Brunei has built the broadband, launched 5G and drawn up an ambitious digital future. But infrastructure cannot create innovators by itself. His Majesty has challenged young Bruneians to move from users to creators. The harder question is whether our schools, banks, businesses and government contracts are ready to let them build.
Brunei has spent a decade wiring itself for the future. The Sultan's call for young people to become creators now poses the harder question: what will Brunei build upon it?
By Malai Hassan Othman
His Majesty Sultan Haji Hassanal Bolkiah Mu'izzaddin Waddaulah, the Sultan and Yang Di-Pertuan of Negara Brunei Darussalam, has set Brunei's young people a challenge that is easy to applaud and considerably harder to fulfil.
In his 80th birthday Titah, His Majesty expressed the hope that they would no longer remain spectators of change or merely use technology created by others. They must rise, in his words, as “pencipta, pemikir dan pemimpin berwawasan”—creators, thinkers and visionary leaders.
It is a stirring aspiration. It is also, on the Government's own evidence, a challenge Brunei is not yet fully equipped to meet.
The infrastructure is not in question. Internet penetration is approaching 99 per cent. A baseline fixed-broadband speed of 100 megabits per second is available nationwide, 5G is live, and the restructuring around Unified National Networks has centralised the wholesale telecommunications grid to accelerate upgrades.
Three flagship platforms have also moved into operation. The National Information Hub enables secure data-sharing between government agencies. BruneiID, launched in January 2026, provides single-credential access to government services. TARUS has processed interoperable digital payments since going live in March 2025.
BruHealth proved that a nationally deployed digital service could be adopted rapidly when it answered a real public need. The Cybersecurity Order 2023 and Personal Data Protection Order 2025 have meanwhile strengthened the foundations for security, privacy and digital trust.
Brunei, in short, has built the rails.
What is running on them is another matter—and the Government has said so itself.
The paradox the ministry acknowledged
At the Digital Economy Forum in late 2025, the Ministry of Transport and Infocommunications did something governments rarely do: it publicly named the gap between its digital investment and the results produced.
Officials described a series of “digital paradoxes”, with high connectivity paired with strikingly low economic output chief among them.
Despite the infrastructure, the information and communications technology sector contributed only about 2.3 per cent of gross domestic product—BND484.8 million in 2023, against the Brunei Darussalam Economic Blueprint target of BND1.3 billion by 2035.
Most companies used only basic digital tools. Barely one in 10 had reportedly adopted cloud computing, data analytics or automation.
More than seven in 10 Bruneians had mobile wallets, yet only a minority used them frequently, with cash continuing to dominate day-to-day transactions.
The ministry's diagnosis pointed to resistance to change, insufficient leadership within industries and low workforce readiness.
Strip away the diplomatic phrasing and the message is blunt: Brunei has developed an extraordinary capacity to consume digital services, but comparatively limited capacity to produce economic value from them.
His Majesty's call to become creators is therefore not merely a rhetorical flourish. It speaks directly to a national weakness the Government has already acknowledged.
Where the gap begins
If Brunei is to close that gap, the search should begin in the classroom—not the data centre.
The Ministry of Education's Digital Transformation Plan 2023–2027 is substantial on paper. It encompasses learning-management systems, smart classrooms, digital resources, education data, online services and digital assessment.
An EdTech Centre oversees educational technology and digital content. The Ministry has also introduced guidance to help teachers and school leaders use artificial intelligence responsibly in education.
But there is a crucial difference between digitalising how education is delivered and teaching students to create technology themselves. It is not yet clear how consistently Brunei is doing the latter.
A school can install smart boards, introduce electronic assessments and deploy AI-assisted learning without fundamentally changing the relationship between pupil, teacher and the one approved answer.
That may produce confident software users. It does not, by itself, produce creators.
The results suggest that the gap deserves serious attention.
Brunei's scores in the 2022 Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, were 442 in mathematics, 429 in reading and 446 in science—below the averages of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development across all three subjects.
Yet Brunei improved in all three domains between 2018 and 2022, an achievement the Ministry of Education said placed it among only four participating education systems worldwide to do so. It was a genuine and under-reported success, particularly amid the educational disruption caused by the pandemic.
Less encouragingly, only 3 per cent of Brunei's students reached the top two proficiency levels in mathematics, compared with an OECD average of 9 per cent.
Fewer than a third of students felt confident interpreting mathematical solutions in the context of a real-life challenge, according to OECD survey data.
Those are precisely the intellectual muscles upon which a creator economy depends: interpreting ambiguous problems, applying knowledge beyond familiar exercises and working without a model answer.
Publicly available information does not readily show how many Bruneian students learn coding or computational thinking through the core curriculum rather than after-school clubs; how many teachers are qualified to teach computer science or robotics; or how many student projects survive beyond the exhibition table and develop into viable products.
Nor is it easy to determine whether comparable opportunities exist across government, private, religious and rural schools.
That absence is not proof of failure. It does mean that people outside government cannot properly judge the scale, consistency or results of the effort—which is a problem in itself.
Who gets to build for Brunei?
Even a brilliant graduate needs somewhere to sell what he or she creates.
That is where government procurement enters the story—and where the questions become uncomfortable.
Government is among Brunei's most consequential purchasers of complex digital systems. Yet no readily accessible public breakdown appears to show how much of that spending is retained by Bruneian companies rather than passing through to overseas contractors.
It is similarly unclear how often local developers participate in core design and engineering, rather than installation, maintenance and technical support.
Do contracts with foreign technology companies contain measurable requirements for knowledge and skills transfer?
When a government system is completed, who owns its intellectual property?
Does Brunei retain the expertise to examine, modify and repair the system—or must it return to the original vendor whenever something fundamental needs to change?
None of this is an indictment of foreign partnership. A market Brunei's size cannot go it alone, nor should it try.
The issue is the quality of the partnerships and how much productive capacity they leave behind.
Buy sophisticated systems without insisting on meaningful local design participation, and the country risks becoming more digital without becoming more capable—modernisation without mastery.
The sovereignty test
The release of Digital Brunei 2030 on 2 June has brought these questions into sharper focus.
The five-year national plan combines four strategies: Digital Government, Digital Society, Digital Business, and Data and Artificial Intelligence.
Its proposed projects include the Gov.BN SuperApp and Citizen Portal, National Business Services Portal, further expansion of BruneiID and digital payments, an AI-capable data centre, a National Sovereign Cloud with artificial-intelligence computing capacity, and a national large language model grounded in the Brunei context.
These are not peripheral technology projects. They could become part of the country's strategic digital infrastructure.
Their announcement sharpens rather than settles the question arising from His Majesty's Titah.
Will young Bruneians help design, engineer and eventually own these systems—or will they principally be trained to operate technologies built for them by others?
Digital sovereignty does not require Brunei to manufacture every component domestically or shut out foreign technology. No small country can—or should—attempt complete technological self-sufficiency.
It means retaining enough command over critical data, digital identity, cybersecurity, essential infrastructure and strategic decision-making to protect the national interest.
It also means possessing sufficient local expertise to understand the systems upon which the country increasingly depends.
Data centres can operate on Brunei soil while their technology, expertise, ownership and profits reside elsewhere.
A sovereign cloud can carry the word “sovereign” in its title while its underlying architecture remains beyond meaningful local control.
A national large language model can reflect Brunei's language and culture, but the deeper test will be who trains it, who governs its data, who audits its behaviour and who owns the resulting intellectual property.
The Government's plans are ambitious. The challenge is ensuring that their delivery creates Bruneian engineers, cybersecurity specialists, data scientists, researchers and entrepreneurs—not merely another generation of technically competent users.
What Digital Brunei 2030 must prove
Digital Brunei 2030 correctly moves the national conversation beyond infrastructure. Its stated emphasis is on tangible and sustainable outcomes for government, business and society.
That is the right direction. But outcomes must be measured publicly if they are to remain distinguishable from activity.
Broadband speed and internet penetration are yesterday's scoreboard. They show that the foundations exist, not what the economy is producing from them.
The more revealing indicators now would include:
● the number and survival rate of Bruneian technology start-ups
● the value of exported digital products and services
● high-value digital jobs held by Bruneians
● locally owned intellectual property
● business adoption of cloud computing, automation and data analytics
● local participation in government technology contracts
● the number of students receiving sustained computer-science education
● the number of school and university innovations successfully commercialised
Workshops, launch events and hackathons generate good photographs. They do not, on their own, reveal whether a country is building an industry.
Nor does the existence of a plan guarantee that its benefits will be distributed widely.
If advanced digital opportunities remain concentrated among selected schools, exceptional students, large companies and well-connected institutions, Brunei may produce isolated success stories without creating a broadly capable digital generation.
That would fall short of the transformation His Majesty's words appear to demand.
The challenge belongs to everyone
His Majesty has placed the challenge before Brunei's young people.
But whether they meet it will depend partly on decisions made by people who are no longer young.
Schools will decide whether curiosity is encouraged or contained.
Universities will determine whether research ends in academic publication or proceeds towards working products.
Banks will decide whether an untested but promising idea deserves patient capital.
Established businesses will determine whether local innovators receive their first serious customers.
Government departments writing the next technology tender will decide whether public spending merely purchases another system—or deliberately builds Bruneian capability in the process.
Young people cannot become creators simply because they have been told to create. They need knowledge, opportunity, financing, institutional trust and a market willing to buy what they build.
Brunei has spent a decade laying fibre, building platforms and writing master plans. Digital Brunei 2030 has now given the country its clearest instructions yet.
What it has not given Brunei is a guarantee. That will be written not in the plan, but in whether a generation of young Bruneians is handed the tools, trust and market access to build something the country can genuinely call its own.
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