Uganda: All 79 districts to be online by 2010

Highway Africa News Agency

In a period of three years all Uganda's seventy nine districts of will be online by the year 2010, according to the information and communication technologies minister Dr. Ham Mulira.

This follows the ministry's role in spearheading the development of the National Data Transmission Backbone Infrastructure (NBI) and the Electronic Government Infrastructure (EGI) project that is being implemented in phases but will eventually link all the districts of Uganda by 2010.

"The project is to be financed by the Republic of China through a loan from the Exim Bank of China and it will be implemented in three phases and phase one is to cost $30m that has already been approved by Parliament," he said "The development of the project including feasibility and the quantification of the requirements was completed by the ministry in November last year," he told HANA in an interview in Kampala.

He also said a component of the project will provide enhanced communication facilities to support the forthcoming Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM).

"The project is meant to complement and not to compete with the private sector initiatives because it is the responsibility of government to develop the infrastructure like roads," he said.

"In the same way the national backbone is like a road and considered a digital highway in that although government builds it, usage is for anyone including telephone service providers."

"Provision of the infrastructure by government allows the private sector to concentrate on investments in the actual value added services delivered rather than developing infrastructure."

"It is therefore a form of public-private partnership with the ultimate benefits being to the consumer community in terms of more services including voice and data and Internet access," he said.

He said on completion of the Electronic Government (E-Government), "the project would for example improve efficiency of service delivery and people will be able to communicate while the ease of information flow would lead to efficiency in decision making processes." The project is planned to be implemented in three phases which are similar but only differentiated by magnitude of scope in terms of geographical coverage.

The first phase will establish the NBI in three towns of Kampala, Jinja and Entebbe and the E-government that shall link ministries.

The NBI is intended to ensure that high bandwidth data connection is available in all major towns of Uganda at reasonable rates.

The EGI is designed to reduce the cost of doing business in government, improving communication between government agencies and reducing the need for officials to commute for meetings and thus increasing efficiency.