"This (Society 5.0) is a very wide space that can be used by application developers, social activists, and non-governmental organizations. The government will provide facilities," he said while making a presentation at a webinar entitled 'Digital Village Development during the COVID-19 Pandemic', accessed from here on Friday.
Society 5.0 is a human-centric concept of a society where humans are able to solve various social problems and challenges by utilizing technological innovations from Industrial Revolution 4.0, he explained.
One way for the community to utilize technology to overcome social problems and improve people's welfare, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic, is to develop digital villages, he said.
However, Indonesia has not yet been able to fully implement Society 5.0, especially in rural areas, since information technology infrastructures are still being developed there, Sukamta said.
In 2019, only around 36 percent of residents in rural areas had access to the Internet, even though the figure may have increased considering the acceleration of technological infrastructure development in the midst of the pandemic, he added.
He opined that by facilitating rural residents with technological innovations, local governments could optimize villages through the "smart village" concept. He expressed the hope that the use of technology for optimizing smart villages would have an impact on improving the community's economy.
"If it (the development of a smart village) is jointly done and managed by the village head, I believe it can be done," he remarked.
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Translator: Putu Indah, Raka Adji
Editor: Sri Haryati
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