East Africa: Great Rift Valley ICT Summit Set for April
https://roztoday.blogspot.com/2014/02/east-africa-great-rift-valley-ict.html
The delegates ministers are set to discuss international and national infrastructure with focus on fixed and landline fibre as well as wireless and satellite communications, financing and standardization across borders.
Top on individual states agenda will be the development of smart cities and last mile connectivity - a topic that featured prominently during the last Summit which was held in Tanzania in 2013.
Also expected to take centre stage is the issue of monitoring the use of ICT with all the member states involved having agreed to come up with uniform SIM registration guidelines while the price of voice calls and data across borders is also on the agenda.
Spectrum management will further see more spotlight as most of the attending states expected to migrate to digital migration this year (except for Tanzania that has already initiated phase one migration) that will free much-needed spectrum for use in LTE and 4G as well as wireless communications.
Ministers and other sector players are also expected to exchange notes on the impact of ICT between them as they seek to measure how the different regulations existing in different jurisdictions are affecting the market.
Under capacity building, discussions are expected to be centered around ICT education and training especially with a number of participating countries planning to include ICT into the their curriculum while the localization and local content will be prime as much content is needed as digital migration kicks in.
Cloud computing, e-government, e-commerce are other discussion topics that will meet the delegates.
It is however unclear whether South Sudan will be attending the conference this time round given the political developments in Africa's youngest country.
By Kamau Mbote
Source @ CIO East Africa
