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Country urged to speed up use of ICTs
Sifelani Tsiko, The Herald (Zimbabwe)
February 11, 2008

http://allafrica.com/stories/200802111155.html

Zimbabwe needs to step up efforts to promote the use and application of information and communication technologies in all the country's sectors to fight poverty, empower people and enhance access to new knowledge.

Participants said this at a one-day ICT workshop organised by E-Knowledge for Women in Southern Africa (Ekowisa) last week.

The ICT workshop drew participants from the civil society, government and other economic sectors.

Participants said Zimbabwe needed to speed up the operationalisation of the ICT policy in the fields of commerce, education, agriculture, health and other sectors to help develop the country.

"The Government, through the Ministry of Science and Technology Development, has developed an ICT policy which lays the framework for various actors to operate in the country," one participant said. "This ICT policy needs to be operationalised and utilised for the benefit of the people."

The Minister of Science and Technology Development, Dr Olivia Muchena, urged the participants to link ICT to rural development to help widen its access to the majority of people in the countryside.

She said action plans should be drafted to help use ICT to reduce poverty in the country.

Dr Muchena said the ICT should be viewed as an export industry that can help generate employment opportunities and revenue for the country.

She called for smart partnerships between the public and private sectors to help promote the co-ordination of programmes and mobilise resources to develop the ICT sector.

For effective implementation to take place, Dr Muchena said, there is need to review sectoral policies and legislation and to streamline them with the national ICT policy.

Participants identified agriculture, tourism, health, education, mining, gender, youth and the transport sector as the ICT policy priorities.

Access to ICTs in rural areas is still a major challenge and some ICT experts say there is need to establish ICT centres, which can use a combination of radio and Internet.

In Uganda, the Nabweru telecentres is helping women farmers to regularly access information on market prices for farm produce. A link between the telecentres and the Ugandan National Council of Science and Technology was created enabling small-scale farmers to receive online advice.

Even though such concepts are riddled with many challenges, one participant believes strongly that if telecentres are promoted in Zimbabwe smallholder farmers can be better informed about prices of farm produce at say Mbare Musika before they can deliver them.

Participants at the workshop were split into groups on each identified sector and analysed the challenges and opportunities facing the sector in terms of ICT implementation.

Key challenges that were identified included:

• Lack of ICT infrastructure
• Inadequate financial resources
• Lack of ICT skills
• Limited public-private sector partnerships
• Poor bandwidth capacity nationally and internationally
• Inadequate research and development
• Language barriers
• Poor co-ordination of ICT programmes
• ICT security

Other constraints that were cited included access to programming and cheap access to broadband capacity (either by satellite or fibre) and complications in accessing copyright programming.

Community Technology Development Trust policy analyst Regis Mafuratidze said there was need to review existing ICT legislation to avoid contradictions with the main ICT national policy.

"We need to come up with specific legislation to address these problems. We need to remove distortions and contradictions so that there is full compliance to the ICT policy requirements," he said.

Eng Albert Kundishora of the Harare Institute of Techonology said there is need to mobilise more resources for the implementation of the ICT policy.

He also said that there was need to unbundle ICT activities to enhance operational efficiency.

Key recommendations that were made at the workshop include:

• Increased training of teachers to help them impart knowledge to students
• Establishment of telecentres in rural areas to help farmers access vital market and distribution information
• Mobilising resources for the procurement of hardware and software
• Need to promote use of indigenous languages on the Internet. Content must be in the language understood by the locals
• Human resources development -- need for ICT training and specialisation
• Increased use of ICTs in health management systems
• Gender perspective needs to be incorporated into the design and implementation of ICT policy e.g. for the disabled, women, youth
• Promoting increased use of ICT in monitoring environmental activities, pollution, mining activities
• Promoting use of ICT to promote tourism, small-to-medium enterprises and billing systems e.g. E-ticketing.

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