Kota Kinabalu: Education systems need to be reformed in tandem with the rollout of digital public infrastructure for actual transformation in development outcomes to take place, said George Town Institute of Open and Advanced Studies (GIOAS) Head of International Sneha Poddar
(pic).
“Any system is only as good as its participants. So, designing a beautiful system or a highly advanced ecosystem would not solve things,” she said in her framing keynote at the Sabah Asia-Pacific Impact Investing for Sustainable Development Summit 2026 (Sabah AIMS 2026), here.
Advertisement
“What we really need is also investment in education because it is us as individuals who make up the system,” she added.
For the record, the inaugural Sabah AIMS 2026 gathered over 300 delegates from more than 170 leading global organisations. It was jointly organised by GIOAS and the State Tourism, Culture and Environment Ministry representing the Sabah Government. Daily Express is the media partner.
Additionally, she said mainstream curricula had failed to keep up with rapid scientific and technological progress.
“There has been so much advances in quantum science, in technology, but all of that has not been translated into our mainstream curricula,” she said.
“We have moved from industrial age to information age to now intelligence age, but our education system has not really progressed far,” she added.
Poddar said she had identified eight transformations needed in education, though time constraints during her keynote session meant she was only able to touch on a handful.
She said leadership training was among the most pressing, pointing out that it should extend past district-level officials to village leaders themselves, who she said already possessed considerable grassroots insight.
“There is no shortage of wisdom or grassroots solutions,” she said, citing conscious leadership, systems thinking and ecological design as areas where existing local knowledge could be strengthened through structured training.
On ecological design, Poddar said Sabah has the potential to host a school of tropical and coastal architecture that aligned building design with the region’s own bioregion and ecoregion.
She cited a school in Rajasthan, India, that remained cool in temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius without mechanical air conditioning, built instead on permaculture and passive cooling principles.
“This shows how transformation in education can help innovative solutions really fast,” she said.
She said entrepreneurs also need training in regenerative livelihoods, sustainable businesses and social entrepreneurship, noting these as necessary skill sets for communities to make full use of new development opportunities as they come about.
On Sabah, she said the State has the potential to leapfrog conventional development models and become a testbed for an integrated digital public infrastructure and education system.
“The first time that I came to Sabah was in 2023. And that was when Sheng brought me to the interiors of Sabah, to the rural villages of Sabah, to understand what the challenges are really on the ground,” she said.
She said the visit was as much about experiencing life in rural communities firsthand as understanding their challenges on paper, recalling being impressed by the scale of Mount Kinabalu during that trip.
Poddar said the insights gathered over the past three years in Sabah informed her broader proposal for a five-pillar digital public infrastructure system, covering digital identity, data, knowledge, finance and marketplace, which she suggested could be piloted in the state as one integrated ecosystem rather than in fragments.
She also proposed placing the State as an Innovation Village, bringing together institutions working at the forefront of digital infrastructure and education reform to train the region’s youth and roll out all five pillars of the system simultaneously, rather than adopting them piecemeal as other countries had done.
“Sabah can build the digital public infrastructure, not only just one pillar but all the five pillars together to really leapfrog and scale the development in the region,” she said.
She said the approach would allow Sabah to bypass the slower, incremental path other regions had taken toward digitally enabled, wellbeing-oriented development.
“It is an intra-generational journey and I think theoretically and technologically it is now possible to deliver wellbeing fast, but with everybody’s willingness to turn, learn and earn I think we can realise it for Sabah,” she said.
