"We are presently reviewing the old ICT policy of 2005 to make it adapt to current technological developments in the sector," he said.
Eng Kundishora said the ministry would soon facilitate some consultative meetings with relevant stakeholders to come up with input for the proposed new national ICT policy frame- work.
ICT experts believe that because of the fast-moving nature of the sector policies and laws should be made extremely flexible and at the same time be reviewed periodically to match developments in terms of new technologies as well as developments in related policies and laws.
For instance, ICT policy is intricately linked to the country's industrialisation policy and the ICT Policy of 2005 was based on the Industrialisation Policy of 2004. The Government this year launched a new Industrial Development Policy.
As a case in point, the Industrialisation Policy of 2004 identifies ICTs as indispensable in effectively marketing industrial products both on the domestic and export markets, but hardly considers the development of a viable ICT industry which is one of the current thrusts of the ministry at the moment.
Then there are issues of technological developments, for instance, "cloud computing", which basically refers to the delivery of computing and storage capacity as a service to a heterogeneous community of end-recipients.
In this respect there is still a challenge for the country in terms of establishing vendor neutral co-location spaces that would allow cloud providers to co-locate their service offering.
But then there are policy and regulatory issues that come with such systems and this necessitates the ICT Ministry to take a proactive approach.
Another issue is that the ICT Policy of 2005 is based on data and statistics that were available up to 2004, when, for example, subscribers for the three mobile telephony service providers were below 400 000.
Currently, mobile subscribers are around 9,8 million, a factor which combined with rising internet connectivity necessitates greater ICT start-up activity.
This should then mean that now that the key role of the ministry is no longer one of driving the growth in the teledensity rate (although it is critical that it maintains its target of increasing the rate by 10 percent each year) but one of supporting the growth of a Zimbabwean ICT industry.
To this extent Eng Kundishora said the Ministry would soon be stepping up funding and provision of technical support to start-up ICT companies.
Eng Kundishora also said they had unveiled a raft of initiatives aimed at transforming the country to a knowledge society, especially with regard to increasing the country's ICT literacy rate within Government structures and for the general public.
He said the ministry had established a Government ICT school, which is presently taking 30 civil servants for ICT training.
"Although the figure might be rather low at the moment the move represents a step in the right direction," he said.
He added that the Ministry was moving forward with capacitating schools and tertiary institutions with adequately trained staff and the requisite technologies.
Meanwhile, the review of the old ICT Policy will naturally require that the Ministry carries out another 'National e-Readiness Survey' (similar to one carried out prior the drafting of that earlier policy document).
The e-Readiness survey basically measures the country's e-business environment in relation to availability of communication infrastructure, adoption of e-business by the Government, consumers and companies, and the current capacity and speed of connectivity.
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Quelle/Source: AllAfrica, 27.06.2012
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