KAMPALA – National Information Technology Authority Uganda (NITA-U) on Tuesday, May 28 unveiled its annual Government excellence awards at Naguru in Kampala.
Under the theme “Bold Digital Government: Unlocking Service Delivery”, the awards pre-activities are set to run for one month from May 28 to the awarding day of June 28, 2019.
Peter Kahiigi the acting Executive Director NITA-U, remarked that the awards are aimed at recognizing and rewarding the outstanding Government agencies that are implementing the use of online platforms to enhance service delivery to citizens
“We will recognize top government entities that have championed eGoverment. Over the one month, you are going to hear amazing stories that are happening within the government to transform service delivery.” Peter Kahiigi said.
Mr. Kahiigi added that as part of this campaign, NITA-U will hold a two-day exhibition dubbed as the E-Government Expo which will be held on the 20th and 21st of June at Garden City.”
The awarding process according to NITA-U will include 75 nominations under 7 categories and 4 awards to be given out.
The categories include best eService under sectors of Health, Education, Agriculture, and Justice, Law & Order, Citizen’s Choice, Accountability among others.
Vivian Ddambya the Director Technical Services NITA emphasized that the authority has the month-long celebration of eGovernment which will culminate with an eGovernment conference followed by a glamorous Awards ceremony on June 28.
She added that the Authority has set up a national data center that enables government agencies to host their applications.
“One of the blockers for accessing government services online is people lack trust in these applications, so we have built a very robust security platform,” Ddambya added.
According to Kahiigi the goal of NITA-U is to transform the Government into one that is found online to make the lives of citizens easy.
“NITA is currently the leading implementing agency for e-services in Uganda. Service delivery, as a result, has become more digitized and efficient creating an open government for Ugandan citizens,” he said.
“By the way, I think NITA should give itself an award during the eGovernment awards. It has really done well too on eGovernment,” he added.
NITA’s Technical Director made an open invitation to everyone for the expo and award ceremony saying, “NITA-U makes 10 years this year. It is very amazing that we are hosting the e-government excellence awards on the occasion.”
Martin Sekajja Director of IT at Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), speaking at the launch applauded NITA-U for its efforts to digitize Uganda noting that value proposition is key for any ICT investment to be made by ministries, departments and agencies.
Mr. Sekajja said that KCCA previously used 128kbs and is now using 10mbps dedicated network connection using NITA-U National backbone Infrastructure.
“There are 23 service centers with a private connection of 25Mbps, these include; KCCA service points, hospitals and schools,” Sekajja added.
The IT Director said that KCCA has plans to connect 79 schools, 9 hospitals and to upscale revenue collections through automation. “the request is processed by NITA-U.”
He highlighted that currently over 338,000 properties in the city have been assigned a digital address which was introduced to support trade and e-commerce.
“NITA-U freely connected all traffic signals in the city to the National Backbone Infrastructure and now through one command center, KCCA officials can observe the condition at all traffic signals in real time,” Sekajja said.
