Najib: eRezeki project to connect Malaysians with digital income

Prime Minister Datuk Seri Najib Razak yesterday announced the eRezeki project to connect Malaysians at the bottom 40 percent of the income pyramid (B40) with domestic and global digital income. "eRezeki will be rolled out across multiple Digital Work Centres and this work centre can be in the form of Urban Transformation Centre, Rural Transformation Centre, community colleagues and mosques to impact rural and urban low income households," he said at the closing of the 26th MSC Malaysia Implementation Council Meeting here Thursday. He said the project includes a series of Digital Capability Programmes which would eventually train and match 400,000 empowered B40 community members with micro tasks from domestic and foreign sources, helping each of them earn an average additional annual income of RM6,000 by 2020.

He said to accelerate the promise made by the government to put the rakyat at the centre of its service delivery, the government endorsed the Digital Government Transformation initiative that would push new frontiers in online service delivery, telecommunications infrastructure and human capital development.

"Central to this is the shift from the current provider-based internal rating to user-based satisfaction rakyat-centric assessment.

"In line with this, we have decided that part of government data will be declassified to make it available to the public," he added.

Najib said to fuel growth in the Malaysian Digital Economy, it was also vital to drive the development and promotion of key technology hubs for the nation's information and communications technology industry.

Hence, he said the government had approved several decisions to help deepen the MSC Malaysia's Established Niche Area.

"They are to position Malaysia as a hub for cloud and content services, whereby a data traffic hub will be created.

"This will be done by leveraging the data centre ecosystem in Cyberjaya, the international data connectivity gateways in Cherating and Mersing, and creating a new cloud content and services cluster in Iskandar.

"In this regard, we will invest in expanding the international data connectivity gateway and we will consider this as the priority project," Najib said.

In addition, he said to make Malaysia as a regional games and interactive media hub, several actions would be taken, including attracting anchor companies to serve as industry drivers, building local games capacity and capability and raising global market access through publishing platforms.

Najib said the government would also endorse the creation of a one-stop coordinating body to spur further development of Content Malaysia.

"This will help us to realise the potential of our young people toward monetising their creative talents," he added.

Following the efforts in 2013, he said to realise the opportunities in Big Data Analytics (BDA), the Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) would implement three high impact projects around talent development.

This would see the setting up of the Asian Institute of Data Science in collaboration with leading global universities such as Carnegie Mellon; the opening up of Government Open Data through data.gov.my; and the setting up of a BDA Innovation Centre of Excellence led by the private sector to nurture Malaysian talent in data science and drive usage and growth of BDA in the country.