Country office demand for our work on e-governance continues to be on the increase. This week alone Djibouti, Libya, Moldova and Tunisia have asked for support.
Last week, DGG Director circulated a series of concept notes prepared by our CO in Djibouti. e-governance is one of the themes they want to address. The CO wants to focus on: a) development of a e-governance strategy; and b) state modernization via ICT tools (or e-administration in our book). The proposals are still very basic and can certainly benefit from our input. I will be sending comments next week.
RBAS organized a large meeting with the new Libyan government which was focused on public administration and e-governance on the DG side. DG has seconded Bratislava’s DG Team Leader to Libya and the advisor was at the meeting. However, I became aware of these developments through a contact in RBAS HQ and immediately proceeded to contact our colleague. We have agreed on having a conference call next week.
Moldova recently completed an independent evaluation of the national e-governance programme they supported, with our help, in the last five years. The programme ended last year. They are now organizing a meeting the week of 20 February with the government and the e-governance center (EGC) the WB has set up and supported with a 20 million USD loan. The outcome of such meeting should determine: a) what, if any, is the role of UNDP on e-gov? our ideas are to focus on e-participation and empowerment which EGC is not really supporting; and b) how can UNDP work more closely with EGC? EGC is weak in terms of project implementation and has thus ended recruiting such capacity in detriment on actual substantive programme expertise.
The call we had with the Tunisian group supporting Open Government a couple of week ago is yielding results. I proposed to the group to meet with the CO. I thus contacted the CO and suggested this. But I got back more than I expected. The CO informed me that they are working with the PM office in organizing a meeting on Open Government in March. The meeting will focus on open data and e-participation. I immediately responded suggested that we have contact with Brazil, co-chair of OGP, and have in-house expertise on e-participation. The CO was more than happy to hear this and responded that we will part of the process. In the meanwhile, the CO will be seeing the Tunisian group, which includes one MP, Wednesday next week.
The Motorola partnership is finally materializing. We have to submit a proposal next Wednesday and we will receive the funding within four weeks.
And yes, we survived the retreat with no visible injuries…
Cheers, Raúl
