Project News

Online seminar on "Awareness-raising Activities on Cybersecurity" was organized by JICA experts for three days from August 30, 2021.

As part of the project's cooperation with AIS's awareness-raising activities, the project is creating animated video materials for dissemination activities aimed at protecting children from online threats. This seminar was also related to the use of these materials and aimed at the following.

1. To understand the experience of dissemination and awareness activities in Japan and to consider the educational materials and activities applicable to Viet Nam.
2. To learn how to apply marketing theory to dissemination and awareness activities related to cyber security

1) Awareness-raising Activities in Japan (1.5 days)

Policy, websites, textbooks, and educational materials related to information and cyber security awareness raising in Japan were shared. In Japan, the law enforcement has released many educational materials and awareness-raising videos. There is a wide range of educational materials whose targets are from children to teachers, and many of them seem to make children think about situations related to information security, rather than making them memorize something in particular.

The uniqueness of Japanese awareness-raising materials is that there are many teaching materials based on manga and anime. In Viet Nam, Doraemon, Naruto, One Piece, etc. are very popular, so teaching materials based on these themes may be effective in terms of dissemination. The JICA expert explained that manga is not only popular and easy to disseminate, but also has the characteristic of being less noisy and more intimate without being authoritative due to its limited information.

One of the reasons why there are so many educational materials in Japan is that the number of incidents of online phishing scams, etc. have not decreased. Many of the people who get scammed are not interested in awareness-raising materials in the first place and rarely learn from them. Challenge of dissemination and education is how to educate people who are not interested in information security and safety, and inform them of online threats.

The framework for thinking about such things is marketing theory, which will be covered in the second half of the seminar.

2) Marketing theory (1.5 days)

In the marketing theory, the participants learned the basics of marketing and how to apply marketing to cyber security awareness activities. AIS has been requesting to learn about digital marketing methods for a long time, and we were able to respond to the basic part of their request through this training.

Among the marketing theories, the JICA expert had the trainees experience STP Analysis (Segmentation-Targeting-Positioning) and Persona Analysis as their tasks. In particular, the team working on a public awareness campaign to protect children from online threats were very proactive in their approach to the task, presenting the results of their team discussions as answers after the second day of training.

In the analysis of the target audience of the awareness activities in Vietnam, how to provide security education to "children who do not go to school" was discussed as an example. AIS is also studying how to provide security education to children of ethnic minorities living in mountainous areas, as their lifestyles are very different from those of children in urban areas. Based on this research, AIS and JICA experts had a lively exchange of opinions.

The JICA experts who conducted this seminar will continue to follow up on the seminar and provide advice on dissemination and awareness raising activities of AIS.