Bridging the Digital Divide in Depressed Areas in the Philippines

A Personal look at the Digital Divide.
By Roque Santos Morales

As far as the statistics of Education (particularly IT education) in areas outside of the Urbanized areas (primarily in the depressed areas), it appears that there is a dearth of information as to how there would be policies to address IT education.

Take for instance, Autonomous Region for Muslim Mindanao which does not only earmark for a small passing rate in the NEAT and NSAT exams compared to other regions.

In our school, I've noticed how technologically challenged are my students who come from ARMM areas in Mindanao.

Understanding that it is already a privilege to be functionally literate in these areas and this is a very big issue, imagine elementary and secondary students from public high schools not having access to information technology in the Philippines.

I salute the Open source people in Mindanao for doing their share in trying to popularize FLOSS in the southern part of the Philippines, but I believe that there should be a more bigger role to be played by fellow FLOSS advocates in Mindanao like doing a FLOSS project aimed at ARMM areas, like for instance piloting a primary and secondary school with implementing FLOSS. What I mean here is embarking on setting up a FLOSS laboratory in one targeted elementary and high school. At least from one end we would be able to actively show that Open source indeed can help in doing projects like bridging parts of the digital divide.