SDG 16: Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions | SDG 3: Good Health and Well-being
Institutions: Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology | Ministry of Women & Child Development
At the 2025 ASEAN ICT Forum on Child Online Protection, the Secretary-General of ASEAN emphasised the region’s growing digital ecosystem and the corresponding responsibilities to safeguard children online. He underlined that as ASEAN’s digital connectivity expands, so too must efforts for “child-centred, resilience-based and technology-safe” spaces online.
Key messages included:
The need to strengthen regional cooperation among ASEAN Member States (AMS) on strategies to protect children from online abuses, misinformation, cyber-bullying and exposure to harmful content.
Encouraging adoption of digital literacy, parental supervision and age-appropriate design for platforms accessible to children, to ensure safe participation in the digital economy.
Promoting public-private partnerships including telecom providers, social-media companies and child-welfare agencies to build child-safe digital infrastructure and standardise guidelines across borders.
Emphasising the importance of data-driven monitoring, cross-border data exchange, and alignment of national laws to keep pace with rapidly evolving ICT use by minors.
For India, this forum signals the rising importance of regional digital-safety governance frameworks in which India, as a key Bay of Bengal/Indo-Pacific player, can engage. India’s national child-online protection laws, digital public infrastructure policies and telecom regulation will benefit from coordination with ASEAN’s regional standards. This also aligns with India’s push under the National Digital Communications Policy, Digital India 3.0, and global child-protection commitments. Enhancing cross-border mechanisms for platform accountability, exposure minimisation and shared incident-reporting is increasingly important.
What is the ASEAN ICT Forum on Child Online Protection? → It is a regional conference organised by ASEAN focusing on digital connectivity safe for children, bringing together governments, private-sector, academia and NGOs to share good practices, design standards and cooperative mechanisms for protecting minors in the digital domain.
Relevant Question for Policy Stakeholders: How can India align its national child-online protection strategy with ASEAN’s emerging frameworks, ensure that platform-design rules account for regional standards, and participate in shared monitoring and incident-reporting systems across jurisdictions?
Follow the full remarks here: ASEAN Reinforces Child Online Protection and Digital Safety Across Member States