She was speaking at the launch of the e-period phase, the second part of the national ICTs project carried out to determine the country's e-readiness in Harare last Friday. "The Government is working on an e-government and e-governance strategy to assess its readiness to offer its services electronically and pave way for discussions between government and its citizens," she said.
She said Parliament was working on a pilot project to establish Parliamentary Constituency Information Centres (PCICS) in various constituencies throughout the country from which people could access socio-economic data about their constituencies.
However, the minister said for the programme to be successful, citizens had to be made literate in the use of information communication technologies.
"For effective implementation of e-government programmes, both Government and citizens must be e-literate and have access to, and confidence in, using ICTs," Muchena said.
She said the Government was embarking on several initiatives aimed at increasing access to electronic education, especially in schools.
"There is need to train teachers on the use of ICTs as tools for teaching and learning for both students and life-long learners.
"We are discussing with the Ministry of Education to ensure that all teachers become computer literate and computer studies are introduced into the curricula from pre-school level to universities," she said.
ICTs, Muchena said, could assist all sectors of society and contribute to the country's economic turnaround programme.
She noted that ICTs had become a powerful tool for economic development and networking through them was a strategic resource that the Government, private sector and civic society could utilise in decision-making, improving service delivery and the quality of service in all sectors of the economy.
ICTs refer to technologies that are used in collecting, documenting, storing, editing and passing on information in various mediums from one point to the other.
President Mugabe recently initiated a programme to computerise high schools in the country and the initial phase benefited two rural schools in each province with each receiving 10 computers and two printers.
Quelle: AllAfrica, 26.09.2005
