The closing ceremony of the Winter E-Governance Knowledge-Sharing Week for African officials

On December 22, 2023, the Winter E-Governance Knowledge-Sharing Week for African officials, organized by the HSE Center for African Studies with the support of Innopraktika, closed.

During the week-long events, officials from African countries attended lectures and seminars given by Russian and African experts - representatives of the government and private sector. Participants discussed the prospects and directions of further digitalization in Africa and its cooperation with Russia. Among the topics discussed were financing and strategic planning of the state's digital transformation, cybersecurity, mechanisms for digitalization of certain sectors (education, taxation), AI implementation in public administration, and the use of geoinformation data.

“I would like to point out the role of the HSE University’s leadership and personally the Center’s one, which did a gigantic job to make this week contributable,” said Alexandr Polyakov, Deputy Head of the Africa Department of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and former Russian Ambassador to Nigeria, Uganda and South Sudan.

Among the Russian government agencies involved in the knowledge sharing were the Ministry of Digital Development, Communications and Mass Media, Russian Foundation for Information Technologies Development, Department of International Cooperation and Capital Movement Control of the Russian Federal Tax Service, Department for Development of Smart Projects in the Moscow City Government, Moscow Mayor and Government Office.

“All the delegates participating at the school were of a very high level. So it corresponded to the task of experience sharing, we had the opportunity to communicate with colleagues from different countries. The materials and activities presented were also very useful,” shared Mr. Babirukamu Collin Mugasha, Director for E-Government Services at the National Information Technology Authority of Uganda. ”We want to reach out to some of the Russian companies that were represented here. We want to engage them to teach us and help us, especially those that have worked with the Russian government. We want to see if they can be useful to the government of Uganda.”

Russian companies also actively participated in the program: Kaspersky Lab, Sberbank, Geoscan GC, Cribrum JSC, Dialog, Solar, Bulat LLC, T8 LLC, Moscow Center for Innovative Technologies in Healthcare. Excursions to the Yandex office and the Smart City pavilion at VDNKh were also organized, where the participants listened to lectures from representatives of specialized departments of Moscow responsible for smart projects in the city.

Anastasia Pavlenko, Deputy Executive Director, Director for Strategic Partnerships of the non-state development institute Innopraktika, noted that the feedback received at the end of the Week confirmed its value and relevance for all participants.

 

“The Winter E-Governance Knowledge Sharing week for African officials is an example of implementing a new level of initiative in international cooperation. Thanks to the program, which we jointly organized with the HSE University, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and other government agencies, its participants gained important professional and managerial experience,” Pavlenko outlined. - I hope we will be able to scale this practice in other areas as well.”

“We are very happy to have the opportunity to hostAfrican officials here in Moscow. I hope that this event will become annual and will serve as a permanent platform for sharing experience both between Russia and Africa and between African countries,” said Andrey Maslov, the Center’s Director and Coordinator of the E-Governance Knowledge Sharing Program.

The participants of the School

The Center for African Studies