Abbas Ghanbari

Issues and Challenges of New Ict for Development: Information and Communication Technology Abbas Ghanbari

We do believe that in order to use ICT for development, a lot of issues and concerns should be taken into consideration, and even it should be at the center of any policy if we want to take advantages of ICT advancement, and are least inclined to pay a hefty price. Some of this issues and challenges of ICT can be summarized as: access to digital tools and contents, increasing awareness about skills and services related to ICTs, a supportive legal protection for online transactions, un-sustainability of many ICT pilot projects, and so forth. Based on the aforementioned issues and challenges, which were highlighted by respective scholars in different countries, we do believe that sharing experiences between differing countries in using ICT for development, especially in the Muslim world is the best way to address these issues and challenges to avoid making same mistakes . Iran and Malaysia are considered as two leading developing countries, and both of them are more or less at the middle of a progressively long development program, called Malaysian 2020 and Iran 20 year vision plan that ICT is at core and center of their development programs.