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Friday, May 2, 2025

T&T seeks digitisation

help from Estonia

by

KAY-MARIE FLETCHER
538 days ago
20231111

Se­nior Re­porter

kay-marie.fletch­er@guardian.co.tt

The Gov­ern­ment is seek­ing as­sis­tance from Eu­rope to ac­cel­er­ate dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion plans for Trinidad and To­ba­go.

This was re­vealed by Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley yes­ter­day as he said the Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion is look­ing at adopt­ing some of Es­to­nia’s prac­tices.

Speak­ing at Care­nage Po­lice Youth Club and Home­work Cen­tre yes­ter­day, Row­ley said, “In Eu­rope, Es­to­nia is one of the coun­tries that have done so much in get­ting where we want to be in us­ing the mod­ern tech­nol­o­gy. So, we in­ter­act­ed with Es­to­nia. We got the agree­ment to help us and to­day our Min­istry of Dig­i­tal Trans­for­ma­tion is in the cor­ri­dors of and work­ing with the Es­to­nia help­ing the gov­ern­ment and peo­ple of Trinidad and To­ba­go to digi­tise our coun­try.”

He said the gov­ern­ment will con­tin­ue to al­lo­cate re­sources to en­sure there is con­nec­tiv­i­ty across the coun­try.

At present, he said there is a pro­gramme in place to bring con­nec­tiv­i­ty to rur­al com­mu­ni­ties, and more pro­grammes which pro­vide con­nec­tiv­i­ty will be added as time goes by. The Prime Min­is­ter yes­ter­day said he al­so wants to digi­tise all Gov­ern­ment min­istries as he fo­cus­es on trans­form­ing the coun­try to be­come a tech­no­log­i­cal­ly ad­vanced one.

He said he is cur­rent­ly eye­ing the Min­istry of Works and Trans­port as he re­vealed his plans to in­tro­duce a sys­tem where li­cence plates would be read dig­i­tal­ly by law en­force­ment of­fi­cers to keep track of crim­i­nal el­e­ments.

“We are mov­ing to the sit­u­a­tion where the li­cense plates on our ve­hi­cles should be such that they could be read dig­i­tal­ly. So, once you move around this coun­try in a ve­hi­cle, the po­lice should be able to read your li­cence plates and, in an in­stance, de­ter­mine who owns that ve­hi­cle, whether it is reg­is­tered or not, whether all the le­gal re­quire­ments are met and, in fact, where you’ve been. You could imag­ine the po­lice be­ing able to have that in­for­ma­tion? But to do that we have to build the dig­i­tal in­fra­struc­ture,” he said.

How­ev­er, he ad­mit­ted that achiev­ing this dream would be no easy feat.

“What is re­quired as we trans­form is to shut down some op­er­a­tions and re­place them by oth­er, bet­ter, more valu­able op­er­a­tions. But that will bring voic­es who on­ly talk about what you’re go­ing to have to shut down, nev­er talk­ing about what you’re go­ing to have to re­place it,” he added.

Row­ley at­tend­ed an event where Huawei do­nat­ed an ideahub board, ten elec­tron­ic tablets and one year of free con­nec­tiv­i­ty to the Po­lice Youth Club and home­work cen­tre for the res­i­dents of Care­nage.


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