East African Business Week (Kampala)
Arthur Oyako
7 April 2008
Kampala — The Uganda government and with support from US based computer manufacturer, Tropix/Founder Computer Company has started supplying 3,000 laptop computers to civil servants.
This is the first in a batch of 300,000 laptops meant for the civil and corporate employees computer ownership programme (CICOCO), a US$106million project intended to make a head-start in the e-government programme.
The allocation of these laptops started last week.
Uganda's ICT ministry is monitoring the computers project that is expected to span over a five-year period.
The programme is funded by the Chinese government through grants from the Chinese development bank, Exim.
The CICOCO programme is intended to strengthen the transfer of information amongst civil servants, parent ministries and the worldwide web as a whole.
Each laptop costs $699 through a loan scheme from Stanbic Bank.
The bank is offering the loans for the purchase of the laptops in four repayment packages of either, 12 and 24 months, or 36 months time. A special 48 months package is reserved exclusively for civil servants who have accounts with the bank and are servicing other loans with the bank.
Civil servants' children can also purchase the computers under the same arrangements but with approval of their parents. Government also plans to pursue a computer scheme for students in the next phase of acquiring laptops. It is intended to cover the needs of students' from secondary school level to university, under similar terms and conditions as of the civil servants.
Dr. Nicholas Olwor, the senior assistant secretary to the ICT state minister said the laptops are part of the public sector reform programme that the government of Uganda launched to improve on service delivery by civil service officials.
The computers come with a 120GB (giga byte) SATA hard disk, 1GB memory chip of RAM (random Access memory) a 14.1 inch WXGA LCD (liquid Crystal Display) screen and a 1.6 GHz (giga Hertz) Pentium dual core T2330 processor.
They also come with DVD writer, USB ports; integrated graphics, wireless internet card, independent web camera, a TV card and the home edition of Windows XP operating system among other things.
"To get the laptop, a civil servant has to fill out a form, present it to an authorising officer (preferably the accounting officer) for approval and then submit the form to any branch of Stanbic bank limited and the laptop will be delivered to him or her," Dr. Olwor said.
The civil servants, however, must be earning a salary of over Ush 120,000 ($71) to qualify for the offer and to deposit Ush50,000 ($30) at the collection of the laptop to cover internal handling, transport, insurance and storage.
According to Dr. Olwor, the government decided to handle the marketing of the laptops so as to reduce on the reliance on middle men and stabilise the price. He added that the whole idea of government deciding to give civil servants laptops was to make the civil servants as competitive in service delivery as are their counterparts in the private sector.
The adoption of ICT is expected to change the way government officials handle public affairs and to also quicken service delivery.
To make the project more viable, the government of Uganda in partnership with Warid Telecom will facilitate the training exercise of all civil servants at a subsidised cost to acquire computer literacy skills from the mobile telephone services provider.
The laptops' project is one of the steps taken by government towards the achieving the complete integration of an office less work environment into the lives of civil servants. Government also plans to introduce blackberry mobile phone handsets that will be synchronised with the laptops so as to keep the civil servants at work even when they are not in office.
The ICT ministry recently acquired high tech HUAWEI video conferencing telephones that are not being used by the officials that received them.
Dr. Olwor said the government was yet to receive another consignment of over 3000 laptops at the end of this month (April) and the distribution of that consignment was expected to start in mid next month (May).
The training of civil servants on the use of the laptops is also expected to start early next month.
Be the first to Write a Comment!
Copyright © 2008 East African Business Week. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
