When we speak about national infrastructure, we tend to think about what can be seen and measured: roads, railway lines, hospitals, schools, digital networks and public institutions.
But there is another form of infrastructure that determines whether these systems actually work for the people they are meant to serve.
That infrastructure is empathy.
I do not mean empathy as sentiment, sympathy or simply being nice. In the context of nation-building, empathy is the disciplined ability to understand how different people experience a policy, service or physical environment—and to use that understanding to design something that works in real life. Applying it does not mean lowering standards or diluting the hard KPIs by which public sector performance is measured. It means adding a second, equally rigorous question alongside them: not only was this delivered, but can the person in front of it actually use it.
A nation can have world-class infrastructure on paper and still fail the person standing three feet in front of it.
A railway station may be modern, but can a blind commuter navigate it independently? Can an older passenger hear the announcements clearly? Can someone recovering from knee surgery reach the platform without climbing a long flight of stairs?
A government service may be fully digital, but what happens to the citizen with limited digital literacy, an unreliable internet connection or difficulty understanding the language used?
A school may apply the same attendance and assessment rules to every student. But do those rules recognise the child grieving the death of a parent, moving between foster homes or living with a learning disability that has never been diagnosed?
These are not marginal scenarios. They test whether our systems understand the society they are intended to serve.
We are designing for a diversity that already exists
Too often, policies and infrastructure are designed around an imagined “average person”: physically able, digitally connected, emotionally stable, financially secure and capable of navigating administrative complexity. That person does not represent the full population—and the gap is neither small nor temporary.
The World Health Organisation estimates that 1.3 billion people—approximately one in six people worldwide—experience a significant disability. Crucially, the WHO explains that disability results from the interaction between a person’s health condition and environmental or social barriers, including inaccessible transportation, public buildings and limited support (WHO). A person’s condition may create a limitation, but the way we design the environment can either reduce or magnify it. Disability is also not a fixed category separating one group from everybody else: any of us may experience reduced mobility after an accident or surgery, lose some vision or hearing as we age, or need to push a pram or help an elderly parent through a crowded station.
That population is also growing. Malaysia’s population is ageing: in 2026, people aged 65 and above comprised 8.4% of the population, up from 8.0% in 2025, and the country’s old-age dependency ratio rose from 11.4 to 11.9 older persons for every 100 people of working age (Department of Statistics Malaysia). Designing for people with limited mobility, then, is not about accommodating a small minority. It is about preparing for the society we already have—and the society we are becoming.
Public transport must be measured through the complete journey
Transport is one of the clearest examples of why empathy must be treated as infrastructure.
We usually assess transport systems through technical performance: passenger capacity, service frequency, kilometres completed, travel time and cost. These indicators matter, but they do not tell us whether every passenger can complete the journey safely and with dignity. As of December 2025, Rapid Rail was carrying more than 1.03 million commuters every day (Prasarana). At that scale, accessibility cannot be treated as a supplementary feature—a lift that is out of service, an announcement that cannot be heard or a connection requiring passengers to cross an unsafe road can affect thousands of journeys in a single day.
A tactile pathway that leads into an obstruction does not serve the blind passenger who depends on it. Priority seating means little if there isn’t enough time for someone using a walking aid to sit before the bus moves. And a station lift is no use if the pavement leading to the station is broken, obstructed or disconnected from a safe crossing.
True accessibility must be measured from door to destination. It includes the pavement leading to the stop, the reliability of lifts and escalators, the clarity of information during disruptions and the availability of human assistance when technology is insufficient. Empathy changes the question from “Was the infrastructure delivered?” to “Can people actually use it?” That is not a softer measure. It is a more complete one.
The worker’s journey does not end at the factory gate
That same door-to-destination thinking applies just as urgently once the commute becomes a matter of livelihood—and PERKESO’s own data shows why.
In 2023, PERKESO recorded 82,876 employment-related accidents. Of these, 38,454—or 46.4%—were commuting accidents. More strikingly, commuting accidents accounted for 750 of the 1,060 fatal cases recorded that year: 70.8% of worker fatalities, or approximately two deaths every day (PERKESO).
These numbers challenge the assumption that responsibility for worker safety begins and ends at the workplace gate. A worker who travels by motorcycle because no affordable or reliable public transport serves an early-morning shift is not simply making an individual transport choice. A poorly lit walk from a railway station to an industrial area, or a shift schedule that requires travel when public transport is unavailable, are not incidents that happen to the system—they are conditions the system has set. An empathetic system does not immediately assign blame; it first seeks to understand the circumstances shaping behaviour. In practice, that can mean employers mapping how their workers travel, aligning shifts with public transport schedules, providing safe transport for late-night employees, or working with local authorities to fix dangerous first- and last-mile connections. It can also mean connecting PERKESO’s accident data with transport, location and working-hour information, so prevention addresses the conditions behind recurring incidents rather than the incidents alone.
The same principle should follow the worker past the point of injury. PERKESO’s policies must remain consistent, accountable, and protected from abuse—but consistency is not the same as rigidity, and rules designed only for standard cases can leave people facing the most difficult circumstances least able to access the support built for them. A person coping with a serious injury may have to navigate forms, medical reports, appointments and deadlines precisely when their physical and emotional capacity is at its lowest. A family that has lost its principal income earner may struggle to determine which benefits apply, what evidence is required and which institution to approach first.
Empathy here does not mean abandoning rules or approving every application. It means designing rules around the realities of the people expected to comply with them: simpler language, assisted application channels, clear case tracking, institutions that share verified information so the same documents are not submitted repeatedly, case-management support for complex circumstances, and clearly governed exceptions where a standard process would otherwise produce an unjust outcome.
PERKESO’s Return to Work approach already demonstrates this kind of institutional empathy in practice. Its biopsychosocial model recognises that recovery is not only medical—it can involve physical rehabilitation, psychological adjustment, vocational support, workplace accommodation and the ability to regain a sustainable income (PERKESO). The opportunity is to extend that same human-centred thinking across the citizen’s entire journey, from prevention and application through to rehabilitation, employment and sustained independence.
Equal treatment does not always produce equal opportunity
The same distinction between standard and barrier holds in education.
UNICEF estimates that nearly 240 million children worldwide have some form of disability. These children are more likely to have never attended school or to drop out, facing barriers that include stigma, inaccessible facilities, inadequate learning materials and a lack of appropriately trained teachers (UNICEF). In Malaysia, UNICEF previously found that 43% of surveyed Malaysians believed children with disabilities would be disruptive in a mainstream classroom—a figure that points to a barrier deeper than school facilities: the assumptions through which we judge who belongs in a conventional learning environment (UNICEF Malaysia).
Children do not arrive at school carrying equal circumstances. One may have a quiet home, private tuition and parents who can advocate for them. Another may have lost a parent, taken on additional responsibilities at home or begun moving through a care system. A child with dyslexia, attention difficulties or another learning difference may be intelligent and capable, yet repeatedly treated as careless because the system recognises only one way of learning.
Applying empathy does not mean lowering educational standards. It means distinguishing between the standard we want a child to achieve and the unnecessary barriers preventing that child from reaching it. Flexible teaching methods, early identification, counselling after bereavement, reasonable accommodations and better communication with caregivers do not compromise excellence—they allow more children to demonstrate their potential.
Exclusion carries a national cost
Transport, work and education are not separate case studies—they are the same person’s journey at three different stages of life, and the cost of getting any one of them wrong compounds across the other two.
The International Labour Organisation reports that only three in ten persons with disabilities are active in the labour market, and that when persons with disabilities are employed, they tend to earn less than workers without disabilities (ILO). A child excluded from mainstream schooling, an adult who cannot safely reach a workplace, a worker who cannot access support after an injury: each is a point at which a capable person is pushed out of participation—not for lack of ability, but because the system made participation unnecessarily difficult. The result is potential workers, entrepreneurs, taxpayers, caregivers and community leaders a nation simply does not get to use.
This is why empathy is not separate from productivity. It is one of the conditions required to unlock it. It also shapes something harder to measure but just as material: whether people trust the institutions serving them enough to participate, comply and stay engaged through reform. Every interaction with a public institution tells a citizen something—whether the system sees them, understands their circumstances and considers their participation worth designing for.
Empathy must be converted into a method
The danger is that organisations speak about empathy but leave it as an aspiration. For it to become infrastructure, it must be built into how policies and services are designed, implemented and measured.
First, listen before designing. Engage the people who will use a service, especially those most likely to encounter barriers. Representation at the end of a process is consultation. Representation at the beginning is co-design.
Second, test the real journey. Do not assess only whether each component exists. Follow the citizen’s entire experience—from finding information and reaching a facility to completing an application, receiving a decision and resolving a problem.
Third, design for different circumstances. A strong system can maintain clear standards while providing more than one way to meet them.
Fourth, measure exclusion as a delivery failure. Track who cannot access a service, who abandons the process, whose applications are repeatedly rejected and which communities remain absent from the intended outcomes.
Finally, close the feedback loop. People must be able to see that their experience has led to an action, a design improvement or at least a clear explanation.
Building nations that work for real people
At PEMANDU Associates, we often speak about translating ambitious strategies into results at the three-feet level—the point at which a plan meets the person it is supposed to help.
Empathy belongs at that level. It asks policymakers to move beyond the meeting-room view, engineers to experience the journey, educators to understand the child, and institutions to see the human being behind the application number.
No system can anticipate every possible circumstance. But we can build institutions capable of listening, learning and responding when reality does not fit neatly into a standard category.
The fullest potential of a nation is not found only in the strength of its economy or the sophistication of its infrastructure. It is found in how many people are genuinely able to participate in, contribute to and benefit from its progress.
Empathy does not weaken systems, nor does it soften the KPIs used to judge them. Properly applied, it is one of the conditions those KPIs depend on.
Author:
Hilyah Raffick
Vice President
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