Digital innovations for development appear to be the theme of the 2015 Transform Africa event in Rwanda, among them is an online platform created to establish connectivity between Rwanda's government and its citizens for access to government services.
According to the website, Irembo is the "one-stop portal for e-Government services", a platform for the provision of government services online.
"We already are live, we have five government services online and we will be having about 30 services by end of this year," said Clement Uwajeneza, CEO of Rwanda Online Platform Limited.
"What we are enabling Rwanda to develop is first we are making it easier, more affordable for the citizen to access government services, you no longer have to plan for it days in advance," he added.
Uwajeneza believes government services that are applied for online will allow government to be better connected with its citizens and therefore that will help government add value to and keep track of citizens.
For instance from birth with a registered birth certificate, and every governmental service needed thereafter will be captured and this will help government keep tabs on an individual’s life.
"In the next four, five years we will actually have put the majority of all government services online - we will have become the norm to applying for government services, there will be no other alternative, we will be the way to accessing government services," said Uwajeneza.
According to the website, services available are registration for driving tests (provisional, definitive and supplementary), birth certificate and birth record certificate and criminal record clearance certificate applications.
Rwanda's government services are also aligning and transforming, moving from manual processes to an automated process.
Because 80 per cent of Rwandans are not yet connected to the internet consistently, Uwajeneza says they are trying to establish a network or system of agents that are connected that can help Rwandans at any point or location in the country so that everybody is included in the innovative digital transformation.
"We are creating some new innovations, some things that are not already existent in Rwanda, like the way we are processing payments - we needed to build a new payment gateway system."
They are also innovating the way they deliver training across the country to improve the way they train people more remotely considering the ever evolving environment the country is in.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Tendai Dube
Quelle/Source: CNBC Africa, 21.10.2015
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