Designing e-Government for the Poor - Tanzania Development ...

Job training and job placement services for rural economic development
ment. Local economy leaders, IT professionals, students and citizens, and
workers need to have basic IT literacy. In e-training, it is important to
determine the adequate level of IT competency, and the number of people
need to be trained. English proficiency is also a necessary part of an etraining
curriculum. The skills and knowledge needed for rural economy or
industry development are agricultural knowledge, natural resources, business,
economy, accounting, trading, and education support.
As an example of an e-training programme, Mr. Yoshimura discussed
the e-training programme administered by the Venezuela Ministry of Science
and Technology. The Ministry established and developed a software
workforce programme to improve its global competitiveness and encourage
productivity with the use of e-business. The achievement of this IT training
programme was the short turn around time of 6 months for the trainees.
Participants or students in this programme quickly acquired the necessary
IT skills needed to develop the software industry and generate revenue. In
addition, training costs per student were low, and student drop out rates
were lower than the industry standard.
The second example given was that of the Government of West
Bengal Info-Literacy programme. The Government of West Bengal wanted
to provide citizens with IT skills and higher education. The necessary
infrastructure, education services, IT support services, and project management
were successfully introduced. Microsoft’s IT infrastructure and support
services proved to be exceptionally reliable, and contributed to the
success of the programme that impacted the economy by generating human
capital for new IT employment and business opportunities.
The third example is the Japan Institute of Worker’s Evolution
(JIWE). The objective was to support citizen reemployment and provide a
job placement support network. The challenge was providing support
services to women who cannot visit the training location because of
childcare. Therefore, JIWE needed to make employment information and elearning
services easily accessible at home. The solution was to provide an
e-learning curriculum design consultation and a web site accessible instantly
and at any time. The user friendly web based e-training content
enabled development of IT skills for mothers at home.
Mr. Yoshimura said that a project plan for an e-training/learning
centre requires a detailed plan on ICT workforce development and ICT
curriculum. An e-training infrastructure necessitates a high performance
backbone network. The infrastructure must provide the following:
• Local network for transmission of video, data, and telephone
• High speed secure connection to the Internet
• High speed secure access to WAN
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