The public-private collaborative approach is supporting Pakistan’s progress towards digitalization but more needs to be done to connect close to 50 percent offline population with high-speed internet.
This was the crux of the discussion by guest speaker Aamir Ibrahim, the CEO of Jazz, during the session ‘Pakistan’s Digital Outlook’ that was hosted as part of a larger roundtable called ‘Realizing the Digital Pakistan Milestone’ by the GSMA in Barcelona, Spain.
Its participants included Julian Gorman, the Head of APAC GSMA, and representatives of the local telecom industry.
Ibrahim highlighted the challenges presented by frontier markets like Pakistan, and stated that previous coordinated efforts had turned challenges into success.
He said, “A united front is necessary to take on industry challenges. A recent example is the Rs. 0.75 voice tax on mobile calls, which was implemented without the industry stakeholders’ prior consultation”.
