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Toward ASEAN digital community
The existence of digitally related subjects in the school curriculum would direct students from an early age to be digitally responsible.
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Southeast Asian internet economy (gross merchandise value, in $US billion). (e-Conomy SEA 2019/JP/Hengky Wijaya)
It is undeniable that digitization (data conversion from analogue to digital) and digitalization (the process of using digital systems) experienced rapid growth during the COVID-19 pandemic. The McKinsey Global survey has shown that many companies accelerated digitization during this COVID-19 pandemic.
Moreover, in the Future of Jobs 2020 report, the World Economic Forum (WEF) disclosed 10 jobs predicted to see a surging demand in 2025, which are all digitally based, such as data analysts/scientists, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine-learning specialists or software-and-application developers. Digital-giant Microsoft also projects that 149 million digital workers will be needed by 2025, of which most jobs align with the WEF report.
The need for 149 million digital workers has only been fulfilled by 66 million in 2022. The deficit of 83 million digital workers could be an excellent opportunity, especially for the ASEAN community, amid economic uncertainties. The question is whether the ASEAN people are ready to face the future challenges of this digital era.
ASEAN, which turned 55 on Monday, has several strengths to meet the demand. WEF acknowledges ASEAN as the region with the fastest internet growth in the world, and has projected that the region’s economic growth will expand significantly to US$1 trillion in the next 10 years. In addition, ASEAN itself can also become a lucrative market because of its huge population -- 682 million people or about 9 percent of the world's population of 7.9 billion this year, according to United Nations projections.
To answer digital needs and challenges in the future, several initiatives have been carried out even before digital acceleration occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. ASEAN, which wanted to build a stronger ASEAN economic community since 2015, has made several digitally related programs, encompassing the blueprint of ASEAN Economic Community 2025 and ASEAN Connectivity 2025. This digitally related program has also been further strengthened by several other initiatives, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, including Go Digital ASEAN by the Asia Foundation and Digital ASEAN supported by WEF.
