This article describes an action-research pilot project to provide opportunities for the remote Kelabit community in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, on the island of Borneo, to use information and communication technologies (ICTs) for sustainable human development. The project aims to establish a telecentre as a place for the community to use ICTs. Although many in the community have heard about computers, they have not seen or used them. In Phase 1 of this project, a team of University Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) researchers were involved in the collection of base-line data to provide a socio-economic profile of the community, to establish existing patterns of communication and computer awareness and finally to determine the current attitudes towards computers in Bario's secondary school (SMK Bario). Findings indicate that due to Bario's relative isolation, community members cited their relatives to be the main source of information and face-to-face communication as the major channel of communication, and that a majority of school teachers had a positive attitude towards using ICTs. Recommendations for future directions in promoting the utilization of ICTs to lead to the establishment of a telecentre are discussed.

This paper presented the telecentre implementation for the Orang Asli villages in remote rural areas under the Telecentre Program for Orang Asli (TPOA). TPOA telecentre architecture aims to assist the achievement of a rural community sustainable telecentre through innovation and strategic adoption of ICT technology. Lessons learned from our past telecentre experience have outlined various challenges in the technical aspects of the telecentre implementation and operation.The TPOA telecentre ICT architecture has been designed to address the outlined issues hence producing a smoother telecentre operation that enables the rural communities to selfsustain their own telecentres. The technical support for the remote rural telecentre can be very expensive and impractical due to the extreme physical access condition. Hence, the rural communities themselves have to carry out the support and maintenance to sustain the operation of the telecentre. The TPOA telecentre architecture has enabled a relatively friendly to operate ICT platform in order to assist and make it possible for the Orang Asli to sustain, support, and maintain the telecentre operation.

Over the last decades, researchers and development practitioners have been experimenting with models, frameworks and devises to meet the needs of diverse users of information communication technologies. Turning to an ICT‐based community development known as the Telecentre Programme amongst Orang Asli, an indigenous people groups in Peninsular Malaysia, this paper describes why a remote virtual management devise was invented to encounter challenges related to rugged terrain constraints, which would have directly impacted the planning and the execution of programmes designed at the telecentres. This paper argues as a technological solution, the virtual remote management system has powered an ecosystem, which shored up the digital inclusion of the indigenous communities and in the process enabled the enhancement of local informational capabilities. To this end, it reduced their technological dependency on outsiders leading to the usability and sustainability of the telecentre for local capacity building and socioeconomic benefits for the disadvantage communities.

Background Rice field agroecosystems produce food for more than half of the world’s population and deliver important services supporting farmers’ livelihoods. However, traditional rice field agroecosystems are facing a variety of problems, including pests or markets that are hard to access. This research explored indigenous farmers’ perceptions of the problems, their causes and consequences, and the solutions applied to address them in the rice field agroecosystem. Furthermore, the study investigated how indigenous farmers related these problems to the surrounding landscape elements and to microzones in the fields. Methods Data were collected in two villages in the upper Baram, Sarawak using a qualitative approach that included sketch drawings and face-to-face interviews. Forty-three indigenous farmers of the Kenyah, Penan and Sa’ban ethnic groups were interviewed in their rice fields. The sketch drawings were used to identify the perceived landscape elements, while the oral interviews were employed to identify perceived microzones. Furthermore, the interviews elicited the perceived problems in the rice field agroecosystem and their relations to landscape elements and microzones. Results The findings identified a total of nine environmental problems, e.g. animal disturbance, six social problems, e.g. difficult to access farm inputs, and eight agricultural technology system problems, e.g. poor soil quality, with some found to be rooted in complex causes and affecting agricultural productivity. While some problems were perceived at field level, microzones were frequently used as sub-field indicators of the problems. The surrounding landscape elements were perceived as both a source of the problems and as a means of avoiding them. To solve the problems, farmers applied preventive and reactive strategies based on traditional knowledge and scientific knowledge, resulting in a hybridisation of knowledge systems. Conclusions By including environmental, social, agricultural technology system problems and different spatial scales, this research contributes to addressing issues that can be overlooked when focusing on only one dimension of the problems. These results contribute to a better understanding of how indigenous farmers perceive, cope with and adapt to problems in rice field agroecosystems, which is important for landscape management.

This chapter highlights an initiative by a group of researchers2 from Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (UNIMAS) to connect villagers in the remote and isolated village of Bario to Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), which include computers, telephones, the Internet, and VSATs. This project has eased the information flow in and out of Bario, affecting the well-being of the people by providing a means to keep in touch with friends and relatives in urban areas. The response of the Bario community has been positive, but the objective of the e Bario project is more ambitious than to just provide access to the Internet, computers and other related technologies. The main objective is to identify opportunities for remote and rural communities in Sarawak to develop socially, culturally and economically from the deployment of the technologies. The results of the initiative are expected to demonstrate the many ways in which ICTs can be used to improve the lives of marginalized groups, specifically, here, the rural and remote communities in Malaysia. However, to ensure that the objectives will ultimately be met, the team has had to search for an appropriate methodology that will ensure the full benefits of the initiative to the community. This chapter describes and discusses the approaches adopted, emphasizing the benefits of a close association between the researchers and the community as well as the adoption of suitable participatory methods for engaging with the needs and opportunities that were discovered.

Scientific research involving remote rural communities is often plagued by a lack of understanding of what constitutes indigenous knowledge. That is, indigenous perspectives, models of representation, and their ways of knowing. Through a long-standing community-university partnership in working with remote and rural communities in the Borneo Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sarawak and the Orang Asli communities in Peninsular Malaysia, we address this concern in presenting directions for shaping digital socio-technical innovation. We highlight the need to adopt a balanced indigenous worldview based on two case studies from past interactions with these indigenous communities to highlight how indigenous knowledge can now become contextualized within contemporary problem-solving scenarios.

The introduction of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to remote and isolatedindigenous communities in the forested interior of Borneo has generated desirable development benefitsfor them as well as revealing the processes of community engagement that were necessary for bringingthem about. Associated learning has also highlighted aspirations for development that relate to thespecifics of their cultures and lifestyles in relation to the natural environment in which they live, lendingcredence to the concept of ethno or indigenised development in contrast to notions of asset exploitationexpressed within orthodox development. The emergence of the global Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs) with their imperatives for protecting biodiversity and the rainforests as well as combattingclimate change focusses greater attention on the role of indigenous peoples as stewards of fragile ecosystemsthat are highly susceptible to global warming. The experiences of applying ICTs to indigeniseddevelopment within Borneo’s rainforest communities - helping them maintain eco-friendly lifestyles,conserve biodiversity and record their traditional knowledge about the climate - carries lessons ofglobal significance for the wider achievement of the SGDs and the future of our planet.

{ 1 smchairil, 2 bpoline, 3 mjamilah}@fss.unimas.my, 4