africatodayonline.blogspot.com -
Recently, Rwanda organised an ICT conference named ‘The Transform Africa Summit 2013’ under the theme: ‘The Future Delivered Now’ which was attended by seven presidents, including President Museveni.
While speaking about the need to enhance ICT in the region, President Museveni said “it must also be optimally applied in solving challenges in automation of machines, storing and retrieving of information, identifying persons in democratic voting systems, sorting out the wage bill and in defence systems”.
ICT also has the biometric data system with traits like fingerprint, face, and iris and if it (ICT) is modified, these can be installed in many public and private owned buildings for security reasons especially in light of the recent Westgate terrorism attack and media report of laxity of some of our security guards.
The biometric data system can also be applied by the Electoral Commission to eliminate doubt of the credibility of the polling results.
In Uganda, we have had cases of ghost workers, if the biometric datasystem is applied, the system will be foolproof and will become impossible to create ghost workers as the entire system will be electronic.
ICT boost also helps to change from the old fashioned and outdated systems of file keeping to the use of database file system, which is better because under this technique, accessing files is easy, for example by using ‘Ava Find’ programme other than the manual checking which can takes days to allocate a file needed.
Kenneth Makanga,
makangakenneth@gmail.com
