Perspectives from the Region: Country Expert Interviews

and morbidity from noncommunicable diseases and water and air pollution. Addressing these challenges requires improving the quality of services, especially last-mile service delivery for the poor and the vulnerable, by increasing spending, efficiency, and accountability using both the public and private sectors.

The plan focuses as well on developing twenty-first-century skills and employment opportunities for youth, which are essential to reducing intergenerational inequality, as well as safeguarding displaced human capital.

Finally, the plan highlights the fact that the empowerment agenda for human capital in South Asia, which also aligns with the third pillar of this study’s framework, is centered on girls, women, and marginalized communities, who are subject to deprivation, discrimination, violence, and exclusion in many forms.

The challenge therefore is to harness the converging technology revolution to not only improve service delivery (“building and protecting” human capital), but also to ensure better jobs (“deploying and utilizing” human capital) and reduce inequalities, strengthen inclusion, and enable empowerment (“empowering” human capital). Without adequate regulation and intentional public policies, the latter two objectives could be easily overlooked or undermined because of some of the inherent features of these technologies. This study also highlights the need to build the innovation capacity of countries so they are able to locally adapt, diffuse, and develop technologies for a resilient future.

Discussions with local actors in the region revealed other perspectives on the priorities for human capital and the use of technology in South Asia. A series of virtual interviews were held with technology experts in Kerala (India), Nepal, and Pakistan.6 The interviews were extremely helpful in understanding the situation on the ground, including political economy issues and geopolitical rivalries that affect technology choices, and in eliciting suggestions for what the World Bank could do in the future. Table 2.1 is a summary of the responses by each group.

A key insight from these interviews is that those at the local level broadly recognize the qualitative shift in the uptake of technology arising from COVID-19. And it is widely understood that such disasters can and will happen again, thereby underscoring the urgency of anchoring disaster preparedness and resilience at the community level. Such a step would include building capabilities for community innovations and adaptation of solutions to local needs (“resilience by design”) and strengthening the capacity of local government. Resilience to future shocks requires greater digital collaboration between the public and private sectors and digital leadership capabilities within government to leverage digital technologies. There is a potential for quick wins in health, education, and social protection, including assessing requirements for critical medical and food supplies, rethinking the traditional schoolhouse delivery mode with roving teachers and mobile learning labs, and delivery of social assistance through financial