technology. This document offers an overview of the gender equality issues in digital development in Thailand, drawing on a literature review, initial findings from research conducted in Odon Thani province in 2022, and findings and recommendations from the 2023 Adult Skills Assessment in Thailand (ASAT).Publication ICT for Greater Development Impact(Washington, DC, 2012-06-15)Information and communication technologies (ICTs) have great promise to reduce poverty, increase productivity, boost economic growth, and improve accountability and governance. That promise only grew when ICTs underwent a revolution in the 2000s. Nearly 5 billion people in developing countries now use mobile phones, up from 200 million at the last decade's start, and the number of Internet users has risen 10-fold. People across the globe do much more than chat and play games. They learn where best to fish and what market to sell their produce in. They trace cattle from pastures to supermarkets. They report illegal logging and misuses of local budget. They pay bills, send money back home, and receive cash transfers. They do business on mobile phones. They use ICTs to prevent violence against women and community radio to empower them. They get state-of-the-art schooling online. They remotely monitor and switch on irrigation pumps. The World Bank Group (WBG) has worked with its clients as they have pursued these opportunities and has supported sector reforms through technical assistance and lending operations, guided by its 2001 ICT strategy. The WBG has been most successful in fostering ICT sector reform and attracting private investment in mobile communications. WBG support for ICT applications has grown rapidly over the past decade. More than 1,300 active Bank investment projects have ICT components (74 percent of the Bank's 1,700-project portfolio) to modernize internal processes and upgrade service delivery. Results have been mixed, with only 59 percent of Bank project components for ICT applications achieving or likely to achieve their objectives fully or substantially.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Publication Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-10-15)The Poverty, Prosperity, and Planet Report 2024 is the latest edition of the series formerly known as Poverty and Shared Prosperity. The report emphasizes that reducing poverty and increasing shared prosperity must be achieved in ways that do not come at unacceptably high costs to the environment. The current “polycrisis”—where the multiple crises of slow economic growth, increased fragility, climate risks, and heightened uncertainty have come together at the same time—makes national development strategies and international cooperation difficult. Offering the first post-Coronavirus (COVID)-19 pandemic assessment of global progress on this interlinked agenda, the report finds that global poverty reduction has resumed but at a pace slower than before the COVID-19 crisis. Nearly 700 million people worldwide live in extreme poverty with less than US$2.15 per person per day. Progress has essentially plateaued amid lower economic growth and the impacts of COVID-19 and other crises. Today, extreme poverty is concentrated mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa and fragile settings. At a higher standard more typical of upper-middle-income countries—US$6.85 per person per day—almost one-half of the world is living in poverty. The report also provides evidence that the number of countries that have high levels of income inequality has declined considerably during the past two decades, but the pace of improvements in shared prosperity has slowed, and that inequality remains high in Latin America and the Caribbean and Sub-Saharan Africa. Worldwide, people’s incomes today would need to increase fivefold on average to reach a minimum prosperity threshold of US$25 per person per day. Where there has been progress in poverty reduction and shared prosperity, there is evidence of an increasing ability of countries to manage natural hazards, but climate risks are significantly higher in the poorest settings. Nearly one in five people globally is at risk of experiencing welfare losses due to an extreme weather event from which they will struggle to recover. The interconnected issues of climate change and poverty call for a united and inclusive effort from the global community. Development cooperation stakeholders—from governments, nongovernmental organizations, and the private sector to communities and citizens acting locally in every corner of the globe—hold pivotal roles in promoting fair and sustainable transitions. By emphasizing strategies that yield multiple benefits and diligently monitoring and addressing trade-offs, we can strive toward a future that is prosperous, equitable, and resilient.Publication Classroom Assessment to Support Foundational Literacy(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-03-21)This document focuses primarily on how classroom assessment activities can measure students’ literacy skills as they progress along a learning trajectory towards reading fluently and with comprehension by the end of primary school grades. The document addresses considerations regarding the design and implementation of early grade reading classroom assessment, provides examples of assessment activities from a variety of countries and contexts, and discusses the importance of incorporating classroom assessment practices into teacher training and professional development opportunities for teachers. The structure of the document is as follows. The first section presents definitions and addresses basic questions on classroom assessment. Section 2 covers the intersection between assessment and early grade reading by discussing how learning assessment can measure early grade reading skills following the reading learning trajectory. Section 3 compares some of the most common early grade literacy assessment tools with respect to the early grade reading skills and developmental phases. Section 4 of the document addresses teacher training considerations in developing, scoring, and using early grade reading assessment. Additional issues in assessing reading skills in the classroom and using assessment results to improve teaching and learning are reviewed in section 5. Throughout the document, country cases are presented to demonstrate how assessment activities can be implemented in the classroom in different contexts.Publication Digital Africa(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-03-13)All African countries need better and more jobs for their growing populations. "Digital Africa: Technological Transformation for Jobs" shows that broader use of productivity-enhancing, digital technologies by enterprises and households is imperative to generate such jobs, including for lower-skilled people. At the same time, it can support not only countries’ short-term objective of postpandemic economic recovery but also their vision of economic transformation with more inclusive growth. These outcomes are not automatic, however. Mobile internet availability has increased throughout the continent in recent years, but Africa’s uptake gap is the highest in the world. Areas with at least 3G mobile internet service now cover 84 percent of Africa’s population, but only 22 percent uses such services. And the average African business lags in the use of smartphones and computers as well as more sophisticated digital technologies that catalyze further productivity gains. Two issues explain the usage gap: affordability of these new technologies and willingness to use them. For the 40 percent of Africans below the extreme poverty line, mobile data plans alone would cost one-third of their incomes—in addition to the price of access devices, apps, and electricity. Data plans for small- and medium-size businesses are also more expensive than in other regions. Moreover, shortcomings in the quality of internet services—and in the supply of attractive, skills-appropriate apps that promote entrepreneurship and raise earnings—dampen people’s willingness to use them. For those countries already using these technologies, the development payoffs are significant. New empirical studies for this report add to the rapidly growing evidence that mobile internet availability directly raises enterprise productivity, increases jobs, and reduces poverty throughout Africa. To realize these and other benefits more widely, Africa’s countries must implement complementary and mutually reinforcing policies to strengthen both consumers’ ability to pay and willingness to use digital technologies. These interventions must prioritize productive use to generate large numbers of inclusive jobs in a region poised to benefit from a massive, youthful workforce—one projected to become the world’s largest by the end of this century.Publication World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2023-04-25)Migration is a development challenge. About 184 million people—2.3 percent of the world’s population—live outside of their country of nationality. Almost half of them are in low- and middle-income countries. But what lies ahead? As the world struggles to cope with global economic imbalances, diverging demographic trends, and climate change, migration will become a necessity in the decades to come for countries at all levels of income. If managed well, migration can be a force for prosperity and can help achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. World Development Report 2023 proposes an innovative approach to maximize the development impacts of cross-border movements on both destination and origin countries and on migrants and refugees themselves. The framework it offers, drawn from labor economics and international law, rests on a “Match and Motive Matrix” that focuses on two factors: how closely migrants’ skills and attributes match the needs of destination countries and what motives underlie their movements. This approach enables policy makers to distinguish between different types of movements and to design migration policies for each. International cooperation will be critical to the effective management of migration.Publication The State of Economic Inclusion Report 2024: Pathways to Scale(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-11-20)The State of Economic Inclusion Report (SEI) 2024 explores efforts to scale up economic inclusion programs - bundles of coordinated, multidimensional interventions that support individuals, households, and communities to sustainably increase their incomes and assets - in the context of overlapping crisis. These programs transform the economic lives of the poorest and most vulnerable people, building their resilience and creating job opportunities. The report features data from 405 programs across 88 countries, benefiting over 70 million individuals either directly or indirectly. This marks almost doubling in the number of programs and nearly a 50 percent increase in coverage since the SEI 2021 report. Governments continue to lead in scaling up these economic inclusion programs, covering nearly three-fourths of program participants. However, non-governmental programs have also significantly contributed to the increase in coverage in recent years, in addition to serving as both service providers and capacity building providers for governments. The report offers five important contributions: 1) Positioning economic inclusion programs as crucial for building resilience and providing job opportunities for the poor and vulnerable in the face of overlapping crises. 2) Analyzing the global landscape over the past three years, highlighting the extent to which economic inclusion programs are being customized for diverse contexts and groups, including a cross-cutting focus on gender. 3) Reviewing progress and challenges in the design and implementation of government-led programs, including the interplay with communities, non-governmental organizations, and the private sector. 4) Examining the emerging agenda of designing economic inclusion programs to enhance the long-term climate resilience of poor and vulnerable individuals and communities. 5) Featuring three spotlights that unpack emerging evidence from government-led programs, customization strategies targeting youth, and the increasing role of digital tools and technologies in program delivery. Data from the report are available on the PEI Data Portal (www.peiglobal.org).