Raphael John-Lall

In­for­ma­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tion tech­nol­o­gy (ICT) has helped South Ko­rea to de­vel­op one of the world's most ro­bust economies and T&T needs to de­vel­op its ICT sec­tor if it wish­es to have the same kind of suc­cess, said Kwang­soo Chang, as­sis­tant Min­is­ter in the Min­istry Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Se­cu­ri­ty. "For the rapid growth and ex­pan­sion of Ko­re­an's econ­o­my, ICT has been ab­solute­ly vi­tal. ICT oc­cu­pies 30 per cent of Ko­rea's ex­ports. Through the im­ple­men­ta­tion of ICT there has been more trans­paren­cy and more ef­fi­cien­cy and it has al­so re­duced cost in do­ing busi­ness," said Chang. "We be­lieve T&T need to im­ple­ment as soon as pos­si­ble e-gov­ern­ment if the coun­try de­sires rapid eco­nom­ic growth and ex­pan­sion." While T&T stands at num­ber 84 on the Glob­al Com­pet­i­tive­ness­es In­dex, South Ko­rea stands in the top 20 coun­tries at num­ber 19. Chang said set­ting up e-gov­ern­ment quick­ly will as­sist in greater in­ter­na­tion­al com­pet­i­tive­ness. "If you es­tab­lish ear­ly on the e-gov­ern­ment, then the na­tion­al com­pet­i­tive­ness grows in a par­al­lel way. When you im­ple­ment e-gov­ern­ment, then all the re­lat­ed in­dus­tries grow as well and it cre­ates more jobs."

Speak­ing about where T&T is in ICT readi­ness, he said the coun­try is still at the ba­sic stage. "As far as I am aware, the ICT process in T&T is at the first or sec­ond stage. This rat­ing has been es­tab­lished by the Unit­ed Na­tions and they iden­ti­fies four stages, so T&T would be in the first two. Ac­cord­ing to those UN stan­dards, South Ko­rea has fin­ished the third stage and is at the fourth stage." Chang was speak­ing through an in­ter­preter on Mon­day at the Ko­rea-Caribbean ICT/Gov­ern­ment Fo­rum at the Crowne Plaza Ho­tel, Wright­son Road, Port-of-Spain. Mon­day's con­fer­ence saw a team of South Ko­re­an diplo­mats and ICT tech­nocrats give share their ex­per­tise on how T&T and the rest of Caribbean can learn from South Ko­rea's suc­cess­es. "The pur­pose of the fo­rum and this diplo­mat­ic mis­sion is to share South Ko­rea's ICT ex­pe­ri­ence. We want to show how the Ko­re­an gov­ern­ment has been able to suc­cess­ful­ly es­tab­lish e-gov­ern­ment. The role of the Pres­i­dent and the Prime Min­is­ter of Ko­rea has been key in push­ing for­ward the e-gov­ern­ment.

"The Ko­re­an ex­pe­ri­ence demon­strates the im­por­tance of es­tab­lish­ing the ICT gov­er­nance sys­tem and re­lat­ed laws that would reg­u­late ICT. The pro­fes­sion­al agen­cies that would mange ICT. Ko­rea has the Na­tion­al In­for­ma­tion Agency. Ko­rea es­tab­lished ear­ly on the su­per fi­bre op­tic su­per­high­way. It al­so es­tab­lished ear­ly on peo­ple cen­tred e-gov­ern­ment." He said that ear­li­er this year a high lev­el del­e­ga­tion of the two coun­tries met. "The Min­is­ter of Trade of T&T met ear­li­er this year with the Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion of South Ko­rea and they dis­cussed they were in­ter­est­ed in sign­ing an Mem­o­ran­dum of Un­der­stand­ing (MOU) in ICT co-op­er­a­tion. There is a high pos­si­bil­i­ty in terms of ex­change of tech­nol­o­gy and per­son­nel," he said. He al­so spoke briefly about South Ko­rea's re­la­tions with T&T in oth­er ar­eas. "We have co-op­er­a­tion in en­er­gy. South Ko­rea im­ports en­er­gy prod­ucts from T&T. I be­lieve there is al­so co-op­er­a­tion in the field of tex­tiles. There are al­so pri­vate Ko­re­an sup­port in the con­struc­tion of fac­to­ries in T&T. We will see a fur­ther strength­en­ing of re­la­tions be­tween the two coun­tries."

ICT aids in GDP?growth

At­i­ba Phillips, chair­man, iGovTT, who al­so gave a pre­sen­ta­tion at the con­fer­ence, said coun­tries that fo­cus on de­vel­op­ing their ICT sec­tors see their economies grow. "Many coun­tries that fo­cus on hav­ing ICT as a key part of their de­vel­op­ment are do­ing bet­ter in terms of their growth do­mes­tic prod­uct (GDP) growth. In Asia and Africa, you see en­cour­ag­ing fig­ures of four and six per cent growth GDP. While in some of the more tra­di­tion­al coun­tries, like West­ern Eu­rope and North Amer­i­ca, they are grow­ing at one and two per cent," Phillips said. Look­ing at the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­ca, you see three per cent. We see that coun­tries like South Ko­rea, Malaysia and Sin­ga­pore have growth rates be­ing dri­ven in great mea­sure by their in­vest­ment in ICT," he said. He showed sta­tis­tics on mo­bile phone and in­ter­net pen­e­tra­tion in the Caribbean and Latin Amer­i­can re­gion. "In Latin Amer­i­ca, there are 582 mil­lion out of a pop­u­la­tion of 490 mil­lion for mo­bile sub­scribers. In T&T, there are 1.8 mil­lion sub­scrip­tions out of a to­tal pop­u­la­tion of 1.3 mil­lion. In­ter­net us­age in Latin Amer­i­ca is about 210 mil­lion and in T&T, 0.7 mil­lion, while the pen­e­tra­tion rate is much high­er in T&T than in Latin Amer­i­ca," Phillips said. He re­ferred to the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship Gov­ern­ment's ICT and na­tion­al de­vel­op­ment agen­da and in­di­cat­ed that the Gov­ern­ment has pri­ori­tised ICT as in fourth place in its de­vel­op­ment plan be­hind peo­ple-cen­tred Gov­ern­ment and peo­ple-cen­tred de­vel­op­ment, pover­ty erad­i­ca­tion and na­tion­al se­cu­ri­ty. "In terms of the pri­ori­ti­sa­tion of ICT at the na­tion­al pol­i­cy lev­el, it is high. ICT per­me­ates the abil­i­ty of the coun­try to do all it needs to do," Phillips said.

He de­fined e-gov­ern­ment and stressed its im­por­tance in ef­fi­cien­cy: "E-gov­ern­ment is the process of bring­ing the Gov­ern­ment clos­er to the peo­ple through ma­jor im­prove­ments in the ef­f­i­cen­cy of the gov­ern­ment's ser­vices in in­for­ma­tion pro­vi­sion with­in and among min­istries."

Phillips men­tioned ini­tia­tives the Gov­ern­ment is un­der­tak­ing. There is now a fo­cus be­ing placed on To­ba­go. "To­ba­go can ac­tu­al­ly lead in pi­lot­ing some of the main ini­tia­tives." Phillips spoke about e-pay­ments which they are cur­rent­ly work­ing on with the Bankers As­so­ci­a­tion of T&T. He said TTCon­nect is the mul­ti-chan­nel ser­vices plat­form for Gov­ern­ment and in­cludes TTCon­nect Ex­press, which is de­liv­er­ing an ex­pand­ed set of e-gov­ern­ment ser­vices. He said Gov-NET, the in­ter-min­istry con­nec­tiv­i­ty project, is the net­work across all min­istries. "We are do­ing an up­grade of the net­work now."

Ac­cord­ing to the Ko­re­an Em­bassy in T&T, the fol­low­ing pub­lic and pri­vate sec­tor com­pa­nies were in­volved in the Ko­rea-Caribbean ICT/ Gov­ern­ment Fo­rum

Pub­lic sec­tor

• Min­istry of Pub­lic Ad­min­is­tra­tion and Se­cu­ri­ty

• Min­istry of For­eign Af­fairs and Trade

• Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy

• Min­istry of Strat­e­gy and Fi­nance

• Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment Ser­vice

• Ko­re­an Na­tion­al Po­lice Agency

• Cus­toms Ser­vice

• Na­tion­al In­for­ma­tion So­ci­ety Agency

Pri­vate sec­tor:

Sam­sung SDS