IfG.CC - The Potsdam eGovernment Competence Center

One of the immediately observable identifiers of a region’s economic status is the quality of its infrastructure. As a driver of economic growth, infrastructure spending is emphasised by Governments all over the world as a lever for employment and enhanced socio-economic development. World Bank states that a 10% increase in infrastructure spending correlates directly with a 1% increase in GDP over time.

After the G20 was formed in 1999 to deliberate on global economic and financial issues in the wake of the Asian crisis, it was thought that given the Group’s combined population and economic strength, topics for discussion under its ambit must be expanded. Thus, in 2009, the Group was designated the ‘premier forum for international cooperation’ at a Leaders’ level. Infrastructure was recognised as one of the developmental pillars, finding a strong footing in the 2012 Los Cabos Summit, which emphasised a strong correlation between infrastructure investment, productivity and standard of living.

The installation was notable not only for its speed, but also because it marked the beginning of Africa’s largest information and communications technology-based development project to be funded entirely by a developing country – India.

The Government is making all efforts to translate the dream of paperless governance into a reality. Over 671 million telephone subscribers, 20 million Broadband connections and 3G services are expected to be rolled out by the end of 2010, targeting 40% rural teledensity and Broadband connectivity to all Gram Panchayats by 2012. Plans are also afoot for delivering financial services using mobile technology. These factors clubbed with e-governance initiatives i.e. mandatory e-delivery of identified services are going to further enhance the magnitude of e-demands.

Though Indian telecommunications sector is the third largest in the world and the second largest among the emerging economies of Asia, when it comes to rural teledensity, it is very low, pointed out Communications and IT Minister A Raja.

While inaugurating the 14th India Telecommunications International Summit in New Delhi today he said despite impressive growth of the telecom sector and low tariffs, vast stretches of India's rural population have little or no telecom penetration and there is a large rural-urban divide in connectivity.

With its large talent pool of English-speaking Information Technology professionals, its extensive and expanding domestic market, and the increasingly central place occupied by information and communication technologies (ICT) in the government’s development strategy, India is well positioned to leverage ICT moving forward.

This will enable the country to leapfrog to higher stages of development, reduce poverty and regional income disparities, and reinforce its competitiveness for enhanced growth and prosperity. This is the conclusion of the World Economic Forum’s recently just released Global Information Technology Report 2009-2010.

Speaking at the ICT Conference 2011 organized by Computer Association of Nepal (CAN) here on Wednesday, they also stressed on the need to implement various concepts like e-village, e-library and telemedicine with focus on rural sector to bridge existing digital divide.

Speaking at a panel discussion on ´Building e-Nepal: Prospects and Challenges´, lawmaker Rajendra Khetan encouraged entrepreneurs to work with competitiveness, quality and access in mind. He further suggested them not to look for government assistance on everything.

The Philippines has increasingly caught the eye of Singapore businesses in recent years, thanks to its growing middle-class, young population and skilled workforce.

Indeed, even in the midst of Covid-19, Koufu expanded its Supertea and R&B Tea brands in the Philippines in August 2020, via a franchise with Philippine F&B group Shakey’s Pizza Asia Ventures.

Smart Cities are being developed with the help of a variety of IoT technologies, but generating, curating, categorizing, analyzing, and transferring such vast amounts of data creates certain challenges for the provision of context-aware real-time services.

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are combining to construct Smart Cities quickly. Applications for Smart Cities rely heavily on data, which is also a major source of concern. According to a thorough analysis of various Smart City use cases, data is the essential component that powers the development process in most Smart City use cases. Improper data processing can harm individuals whose privacy may be jeopardized and programs that get the wrong data. An integrated ICT solution is essential to achieve the highest scalability, data integrity, and secrecy inside and between Smart Cities.

Last Friday, the government formed a committee with members drawn from Ministry of Information, E-government Secretariat and the Communications Commission of Kenya to map out the regions to be connected to the infrastructure.

Njoroge works out of iHub, a working space that hosts developers, designers and others working with technology software. It is one of the most well-known tech hubs in Africa. In just four years since its founding, the iHub has over 13,000 members in its online and off-line community, held close to 500 events and had over 50 companies calling it home.

President Museveni has given Uganda Telecom Limited (UTL) ‘unlimited access’ to national optic fibre backbone infrastructure network and ordered for immediate cancelation of a multi-billion ‘unfavourable’ Internet contract government officials signed with Soliton Telmec, a Kenyan company.

The President, who chaired the Cabinet meeting on Monday, said he was the one who went to China to negotiate the Shs300b loan for the National Data Transmission Backbone Infrastructure and e-Government Infrastructure (NBI/EGI) project.

The minister made this promise on Friday in Lagos at an interactive meeting with journalists, she said the ministry was established as a result of years of agitations by the stakeholders for a supervising ministry to co-ordinate, facilitate and drive the development of the ICT sector.

Beneficiaries of the newly acquired capacity include the Mozambique Research and Education Network (MoRENet) and the Government Electronic Network (GovNet), which are government-led projects established to improve online public service access and capability.

Beneficiaries of the newly acquired capacity include the Mozambique Research and Education Network (MoRENet) and the Government Electronic Network (GovNet), which are government-led projects established to improve online public service access and capability.

The bandwidth will help MoRENet to deliver reliable and cost-effective, high-speed internet traffic to member institutions whilst creating the platform to share education and research content with other Nationwide Research Education Networks (NRENs) around the world.

The Deputy Minister of Information and Communications, Nguyen Minh Hong, said, “In order to promote and exploit the modern IT infrastructure, city leaders need to continue encouraging implementation of ICT in all sectors of the economy, by providing online information and services to enhance the government transparency, and serve residents and businesses better.”

Amy Adams, New Zealand's ICT minister, on Thursday said that over 100,000 homes, businesses and schools can connect to the government Ultra Fast Broadband (UFB) network, up from the 76,000 premises it said the network passed in August.

Leading the deployment charge is Chorus, a new wholesale company created when Telecom New Zealand divested the business last year, with 72,000 premises connected. Enable Networks, the fiber operator subsidiary of Christchurch City Holdings Limited, has made 1,021 connections.

The Federal Government has given the final approval for the deployment of phase 2 of the National ICT Infrastructure Backbone (NICTIB) Project of the Federal Secretariats across the country by Galaxy backbone limited.

The phase two of the project has been on-going with Galaxy Backbone Limited which earlier targeted March 2019 for overall completion of the project.

In the modern world, it takes the audacity of leadership vision to build a connected smart city. Today, Lagos State is blazing the trail in Nigeria. In one of the most audacious Telecom infrastructure projects in Africa, the Lagos State government under its public private partnership scheme awarded, a few years ago, the construction of a 3000km six-way unified duct fibre infrastructure project to Western Telecoms and Engineering Services Limited.

The project deployment kicked off in June 2020 with an 24-month completion timeline and has so far recorded several successes, such as the completion of over 2600km of the fibre infrastructure, the connection of over 1000 Telecom base station sites of MTN and Airtel to the fibre infrastructure, the signing of agreements with Liquid Telecom, Mainone, Dolphin Telecoms, Swift, Spectranet, etc for connectivity to the fibre network and ongoing negotiations with most of the mobile network operators and internet service providers in Lagos.

Governor Fayemi will be performing the ground-breaking ceremony of the Phase 1 of the optical fibre cable laying project for Ado-Ekiti, the state capital on Tuesday.