04 Mar 2015

Electronic-government or E-gov is currently embarking on a number of initiatives to up its game.

E-gov Head of advocacy, Mr Gaogaufi Mako said in an interview that a new portal that is cline-centric was underway and would offer a number of online services.

He said all ministries have been extensively consulted with regards to re-plat-forming the new government portal. That entailed gathering content of all services that government provided because information about any service from government should be identified.

Mr Mako said the new portal would act as a solution to 1-Gov or would offer most government services, including transactional ones.

“Currently we are doing user-acceptance tests for this state-of-art new portal,” he said.

He said systems would also be integrated for individuals to access government services at the comfort of their homes, including renewing drivers’ licenses. He said their office was also working on enabling aspects such as the legislation issues and two bills were before Parliament while they worked on guidelines.

Mr Mako further said they were looking into having a plan to have service centres; bringing those high volume service ministries in one place for optimal service delivery through e-gov.

On other issues, he said it was difficult to imagine that government would be paperless.

Thus, he said there was need for an education campaign within government itself and the public to sell and demonstrate the full advantages and benefits of transitioning to e-government.

That, he said requiret a lot of mindset change within government as there were still cultural connotations with regards to the use of paper which wiould delay diffusion of e-gov services. ENDS