Q&A: Government should not manage community telecentres, says youth minister Nsengimana

THE Minister of Youth and ICT, Jean Philbert Nsengimana, has announced the government wants every citizen to seamlessly access government services online as a means to promote e-government services and quick delivery services. As the third phase of the National Information Communication Technology Plan (NIC III) is being rolled out, government set its focus on enabling citizens to use available infrastructure to access government services. The New Times’ Frank Kanyesigye, last week, caught up with the Youthful Minister, who talked about the targets, achievements and challenges his ministry faces.Below are the excerpts.Q: You are heading a ministry that recently had its mandate expanded to include youth in its portfolio. How much money was the ministry allocated in the 2012/2013 budget?A: Due to the merger of the youth sector and the ICT, the two ministries each had previously submitted their budget proposals according to the ceilings we got from the ministry of Finance. Basically, what we asked for we got because we maximised on the ceilings and we are having Rwf2.8 billion for the two sectors combined, which is what we really asked for.Q: What will be the priority areas for 2012/2013 fiscal year?A: Mostly, the money will be channelled towards the implementation of the programmes outlined in NICI III, and the priority areas include skills development, community development, e-government, ICT security but these will be executed within the implementing agencies which are attached to the ministry. For the case of ICT, RDB/IT is the implementing arm and for youth, we have the National Youth Council and youth centres as implementing organs. As you know, for these two sectors, the ministry is in charge of policy, monitoring and coordination of activities in both sectors.Q: What is the absorption rate of last year’s budget to your ministry?A: For the youth sector, it was 100 percent used. In fact, we had a shortfall by a few millions, and basically we need to use some of this year’s budget to repay for some of the programmes we undertook last year. For the ICT sector, the absorption rate was around 70 percent because there are a number of projects that were not implemented as earlier planned, so that part of the budget was not fully absorbed.Q: The NICI Plan will go into third phase in the next fiscal year which starts in July. What projects are you going to focus on in this phase?A: There are five major areas of focus and two are cross cutting; for instance, skills development and ICT security will go hand in hand. We cannot advance this sector if we don’t take care of the two; we need as many Rwandans as possible to be IT literate. This is one element of skills development. The other dimension is to have very specialised skills depending on selected sectors, to drive the country’s economy forward. ICT security is also very critical because government is now putting more and more services online while financial services are going digital. We absolutely need to protect this information from hackers. There are other key sectors where we want ICT to penetrate. Prime among them is local government and community development. In health, we need to see how new technologies can support healthcare service delivery. Agriculture and education will also not be left behind. In terms of youth empowerment, we are talking about focusing all our energy in helping the young people to advance their economic status. For instance, fighting idleness and unemployment but also supporting other programmes like civic mobilisation, patriotism, education and fighting against drug abuse among others.Q: How will the NIC III affect the ordinary Rwandan?A: Well in NIC III, we are talking about making ICTs more accessible and affordable to every Rwandan citizen and this phase is going to be a key driving force. Principally, we are going to focus on delivery of government services using new technologies where every citizen will be able to access government services hustle free. Hence, we have listed about 450 common services delivered by various government institutions. We are going to start putting those services online, one by one and wherever possible, have the services delivered using a simple mobile phone. Here, we want to make sure that every household at least gets access to a mobile phone which will be the key objective of NIC III. In NIC III, we are talking about having basic financial services delivered using available ICT infrastructure to be driven by the private sector and it is a trend that we need to encourage. We don’t think the government will keep driving ICT growth in this country; it’s not a sustainable approach. We instead aim to make the sector private sector-driven. For instance, VISA is working on a project that is going to take mobile financial services to the next level which obviously will have a huge positive impact on ordinary Rwandans. Delivery of education using ICT by expanding the One Laptop Per Child programme through distributing the laptops to schools countrywide, having every kid utilise the facilities would dramatically change our education system. In fact, we want to alter the public perception that ICT is for elites. It’s not something made for the rich and the city dwellers. It is something that targets that same Rwandan who benefited from other government programmes like Gir’inka, Bye Bye Nyakatsi and VUP Umurenge, among others. Q: What impact has the fibre optic cable (National backbone) had on Rwandans so far?A: There hasn’t been as much an impact as we would wish. So far, districts all over the country are connected and using internet, which has greatly facilitated service delivery at least from government to government perspective. ICT programme in our country has three major components that include, government to government, government to business and government to citizens. The impact that we would like to see is to have fibre-optic backbone infrastructure extended to healthcare services, education, and businesses. We want the whole country to be connected unlike today. For that to happen, we need last mile connectivity up to the grassroots level as one of the strategies of the NICI III. When that happens, there will be transformation with quick business transactions and improvement in the service delivery in both the public and private sector.Q: Now that the National Backbone is in place, when should we expect affordable broadband connectivity?A: It’s not the issue of accessing affordable internet or data services; the issue is what quality of broadband services are we going to provide? Good quality broadband services would trigger the transformational process. If a kid in primary school has a laptop connected to quality internet and browse Facebook and flawlessly stream educational content using YouTube, this is absolutely very important. If somebody wishes to seek the advice of a medical expert at King Faisal, that can only happen with quality broadband services. We have already laid robust ICT infrastructure like the national backbone and the data centre, which we hope to extend to everyone in the country using the last mile connectivity. We also aim to have smart and non-smart phones to be connected to broadband services. We want everyone to have access to the internet.Q: Community telecentres have been privatised, why? Does it mean that they were not effectively managed by government?A: I think that’s what it means. And as I told you, there are things government is very good at, like planning, making strategies and sometimes raising of resources but for activities with potential for profit-making, I think private players are in a position to handle that. Those are the areas the government should pull out from. Initially, the government went into the business because nobody else in the private sector was there. But the moment you create that momentum and market, you make people realise that it makes sense to invest in those areas. For Government to pull out from managing the telecentres is a natural and normal thing to do. It’s not like they were not being run effectively but it was like making the programme grow better and scale up under the management of private individuals. If we, for instance, had 30 telecentres and projected to have 2,000 of them, the government is not going to build and run them. But having triggered the development, I now get proposals to build thousands of telecentres. Q: Who took over the management and how much was injected in the overhaul of the telecentres?A: Well, I cannot precisely mention because I don’t think they were acquired by one company. They were privatised individually. Each district telecentre has a different owner based on individual business plans, which guided the selection process. But all centres have clear key performance indicators that show that they will take the management to the next level besides running them based on the vision they were set out to achieve.About the money they will inject in, I don’t know. You would need to assess them on a case by case basis. What I know is that the telecenters would be run as income generating projects.We want to have these ICT projects available, accessible and affordable to all Rwandans and offer quality services and at some point begin delivering some of the government services. The 30 telecentres are just a tip of the iceberg. We want have many ICT points of access not more than five kilometres from the reach of every Rwandan. Today, the 30 telecentres are still beyond the reach of many Rwandans.Q: Cloud computing is taking shape worldwide, what is it all about?A: Cloud computing is basically a model of running ICT infrastructure and services. It involves shifting your thinking from installation of a system and running it yourself and instead accessing services without bothering about either the hosting or what is happening behind the scene. Cloud computing entrusts services with a user’s data, software and computation over a network. For instance, when somebody sends money via the mobile phone, you don’t care whether the server used to send the message is located in Rwanda, South Africa or Netherlands. All you want is the message. Cloud computing makes sense for people who deliver services instead of thinking about setting up the infrastructure themselves.Q: What is Rwanda’s position on the use of cloud computing? A: We have built the infrastructure as a government. For instance, the national data centre includes a cloud computing platform.When you shift to cloud computing, then you optimise the resources instead of having every government institution own a small data centre that is really difficult to manage and set off servers which do not have enough personnel to run. In cloud computing, everything is run centrally and the environment is in place. We are encouraging people to migrate from the fragmented kind of infrastructure that is scattered across government institutions to migrate to the central cloud based environment.Q: How does e-government work now?A: There have been several e-government initiatives and as I told you before, e-government is about government to government, government to citizen and government to business. So far, the government to government platform is operational and involves several systems like government intranet, financial management systems, documenting systems among many others, handled through the e-government systems which we are presently strengthening. We hope to maximise the Government to citizens platform during NIC III implementation by having more and more government services delivered online.Q: Is the National Data centre complete? A: Yes. It is complete and working well. Currently, it’s being run by Broadband Systems Corporation (BSC), a private company and more government services are migrating to the data centre.As much as it was set up by the government, the data centre runs privately. I am encouraging government institutions to switch to the national data centre despite the fact that it is a process. Migrating systems from one environment to another and then making sense of the infrastructure formerly scattered will ensure that we do not waste our resources. Data centre is a costly investment. For instance, the government paid $10million for internet access for the next ten years. However, this money would be recovered in one way or another. Setting up the data centre, infrastructure, and servers cost the government not less than $5 million.Q: What is Kigali Techno pole?A: Techno pole will be part of the special economic zone akin to a small town that will host a collection of technological investments including training, industries, research and development. The area will solely be reserved for IT related businesses. We believe by bringing those aspects together, we would encourage innovation and investments. The tecno pole would be an ecosystem suitable for ICT investment and development of the country as an ICT hub in line with our vision.Q: What is your vision for the Rwandan youth? And what are the challenges facing the Rwandan Youth at the moment?A: My vision for the youth can be summarised as having in place healthy, educated, skilled, patriotic, productive and innovative youth. Each one has a special significance.Rwandan youth are facing the challenge of economic empowerment. Many young people are not engaged in productive activities and I urge young people to shift their mindset that there are no jobs. For long, we have been training our young people to be job seekers. Now we need to train them to be job creators themselves by becoming entrepreneurs through innovation. We want to encourage the youth to undertake jobs they shun like agribusiness. During the just concluded agricultural expo, what became evident was that one can earn Rwf 300,000 per month through poultry farming, mushroom gardening, among other activities that do not require huge investments.It is easy to set up such small businesses basically and I am encouraging our youth to engage in such projects. However, the vision is to progressively move from on farm to off farm jobs. This is the reason why we are putting much emphasis to build Technical Vocational Educational Training to teach young people to carry out activities that are beyond agriculture. But as we speak today, even agribusiness is not yet fully exploited.Q: How has the existing youth structures across the country helped in empowering the youth?A: The youth structures are the delivery channel for all the different programmes including economic empowerment, health, civic education programmes that I talked about before. Such structures also help in youth mobilisation generally to make them understand what opportunities are there for them and so on.Q: What is YEGO and what are its priorities?A: YEGO stands for Youth Empowerment for Global Opportunities; it’s an extension of current set up of youth centres all over the country. It is a way of focusing the youth centres activities around economic activities rather than social activities. It’s a way of extending the reach of those services from the district to sector level. YEGO is still in the preliminary and discussion level. But we are going to combine our forces in building it and making effective. It is not a government policy as yet though it has been developed to expand the reach of youth services across the country. It is a response to a recommendation arising from the 2009 national retreat.Q: What plans does the government have to increase skills development among the youth?A: Normally, the core mandate of the skills development belongs to the ministry of Education. Our role is to inform them about the needs of the job market, opinions of the youth in the job market for education programmes to be appropriately adapted.In our youth centres, we also develop employability, entrepreneurial and vocational skills, among others, through the ministry of education.Q: Any other comment would you wish to make?A: We are in the middle of a campaign to fight against drug abuse and trafficking and we don’t want this effort to belong to any other person. I would like all the young people all over the country to own this campaign of fighting against drug abuse. I am saying this because the youth are the ones most affected by the drugs. We know the source of the drugs and we ought to stand up to the habit. The second thing is basically to encourage young people to do away with idleness and laziness. For instance, in towns, all young people think of is sleeping, watching movies, engaging in social chats that are not productive. In rural areas, it’s all about loitering in trading centres, drinking local brew, instead of doing something really productive like engaging in agribusiness initiatives or educating those who don’t know how to read and write. There are many things to do instead of spending a whole day idling. In the ICT sector, besides outdoing each other, I urge telecom companies as well as internet service providers to sometimes combine forces with the ultimate objective of pushing for more accessible, available and affordable services to Rwandans.

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Q&A: Government should not manage community telecentres, says youth minister Nsengimana