A visiting team from the South African Province of Limpopo has applauded Rwanda Information Technology Authority (RITA) for its successful implementation of policies and projects aimed at achieving vision 2020.

The delegation headed by the Director General of Limpopo Province Hlamalani Nelly, Manzini, toured the ICT Park, KIST and other data centres like Kigali Wireless Network and the SMART-GOV application centre.

"In the rural areas we were fascinated by the ICT bus that delivers internet services to people who have never seen a computer. The sight of a child deep in a village manipulating a computer inside a bus cheered me very much,” Manzini said in an interview on Thursday.

She said the South African team came to Kigali as a follow up visit triggered by a forum that was held in Maputo in 2007 that discussed how ICT could be used to enhance public sector performance in Eastern and Southern Africa.

"We visited Rwanda in particular because it shares a great similarity with Limpopo in that, the central town Kigali is surrounded by mainly rural areas, just like Limpopo.” she added.

 "Therefore we want to analyze the policies that Rwanda has used to launch ICT facilities to the villages so that we can implement the same policies in our province.”

Manzini further stated how she was impressed by the pilot projects such as "One-laptop-per-child” that enable children to develop computer knowledge and skills from a tender age.

She praised the government for creating a central coordination of workable plans through RDB-IT as the implementing agency that guides the programmes.

"If this trend can be sustained with improvement and still be accorded the same attention in the future, then Rwanda will indubitably achieve its 2020 ICT goals revolution.” Manzini added.

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