Cape Verde eGovernance Country Profile
Today Cape Verde is a stable democratic state that is ranked among the best countries in Africa in Human Development and Good Governance. Furthermore, Cape Verde is the most advanced towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals.
Also to date, Cape Verde has several key e-government successes. Embedded in the Information Society Strategic Programme (ISSP), the Electronic Government Action Plan (EGAP) provides strong political leadership and has created a enabling environment for eGovernment initiatives in Cape Verde.
The whole public administration is linked to a central network and all administration systems and databases are integrated. A functioning and user-friendly integrated financial management information system is accessible from all state institutions, and used to prepare and monitor the budget. Reports on budget execution are presented quarterly to Parliament; and computerized fiscal management systems in three municipalities have boosted revenues. The eGovernment initiatives are ongoing with projects under development such as a Citizen's Portal, which will also include eParticipation components. Another planned project is Casa do Cidadão (Citizen's House), which will improve public services through a "One Stop Shop". Priority processes under re-engineering that will be accessible on-line from the beginning of 2007 include Birth and Marriage certificates, ID Documentation, Commercial Activity Licensing, Commercial Activities, Firm Creation in One Day, Vehicle Documentation and Registration.
An important role plays the central government ICT agency NOSI. After the economic reforms, the government decided that Cape Verde should be integrated in the information society. In this context, in 1993 the inter-institutional commission for innovation and the information society (CIISI) was created. Its target was to implement the electronic government and introduce Cape Verde to the information society. CIISI created NOSI (Núcleo Operacional de la Sociedad de la Información -- Operational nucleus of the information society), an operational group for promoting both the use of ICT and the development of ICT in Cape Verde. NOSI has to propose policies, diffuse them in the civil society and participate in their implementation. NOSI has two financial supports: the World Bank and the European Union. It is a flexible organization with a project structure. It has 50 technicians, 40 of which have a university degree in Engineering in Telecommunications, Electronics and informatics and a certification from Microsoft or Oracle. NOSI concentrates the critical mass of technicians of the SIS in Cape Verde, and contributes to the human resources training in this area by different ways: they hire training courses for its personnel, they invite personnel from other agencies to their courses, and, they have students from educational institutions who carry out short stays at NOSI. NOSI runs 3 large projects:
(i) the system of financial management of the government (Millennium Challenge Account);
(ii) the electoral management; and
(iii) the house of the citizen.
Moreover, NOSI is in charge of the conception and development of the informatics systems. They carry out R&D activities for the development of the systems; basically they have to generate integral solutions for the problems, which is largely adaptive R&D.
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