Executive synopsis:
- Malaysia ranks “very high” in UN E-Government Index, but national stats mask rural-urban digital gaps.
- Sarawak’s internet coverage lags at ~63% (5G) and 58% 4G in Julau, hindering welfare access.
- Digital literacy, language barriers, and cultural readiness compound infrastructure shortcomings.
- Community telecentres (Pusat Internet) show gains but cannot replace skills, trust, and offline alternatives.
- Closing the divide requires literacy training, multilingual support, and hybrid service models beyond towers.
Full Article:
The Digital Divide in Civic Life
Malaysia has spent the past decade building an ambitious digital government infrastructure, from MyGovernment portals to digital welfare payments and online health bookings.
On paper, the achievement looks impressive.
The United Nations E-Government Survey 2024 places Malaysia in the “very high” E-Government Development Index category, alongside Singapore, Thailand, and other regional leaders, with strong scores in telecommunications infrastructure and online service provision.
Nationally, household internet access reached 97.1 percent in 2025, up from 96.8 percent the year before, according to the Department of Statistics Malaysia.
These figures suggest a country closing in on universal digital access.
Yet statistics that look complete at the national level often conceal deep unevenness underneath.
The Department of Statistics Malaysia’s own 2025 figures show that while urban household internet access sits at 99.0 percent, rural access lags behind at 90.7 percent, a gap that, while narrowing, still represents hundreds of thousands of households without reliable connectivity.
In Sarawak, the state with Malaysia’s largest and most dispersed rural population, the gap becomes more visible still.
As of early 2025, internet and 5G coverage in Sarawak stood at only around 63 percent, prompting the Deputy Minister of Digital, Datuk Wilson Ugak Kumbong, to acknowledge that rural residents were struggling to use digital tools tied to state welfare programmes such as the Sarawak Basic Needs Assistance, which disburses aid through digital vouchers linked to the S Pay Global e-wallet.
Some recipients, he noted, were simply unfamiliar with the technology required to receive help meant for them.
This is the essence of the digital divide in civic life.
E-government is designed to make public services faster, cheaper, and more transparent.
But when access to a hospital appointment, a welfare payment, or a land title update depends on a smartphone, a data plan, and digital literacy, the system quietly redraws the boundary of who counts as a full citizen.
For urban Malaysians in Kuala Lumpur or Kuching, this is barely noticeable.
For a longhouse community two hours upriver in Sarawak’s interior, it can mean exclusion from services that policy documents describe as universal.
Sarawak’s geography makes this tension particularly stark.
The state’s vast interior, criss-crossed by rivers and hills, has long complicated telecommunications rollout.
A widely circulated case of a nineteen-year-old from Pakan trekking two hours up a hill to get enough signal to attend a university interview became a symbol of the problem.
Since then, the state government has poured resources into closing the gap.
The SMART initiative, involving 600 telecommunication towers, along with the Sarawak Rural Broadband Network and satellite-based solutions from providers such as Starlink, has pushed settlement-level internet coverage in Sarawak above 90 percent as of October 2025, with Premier Tan Sri Abang Johari Openg citing a target of near-universal coverage by 2030 under the Post-COVID Development Strategy.
Even so, disparities persist within the state itself.
In Julau, a rural district, 4G coverage in populated areas stood at just 58.28 percent as of June 2025, according to a parliamentary reply from the Ministry of Communications, leaving rural schools and students with unreliable connections for online learning.
The consequences of this unevenness extend well beyond convenience.
A 2025 study examining Pusat Internet, Malaysia’s rural telecentre programme, found that while community internet centres in rural Sarawak produced genuine gains in communication, education, entrepreneurship, and access to public services, they also revealed the limits of infrastructure alone.
Digital inclusion, the researchers noted, is not just a matter of signal strength.
It depends on affordability, digital skills, trust in technology, and cultural readiness to adopt new tools, factors that layered infrastructure spending cannot resolve by itself.
Indigenous and rural communities in Sarawak, including many Iban, Bidayuh, Orang Ulu, and Penan households, often combine low digital literacy with limited formal education and older age profiles, compounding the barriers that connectivity alone cannot fix.
This is where e-government policy can clash with lived reality.
Government agencies increasingly assume that citizens can and will interact digitally, whether to renew a MyKad, apply for aid, register a birth, or access telehealth.
For urban, educated, digitally fluent citizens, this assumption holds.
For elderly villagers, subsistence farmers, or communities whose primary language is not Bahasa Malaysia or English, the assumption can become a barrier dressed up as convenience.
The United Nations’ 2024 survey itself flagged this risk globally, noting that e-government carries the danger of creating a new form of exclusion, one where citizens without infrastructure or digital skills are left further behind even as digital public services expand.
Malaysia’s broader trajectory suggests the gap is narrowing rather than widening.
Jalinan Digital Negara, the national digital network plan, has pushed 4G coverage of populated areas above 98 percent nationally, and 5G population coverage has climbed past 80 percent.
Sarawak’s own digitalisation of government services reportedly exceeded 62 percent completion in 2025, ahead of schedule, with a target of full digital access by 2030.
These are meaningful gains, and they matter for the state’s long-term development goals under the thirteenth Malaysia Plan.
But infrastructure targets and coverage percentages tell only part of the story.
Genuinely closing the civic digital divide in Sarawak and across rural Malaysia will require pairing tower construction with digital literacy training, multilingual support, offline or assisted-service alternatives for those who cannot go digital, and continued investment in community access points such as Pusat Internet.
Until then, e-government risks becoming a tale of two Malaysias: one where public service is a few taps away, and another where reaching the same service still means climbing a hill for a signal, or trusting a neighbour to help navigate an app that was never designed with them in mind.
Bridging that gap is not simply a technical challenge.
It is a test of whether digital transformation genuinely serves every citizen, or only those already positioned to benefit from it.
References
Department of Statistics Malaysia. (2025). ICT use and access by individuals and households survey report 2025. https://www.dosm.gov.my/portal-main/release-content/ict-use-and-access-by-individuals-and-households-survey-report-2025
Keling, S., et al. (2025). Assessing the socioeconomic and digital inclusion impacts of Pusat Internet in rural Sarawak, Malaysia. The Electronic Journal of Information Systems in Developing Countries. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/isd2.70038
Ministry of Communications and Multimedia Malaysia. (2021, December 5). Julaihi: Sarawak to hit 93.6 pct internet coverage by 2025. https://www.komunikasi.gov.my/en/public/news/21419-julaihi-sarawak-to-hit-93-6-pct-internet-coverage-by-2025
Malay Mail. (2025, January 8). Digital Ministry teams up with MCMC, Sarawak govt to boost internet access in rural areas, says deputy minister. https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2025/01/08/digital-ministry-teams-up-with-mcmc-sarawak-govt-to-boost-internet-access-in-rural-areas-says-deputy-minister/162457
Malay Mail. (2025, August 13). Fahmi: Malaysia’s internet coverage hits almost 99pc, 5G reaches 82pc in populated areas. https://www.malaymail.com/news/malaysia/2025/08/13/fahmi-malaysias-internet-coverage-hits-almost-99pc-5g-reaches-82pc-in-populated-areas/187431
MalaysianWireless. (2025, July 29). Only 58% of Julau (Sarawak) has 4G internet access in 2025. https://www.malaysianwireless.com/2025/07/julau-sarawak-4g-internet-access/
The Star. (2025, October 22). Internet coverage in Sarawak now exceeds 90%, says Abang Johari. https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2025/10/22/internet-coverage-in-sarawak-now-exceeds-90-says-abang-johari
United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. (2024). United Nations e-government survey 2024: Accelerating digital transformation for sustainable development. https://publicadministration.un.org/egovkb/en-us/Reports/UN-E-Government-Survey-2024
