CSZ

Last week the Computer Society of Zambia (CSZ) hosted an ICT FAIR from 15th to 16th April, 2010. The theme of the fair was:

ICT – Driver for Social and Economic Development.

The Fair was held at Mulungushi International Conference Centre New Wing and officially opened by the Republican President Mr. Banda. The fair attracted sixteen local participants and five foreign participants. It was nice to see the fair bring together the weight of the Government and both foreign and local investors to find meaningful ways to engage ICT’s in the social and economic development of the country. For some time now, especially under the leadership of CSZ President Collins Chinyama there have been lamentations about Government not seriously engaged in ICT matters despite acknowledging its efficaciousness.

We hope that this time round things will be a little bit different.

Obviously, reaching consensus in just one ‘ICT fair’ such as this isn’t realistic – a lot more debate is needed to change the mindsets of the people to get them on board. And most importantly incentivise the local people in the use of ICT’s. However, what is encouraging is the level of engagement and attention the fair seems to have had. Thumbs up!

Some of the issues I was glad came up are:

• The need to compete, cooperate and partner as players in the ICTs to demonstrate to the Government that we can match and muscle the foreign players who are preferred for award of contracts. At the moment, very few local IT consultants exists and those few don’t match the prowess of the foreign expertise.




• The need to invest in the development of local content and software for the ICT offerings in order to have local solutions to local challenges. Mr Chinyama said 95 percent of the content and software materials on the market were imported, despite the fact that the same were not meant to work in the Zambian environment.




• The need to incentivise computer-related institutions such as the CBU students who developed computer anti-virus software and the University of Zambia that managed to design and develop its on-line registration system.




• The need to adopt e-governance strategies to provide centralized services through out the country. You can imagine people are told to go back to their various provinces to get National Registration Cards all because of lack of a database. Not only NRC’s, but also many more services such as vehicle registrations and renewal of car taxes, which still has no systems in place. Just about everything to do with Government seems to be running on manual systems, which means simple processes that only requires less time to do take unnecessarily longer due to red tape and endless bureaucracies. Even the health centres that need ease access of records through information sharing don’t even have databases. And somehow there seems to be no urgency to automate these systems to deliver efficient services?




• Also I believe for ICT to be a driver for Social and Economic Development there should be more Government/Private partnerships to invest in local knowledge and skills in order to train and re-train local citizens rather than just embrace the foreign investors capabilities. Yes, it’s one thing to have foreign investors, but another to promote and retain local skill. The only and major problem is that once foreign investors have an upper hand in IT consultancies it becomes perpetual and remains so for a very long period of time making it difficult for the locals to compete with them. In other words, embracing too much foreign consultancies especially in IT will only hurt in the long term and could attrite the IT market for the local entrepreneurs. And where will all the promises that local citizens have to create wealth on ICT’s have gone? To foreign investors?

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