By Lucky Masilela
Various public sector professionals responsible for information and communication technology (ICT) in their organisations came together in a webinar organised by the Public Sector ICT (PSICT) Forum recently.
That was good indicator of ongoing cross pollination of ideas and best practice, not only within South Africa but across the continent.
As the agency specifically responsible for the management of several second level domains, and the advancement of the use of technology to find solutions to problems associated with the delivery of social services, the ZA Central Registry (ZACR) has advocated the sharing of best practice among African countries for the purposes of benchmarking.
The webinar hosted by the PSICT Forum brought together top Chief Investment Officers (CIOs) and related professionals from different organs of state and the entire ICT industry under the theme:
“Accelerated digital transformation and inclusion as drivers for economic growth”.
The theme is loaded, as any ICT policy should be. ICT is not a topic that can be dealt with in isolation.
In the public sector, as the lockdown imposed on the world by Covid-19 demonstrated, access to affordable and reliable ICT is the difference to life and death. Those without an effective ICT infrastructure to learn, access healthcare and other social services have been further marginalised and the income inequality has become widened. This is a problem because those who are excluded include the majority of South Africans.
This is the reason ZACR found this webinar particularly intriguing because it focused on the inclusion dimension of digital transformation.
It not only talked about digital transformation in theory but highlighted practical experience from private sector companies with extensive public sector experience, like MTN Business, representatives of government departments such as the Department of Small Business Development, a board member of Digital Council Africa, Veronica Motloutsi, and design thinking expert Dr Puleng Mokhoalibe.
To make the event even more relevant to Africa as a developing region with an opportunity to pole-vault the rest of the world with ICT, Jean Baptiste Byiringiro from the Rwanda Biomedical Centre was also participating – sharing insights into how his country’s Ministry of Health managed to deploy drones and robots to improve healthcare in Rwanda, making it safer for healthcare professionals and the patients.
Listening to the insights shared by the panel members, the speakers from the public sector and the private sector, one’s hope could not help being renewed that African governments and private sector players can forge uniquely African ways of building public-private partnerships to make ICT a human right, thus closing the income inequality gap.
When African countries like South Africa, Rwanda and Kenya continuously share best practice as we saw in this PSICT Forum webinar, there is no stopping South Africa and the rest of the continent from demonstrating the versatility required to make poverty history with the help of technology.
It is events such as this one that show that the only limits to Africa’s prosperity with the help of digitalisation are imagination and lack of courage – which should be the easiest to overcome.
Lucky Masilela is the CEO of ZA Central Registry.
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of The Star or Independent Media.
The Star