By Raj Singh

I am pleased to announce the release of the 2023 Annual Report.

The report showcases a wide variety of digital development projects that serve the Foundation’s goal of an open, stable, secure Internet that is affordable and accessible for our Asia Pacific people. It also shows how collaboration and cooperation – within and between multiple stakeholder groups – helps ensure the Internet continues to make a positive impact on people’s lives.

On the front cover of the report you will see a balloon that has a Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) installed on it. This is part of a project by Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia to bring connectivity to indigenous communities around Chini Lake. These communities didn’t have the connectivity necessary to use IoT flood warning sensors, and the ground was too swampy to build towers. This solution was exactly the kind of affordable and innovative mix of low-tech, high-tech and good old-fashioned ingenuity that the Foundation’s Information Society Innovation Fund (ISIF Asia) seeks to support.

This kind of ingenuity combined with a will to solve problems and help humanity is everywhere in the Internet technical community – it’s just sometimes difficult to see it, harness it and resource it. That’s a big part of what the Foundation aims to do. This can be seen in the projects we implement and the initiatives we support – be it connecting and educating schools in Samoa (page 9), upskilling and empowering women and gender diverse people in the technical sector throughout Southeast Asia (page 12) or fostering cybersecurity efforts in Sri Lanka (page 15). 

• You can find the full annual report here.

The team at the Foundation hope you enjoy reading about these efforts as much as we did in helping bring the efforts to life!

And more importantly, if you want to support the Foundation in the work that it does, do get in touch.