Abu Dhabi and Botswana sign MoU for ICT development

Director General of ADSIC al-Mansouri (R) with Lewis Malikongwa In a bid to bolster national performance and global competitiveness, the governments of Abu Dhabi and the Republic of Botswana yesterday signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for information, communications and technology (ICT) knowledge sharing, capacity building and skills transfer.
The MoU between the Emirate of Abu Dhabi - the capital of the UAE and Botswana is a commitment to work together to develop electronic public services and marks the latest stage in cooperation in the ICT field.
The MoU was signed by Rashed Lahej al-Mansouri, Director General of Abu Dhabi Systems and Information Centre (ADSIC) - the government entity in charge of the ICT agenda in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, and Lewis Malikongwa, Deputy Director General of the Botswana National Strategy Office.
Speaking on the occasion, H.E. Al Mansoori said, "ICT today lays the foundation and is the core component for rapid growth and sustainability in any dynamic nation. The Emirate of Abu Dhabi has an ambitious ICT vision and mandate that contributes towards ranking the UAE among the region's top nations in ICT network readiness. The MoU signed shows our commitment towards promoting international cooperation in this area and becoming a genuinely digital, knowledge-based society." "Botswana has impressively boosted the digitisation of its public services and we look forward to our bi-lateral cooperation to jointly develop many easy, efficient and user-friendly digital services useful for our citizens and residents alike," Al Mansouri said.
On partnering with ADSIC, Malikongwa said, "We are passionate about ensuring delivery of top quality e-services to the people of Botswana. Therefore, to enhance people's access to government information and services, we benchmarked several government e-service providers. After a thorough assessment, ADSIC stood out to be the best ranked entity in terms of e-services, particularly the Abu Dhabi Government Contact Centre set up and operations. We believe that through this partnership, we will benefit from ADSIC's expertise and knowledge to help us further develop our government portal and other e-services." The MoU states that the two countries will honour the agreement by collaborating on the following: - Share knowledge and expertise in the monitoring of productivity improvement and performance management; - Skills transfer through attachments, exchange programmes and information sharing; - Provide access to certain information in each other's resource centres for purposes of information sharing; - Identify training and development opportunities for purposes of strengthening the internal capacity of their personnel in Communication and Advocacy, Strategy Management and Productivity Issues or National performance; and - Engage in any other potential areas of collaboration where such collaboration is preceded by mutual written consent of the governments.
Source: WAM