On Thursday, April 4th 2019,the Ministry of ICT and Innovation organized a cluster review meeting with key sector groups for validation of Smart Rwanda Master Plan (SRMP) midterm review report. The meeting brought together members of various sectors such as ICT, education, Governance, Agriculture, health, justice, gender, and trade.

The SRMP was commissioned by the Government of Rwanda as a roadmap for the future of how the Government uses ICT to deliver better services, create jobs and transform Rwandan society and economy in a constantly changing environment. Speaking to the participants, Minister Paula Ingabire mentioned about some of SRMP’s deliverables.

“The SRMP describes Rwanda’s ICT Sector priorities for the five-year period 2015 to 2020, ushering in a new Vision of 2030. Among its key deliverables, the SRMP aims to avail all government services online, today we have 94 services online, but we know we have over 200 services that are still provided manually, and within the remaining time in 2020, the ambition and target is that we are able to bring all Government services online.” Said Minister Paula Ingabire.

Minister Paula Ingabire added that the Private sector should be more engaged and empowered for more investments in the sector.“We hope to move away from 3% of GDP contribution that we have as a sector to 10%. But also, most importantly, how do we create more jobs with a target of 100,000 jobs that are more supported by technology and innovation.” Noted Minister Paula Ingabire.

The participants had time to share their ideas on the presented report to see what it requires so that the SRMP meets the targets it was put in place for. On the next day, Friday, the meeting was followed by a Ministerial High level ICT cluster review. Ministers from 7 key government clusters (Education, Health, Governance, Finance, Commerce, Agriculture, Women and Youth) reviewed the report and toured Government ICT Infrastructures at Telecom house such as the National Data Center, National Computer Security and Incident Response Team (Rw-CSIRT), FABLAB and Knowledge Lab (KLab).