Presenting the draft, Mrs Venson-Moitoi said the technology could be used to meet Botswanas economic diversification plans.
The policy focuses on seven key areas that are expected "to deliver the level of impact required to transform our society and economy," she said.
The main objective of the Community Access and Development theme, would be to provide communities with ICT connectivity, enabling people to have relevant information and access to global markets.
As for e-government, she said, it would provide service directly to the public, improve productivity, efficiency and effectiveness in the public sector.
Mrs Venson-Moitoi said electronic learning (thuto net) would facilitate the provision of universal access to education through on line learning.
The electronic healthcare (e-health) theme is aimed at providing health information systems for telemedicine, holding of patients records and providing health information and other services on line.
The e-commerce initiative, she said, has the potential to create significant employment growth and provide an important diversification strategy.
The minister said the primary thrust of this focus area is extended use of the operations of the International Financial Services and to support growth of the Business Process out sourcing sector. This would result in a software development industry that would encourage innovation.
Regarding the infrastructure theme, Mrs Venson-Moitoi, said the focus was to develop state of the art ICT infrastructure to support e-commerce and transformation of Botswana into an e society.
She also mentioned e-legislation which provides for the formulation of a simple, consistent and technology neutral legislation which recognises all ICT processes and transactions.
She said implementation of the policy would start during NDP 9 and extend into NDP 10. She called for the policy to be championed at the highest level and said the highest governing body of the proposed draft policy be called the Information Age Council in line with Vision 2016.
The implementing agencies supporting the Information Age Council would include the ICT legal reform taskforce and the enhanced Department of Information Technology within the Ministry of Communications Science and Technology to manage national ICT projects.
The enhanced department would also manage and monitor national ICT service levels and also coordinate the e-governance initiative. The reform taskforces mandate would be to review all laws to make them e-compliant.
Autor(en)/Author(s): BOPA
Quelle/Source: Republic of Botswana, 03.08.2007
