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September 2005

At the beginning of a new stage

After one year of high level IT training in Germany, 21 highly motivated IT-specialists have been graduated within a ceremony in the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The ambitioned individual e-projects developed during this time in close co?operation with the respective African organisations and InWEnt will have a significant impact on the sustained development in their national IT industries.

It was about a year ago that 21 African IT Specialists came to Germany. Their objective for the following twelve months consisted in acquiring advanced skills and knowledge in the field of “Business Related IT Consultancy”. The technical training – carried out as a blended learning approach – focussed on Open Source Software (OSS) like Linux, MySQL, Typo3 or Python which are believed to avoid costly commercial software while having a similar or even better performance. The training was completed by several workshops and events like the visit of CeBIT, the world’s leading fare in IT.

In addition, the participants attended a teen-week internship in a German company or institution which provided an insight into the German way of business life. The scholars were assigned by their organisations and companies to achieve individual e-projects during the course of this year. The last two weeks of the technical training were dedicated to refining these projects. Though the success of any training programme does not consist in the programme itself, but in the application, prospects are promising: The presentations at the end of the programme showed amazing projects, some already operative.

The it@ab programme, short for Information Technologies in African Business, that provided the framework for this ambitioned international project, had been designed by the German Capacity Building organization InWEnt on behalf of the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The technical training was provided by Deutsche Telekom AG represented by T?Punkt Business in Freiburg together with a group of recognised IT experts.

The participants of the programme will leave Germany both happy that they can apply the gained knowledge in their home countries as well as sorry about leaving friends. They are now – as it was mentioned in the final ceremony – ambassadors of two countries: For one year they represented their country in Germany. Now they will bring back high?level knowledge to Africa.

It is now up to the Senior Managers of the it@ab network to benefit from the excellent education of their young colleagues and to support them in achieving their projects when they are back in their home countries. In so doing, the InWEnt Training Programme “Business Related IT-Consultancy” will have a considerable impact on the development of the ICT-markets within the Southern Africa Development Corporation (SADC).

Some sample projects:

eGovernment – Birth and Death Registration System for Tanzania (Isaac KISSIVA)

The disadvantages of the current manual birth and death registration system used by the Ministry of Home Affairs, cities, municipals and councils, lead to the consideration of developing a new automated system. The new registration system developed in the framework of the training programme is an advanced web based system that will – in a first step – applied in different Cities, Municipals and Hospitals. The aim is to develop a nationwide centralized database of birth and death information that will enable government officials to access and use this information in order to considerably improve their decision-making.

Special Interest Portal for Professional Women in Science, Computing and Engineering Disciplines, Malawi (Chaulere MALENGA)

In Malawi like other Southern African countries women and girls have limited perspectives when they make their choice of career. Consequently their participation in areas such as mathematics, science, computing and engineering remains very low. The objective of this project is to create a women role?model information portal based on successes in computing, science, mathematics and engineering in order to motivate young women to enter scientific and computing disciplines which are traditionally men-dominated areas. The portal will provide for high quality web based content, news, mailing lists and discussion forums.

African Escape – Website, Namibia (Foibe KALIPI & Lionel THOBIAS)

The African Escape Website serves to inform visitors and customers about the company, its objectives and the products and services the company provides. Since the primary target market for the products and services will be abroad, the website also provides its visitors and customers with electronic business capabilities to interact with the company and buy products or services online. Additionally, existing clients will be able to retrieve service details securely in electronic form. Thus, the project will allow African Escape to successfully step into the global market.

Community Portal for Soweto Digital Village, South Africa (Thulani NDLOVU)

Soweto Digital Village is a computer community resource centre. Its mission is to bridge the ICT gap within the disadvantaged community by imparting the skills necessary for the people to be self-marketable. The main concept of the project is to set up a web-based electronic market place where both the tenant companies as well as potential clients can carry out eBusiness and eCommerce operations thereby reaching a global market resulting in significantly increased sales. Thus, the project will provide more access and flexibility to the community in order to improve its business practices.

All projects can be found here

Contact:
InWEnt gGmbH / Cologne
Frau Christiane Weber
ict@inwent.org

Contact:
Deutsche Telekom AG / Freiburg
Herr Markus Mayer
m.mayer@a-2-a.net

or visit the Website of the Programme:
www.a-2-a.net


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