A new Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Plan is being developed that will provide a roadmap to guide this country’s transition from transactional e-Government to transformational e-Government.
The Minister of Public Administration and Communications, Maxie Cuffie made this disclosure while presenting the excelGov2016 award to the Ministry of Trade and Industry.
Weiterlesen: TT: New ICT plan to bring government service to citizens at home
There will be greater scrutiny of the operational effectiveness of state enterprises, including the Telecommunications Services of T&T (TSTT), as the Government moves to forge a new economic direction for T&T, Communications Minister Maxie Cuffie has said.
In the feature address at Wednesday’s re-launch of C&W Business at the Hyatt Regency, Port-of-Spain, Cuffie said Cabinet has agreed to the appointment of a team headed by economist Dr Terrance Farrell to examine the strengths and weaknesses of state-enterprises and provide corrective measures where applicable. Farrell will also chair the Economic Development Board under the Ministry of Planning and Development.
Cabinet has already approved an electronic system to follow the Biometric Smart Card which will monitor recipients of all social grants, case by case.
If Minister of the People and Social Development Christine Newallo-Hosein gets a second term in government, this system will be put in place soon after.
Newallo-Hosein made the statement on Thursday when asked to elaborate on the decommissioning of 4,000 people from the food card (Targeted Conditional Cash Transfer Programme) programme because of fraudulent activities.
Under suspicion that up to 80 per cent of the people to access government's TTCards in the five years did so fraudulently, Social Development Minister Cherrie-Ann Crichlow-Cockburn yesterday promised an audit into the programme.
Crichlow-Cockburn, in her contribution to the Budget debate in the Lower House, said the programme is to be revamped to fulfill its original intention of providing relief to persons in need.
Popularly called the “food card”, the former People's Partnership government had announced its intention to assimilate the TTCard into a biometric Smart Card programme that would help the elimination of fraud.
Weiterlesen: TT: ‘Food card’ system to be revamped, says minister
By 2016, one per cent of the world’s population will own more than half of its wealth. The staggering projection, from a recent study by anti-poverty group Oxfam, made headlines just as the World Economic Forum (WEF) was getting started in Davos last month.
One concern for secretary general of the Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO) Professor Tim Unwin, who was at the WEF, is that the rapid spread of information and communications technologies is not helping to reduce that growing gap between poor and rich.