6. Impact The results of LIRNEasia’s baseline survey on ICT use has been communicated to policy makers, including the Union Deputy Minister. LIRNEasia data was used to track Myanmar’s progress in ICTs in the ITU’s flagship report Measuring Information Society 2016, UNESCO’s Assessment of Media Development in Media report and A4AI’s 2015 Affordability report. Officials from the Ministry of Transport and Communications in Myanmar are quoting the findings from the 2016. It was quoted by U Myo Swe, Deputy Director General of the Post and Telecommunications Department at a consultative workshop on universal service strategy, design and implementation held in February 2017 in Yangon. The joint study on women’s access to mobile phones and data services was a direct result of dissemination of the baseline survey findings. A large list of policy recommendations has resulted from this study, targeted at improving women’s access and digital skills. Meetings have taken place with the telecommunications operators on the results of the baseline survey and on the various steps that could be taken to enable ICT use by the disabled. Progress is being made bridging communications and technology gaps in the Myanmar language in e-Speak in an effort to build a usable TTS engine. LIRNEasia interacted directly with policymakers when conducting the courses on Social media and ICTs for improved governance. We had the opportunity to train 20 members of Union Parliament and nearly 90 members of Yangon Regional Parliament on the issue. Legislation pertaining to the course material will be tracked. LIRNEasia has also provided input into the drafting of new policies and guidelines by participating in public consultation processes. (Annexures 21 to 24) The Telecommunications Masterplan is yet to be published, and it will have to be analyzed to know the real impact of LIRNEasia and MIDO’s input. The adoption of spectrum policy in Myanmar has been postponed following the submission of responses to the consultation paper. Training MIDO on research and research methods yielded results by Phyu Phyu Thi being receiving a grant from the Understanding Myanmar research programme from Chiangmai University, Thailand. MIDO has also been extremely active in the policy intervention process. They actively partook in providing responses to draft policy documents and frameworks in the country following its engagement with LIRNEasia, MIDO has started partaking actively in international conferences. In July 2015, Phyu Phyu Thi submitted a written document that was discussed at the Regional Internet Governance Forum in Macau. Yatanar Htun and Htaike Htaike Aung participated in a panel discussion on Myanmar at the Stockholm Internet Forum in Sweden in October 2015. In a wide-ranging interview with the Austrian Academic Journal ASEAS, Htaike Htaike Aung and Phyu Phyu Thi talk about MIDO and how they approach policy problems in the ICT space. On a broad scale, one of LIRNEasia’s key objective was to play a role in increasing the Internet subscriptions and users per 100 to above the average of comparator countries. ITU data indicates that Internet user per 100 numbers were at were at 0.18 ten years ago in 2006 and but stood at 2.1 in 2014. This corresponds to the response to our question in the quantative study carried out in 2015 on the use of the Internet through a browser on any device in the past 12 months. However, the study also showed that users accessed the internet