President Museveni has said computers and Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) are enablers of efficiency, calling upon Ugandans to embrace the development .
While commissioning, the regional ICT infrastructure and e-government services in Gulu City,Museveni said ICT is an enabler of the other primary industries, agriculture, among others.
“Within the industry, we are introducing the pathogenic economy, making money out of the sickness that we have here by making vaccines,”he said.
He urged Ugandans to embrace ICT as a way to move the country to the next level.
“We should support the digital transformation,”he said.
Dr Hatwib Mugasa, the executive director National Information Technology Authority Uganda (NITA-U) said a total of 1,606 Kms of optical fibre cable were added on-to the government national backbone infrastructure
“We are happy to launch the regional communication infrastructure programme . We are launching it for the people of Uganda to utilize,”he said.
He said through RCIP, they were able to expand on the cloud service where all the systems are stored.
“We transformed all our transmission sights to solar. We no longer rely on energy.I recognize the support from development partners,”he said.
The government secured financing from the World Bank to implement the Regional Communications Infrastructure Programme (RCIP) Phase 5.
The goal of the RCIP is to transform public service delivery using ICT, in order to improve the lives of Ugandans.
This is also aimed at lowering the prices for international capacity and extend the geographic reach of broadband networks and to improve the government’s efficiency and transparency through e-government applications (the transparency development objective).
RCIP is organised into four components namely: enabling environment, connectivity,e-government and project management with a focus on four key sectors
These include ;agriculture, health, education, and justice, law and order sector