Kenyans should expect to see faster and more efficient government services as the public sector is accelerating ICT partnerships with the private sector.
This was brought to light by delegates at the Connected Kenya 2011 summit held in Mombasa last week. The summit brought together key government officials and the private sector to discuss ways in which the public can benefit from improved government services.
To the theme of 'innovating for the citizen', the summit moved to reward excellence and innovation in the ICT industry, while also showcasing some of the nation's up-coming public-private partnerships.
Mobile telecommunications company, Safaricom chose the summit to reveal trials of a virtual electronic health (e-health) service in partnership with Cisco Systems that will allow patients in remote areas to access health services through video conferencing technology.
The Internet-based system will be connected to digital villages being set up by the government across different rural locations in the country. It will also tap into the existing network of health community workers to complement the e-health system.
Delegates at the conference also discussed ways of sharing infrastructure to optimise on efficiency and cut back on costs, with the possibility of linking up with the public sector.
Equity Bank, the biggest bank in Kenya by subscriber base, is in talks with IBM to outsource and lease out additional capacity of its data centre. “We are hoping it will reduce our costs because we are just using 8% of the capacity, but bearing 100% of the cost of maintaining the data centre,” said Equity Bank CEO, James Mwangi at the summit.
It is this excess capacity from companies like Equity Bank that the public sector is now seeking to tap into to improve service delivery to citizens. Already, the bank is using some of its excess capacity to roll out its agency banking with 8 000 agents across the country.
Several other initiatives were revealed at the summit, such as Google's digitisation of the Kenya Gazette - the government's official publication dating back to the 1950s.
The Ministry of Lands, through the permanent secretary, Dorothy Angote, revealed it is working on the Kenya Spatial Data Infrastructure database that will be used for planning, cutting time taken to plan for road construction from months to days.
The summit also discussed ways of boosting SMEs and entrepreneurs in the ICT industry by engaging with bigger corporates and the government.
“The government will help them to full commercialisation by creating centres of excellence,” said information and communications permanent secretary, Dr Bitange Ndemo.
The ICT Board also announced the winners of the ICT Innovation Awards at the summit. The best innovation award overall was awarded to the International Livestock Research Institute for its mobile-ICT based livestock solution.
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