Universal access and service (UAS) policies do not exist in isolation, they are relevant to education, e-government, electricity, and micro-finance and e-banking, among others. However, overarching national policy on ICT development should provide overall direction and facilitate and define the inter-linkages among the various sectors, policies, stakeholders and initiatives.
ICTs are especially important for education, but voice alone is a limited medium, telephony and radio broadcasting are not enough in the context of dynamic education. In consequence, universal access (UA) generally means “universal Internet access”, and increasingly, “universal broadband Internet access”. Many UAS policies include the provision of Internet access to schools, often partially paid for by Universal Access and Service Funds (UASFs). However, while Internet access for schools might be paid for by UASFs, making effective use of the access is the responsibility of the school, the ministry of education and others. The task of training teachers and providing enough useful and appealing content is particularly significant. The relation between UAS and educational development programmes is considered in further detail in
Section 1.6.1.
E-government is the use of ICTs to make government more responsive, efficient, effective, and transparent. The conditions within a country, including communications infrastructure and public access, transparency of governance, but also government capacity and public literacy, affect what is worth attempting in e-government. These conditions are considered in
Section 1.6.2.
Though electricity is essential for telecommunications, in some developing countries telecommunications are often more widespread or more reliable than the main electricity supply; network operators provide their own power generators and their customers find unorthodox ways of recharging equipment, e.g., through car batteries. Important benefits could be gained by co-ordinating the provision of telecommunications with the provision of the main electricity supply. As discussed in
Section 1.6.3, telecommunications networks would be easier to operate and use and could share physical infrastructure with electricity networks. While it is a highly desirable practice, this co-ordination might be difficult to achieve. However, this absence does not need to prevent telecommunications provision in places that do not yet have the main electricity supply.
Financial services that deal with small sums of money (micro-finance) are widely believed to help people escape from poverty, for example, the Grameen Village Phone programme, provided women with loans to buy phones, sell phone calls, make profits and repay the loans. E-banking uses ICTs to make micro-finance available to more people in new, less expensive ways. As discussed in
Section 1.6.4, these initiatives raise regulatory challenges of their own, separate from those of telecommunications; customers must be protected against fraud but regulation must not prevent the development of valuable and trustworthy services.