A Step towards Incorporation of Rural Area Population of Pakistan to Knowledge Based Society
Zobia Rehman, Claudiu Vasile Kifor · RePEc: Research Papers in Economics · 2015
Knowledge based society offers equal opportunities for all of its members to access the knowledge which is in their individual or general interest. Knowledge can upgrade the condition of living of a society if provided timely and in a semantically understandable way to each and every individual. Pakistan is one of those countries of the developing world which on one hand has issue of digital divide, but on the other hand has adequate availability of the resources that help flourish knowledge based society. In this article we will discuss the major obstacles in implementing Knowledge Management (KM) practices for rural area population of Pakistan and their remedies by information and communication technology, and research and development. Like every individual they need to access two types of knowledge; one related to everyday life for example knowledge related to law and order, policies and procedures and second related to assist them in their occupations. Pakistan has multilingual culture. Urdu is national language of Pakistan whereas English is its official language. Besides this there are more than 70 regional languages. Urdu and English are spoken and understood in literate community which is 60% of total population and rest of the 40% people rely on their regional language as medium of communication. According to World Bank 62% of total population is residing in rural areas where infrastructure and socio-economic environment are also obstacles for KM implementation. In this article we will present a framework which will make use of natural language processing applications on mobile phones and Television communication to bring KM in practice.