Paper long abstract:

While every country has their national ICT goals, the cross-border cooperation and projects can greatly facilitate the achievement of such national goals. China's Digital Silk Road is a giant cross-border project that entails technology transfer, local countries’ ICT infrastructure development, providing concessional and non-concessional funds, establishing training centers as well as launching research and development programs. As China has launched digital Silk Road (DSR) initiatives, such as installation of 5G network, improving artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, easy and cheap access to cloud computing, facilitating e-commerce and mobile payment systems, supporting with surveillance technology, building smart cities, and assisting with other high-tech initiatives in the global South countries, it is important to examine how these projects impact these countries in terms of technological changes, social changes, economic changes, environmental changes, and cooperation dynamic changes by being aligned with their national ICT goals. For that, the author will review news, policy papers, government document, and journal articles. For impact assessment, the Impact Assessment Toolkit for Cross-Border Cooperation will be used to investigate and summarise the contribution of China's Digital Silk Road project in the local context. Overall, this will be a systematic and evidence-based study that will critically evaluate the impact and alignment of China's Digital Silk Road with the ICT goals in global South countries. This study is significant as there is a lack of studies that have examined the challenges and methodologies used for cross-border project impact evolution in the global South countries, especially regarding China's Digital Silk Road project.