Center for African Studies hold a series of workshops on e-governance in Ethiopia

Last week, December 10, the team of experts of theE-Governance Knowledge Sharing Program held a series of workshops in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Together with their African colleagues, experts from the HSE University Center for African Studies discussed the challenges facing the digital development of African countries (financial barriers, legislative systems, gap in accessing digital services, etc.) and shared their ideas on how to address them. It is noteworthy that not only African officials, but also Russian private innovative companies participated in the workshops.

Among the workshops the following sessions were organized:

• “Human capital for digitalization of economic governance” session
• “Cybersecurity: Effective measures to safeguard government and financial data” session
• “Artificial Intelligence in Public Service Delivery” session
• “Digital Transformation and Tax Tech” session
  As Dr. Mactar Seck, Head of the Innovation and Technology Section of UNECA, admitted:

“Knowledge-sharing on digitalization of public finance is extremely important for building the capacity for the young generation. To achieve it, African countries should share their experience with each other. But here I am talking not only about inter-African dialogue, but also about Russian companies helping African countries. Only by joining our efforts can we achieve wealth and prosperity for the African population”.

As Valentin Bianki, leading expert and Deputy Coordinator of the e-Governance Knowledge Sharing Program, and analyst Daria Sukhova noted in their opening remarks, “by 2025, the African labor market will need almost 1 million people with basic digital skills. This emphasizes the need to invest in their development, because the population’s digital literacy is directly linked to the issues of employment and labor market needs. And special focus should be made on civil servants.”

Ngcaweni Busani, Director-General of the National School of Government of Republic of South Africa (NSG) noticed that “the most important thing here is to develop the right strategy, especially at the leadership level”.

An overview report on cybersecurity was delivered by the analyst of the Program Nikolai Golovko. Sergey Kozlov, Deputy Director of Global Center of Cybersecurity Solutions Expertise of the Kaspersky Lab, expressed his readiness to share the company’s experience, data and tools to protect the digital infrastructure of the future. The company cooperates with Afripol and is ready to offer its assistance to African officials and law enforcement agencies to protect critical infrastructure.

Nazar Hassan Idres Fadlallah, Director of the Information Security Department, Tax Chamber of the Republic of Sudan, focused on the development of critical infrastructure and the development of local data centers. Innovative Russian solutions were shared by representatives of the Federal Tax Service of Russia, the Russian GNIVC company, and the Center for the Development of Advanced Technologies

The e-Governance Knowledge Sharing Program is provided with the support of the Russian Government, the Russian Ministries of Finance and Foreign Affairs and the non-state development institute “Innopraktika”. Its main objective is to share knowledge in the field of e-governance to identify current challenges and find IT solutions to address them.