The Ministry of ICT now has a new face in Hon. Tatenda Mavetera who is popularly known for her role in the ZBC classic soapie, Studio 263. Congrats and welcome. We bid you a fruitful tenure and we also come bearing a wish list. Our hopes and dreams if you will.
Some low-hanging fruit
- Enforce good governance at Netone, Telone, and Telecel and get a team that makes those businesses commercially viable.
- Attract investment in infrastructure (mostly connectivity).
- Overhaul and resuscitate Zimpost for the 21st century. Get a leadership team that can do this.
- Engage stakeholders to understand and then implement how to attract sustainable investment for startups.
- Invest in tech skills development.
- Make government services available online in the most intuitive way possible.
- Influence colleagues in government for technology adoption, and awareness of tech impact (opportunities/threats) in the daily operation of government.
- Be ambitious about new technologies and encourage investment and research. Realize we have many opportunities to leapfrog if only we are intentional and creative.
- Find tech and business entrepreneurs and executives across the world and actually meet to listen to them. If you can’t bring them in the same space, go to where they are and listen to their problems, and concerns.
- Create spaces where tech entrepreneurs can access the basics (broadband, machines, ICT resources) with entry based on having successfully gone through entrepreneurship training like Empretech.
- Facilitate tech and business exchange, and training – the ministry has to identify global opportunities that help with networking and skill building. They should help get locals into companies like Alibaba, Tencent, and Huawei and be trained. Even arrange the free Chinese language training for those that want it.
- Exchange tech business visits should also be arranged to African tech and innovation hotspots.
- Invest government funds in backbone infrastructure and bandwidth.
- Invest in startups but only in ones where local and global private investors are also investing in.
We don’t expect you to know it all on day 1…but an effort to want to understand is all we ask
Some of these may be low-hanging fruit. Some may need a bit more digging into. There definitely is more than what is on our wishlist. A good sign to us that the ministry is in great hands is seeing a top-down interest in understanding the sector…(We do not expect you to be an expert on day one) so plenty of engagements with key players in the ICT and startup space. Basically a crash course on the ministry that has been placed in your custodianship.
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What’s your take?