S. Korea pledges support to ICT Dev’t

The South Korean President, Lee Myung-bak, has said that his country is committed to continue supporting capacity building targeting ICT development. The Korean leader yesterday held a meeting with President Paul Kagame at the sidelines of the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness. President Lee noted that he believes that the South Korean-led information technology project in Rwanda will contribute to producing talented human resources in the sector and to Rwanda’s vision to become an Information Technology(IT) hub on the continent. He noted that South Korea is focusing its development assistance on capacity building of recipient nations like Rwanda. “Seoul-funded project to establish the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Centre at the National University of Rwanda will contribute to producing talented people,” Lee said in a statement from the summit. Lee added that friendly relations between the two countries have been expanding since a bilateral summit that was held in 2008 that saw the establishment of diplomatic missions in the two countries, and asked President Kagame’s support for Korean firms carrying out energy and infrastructure projects in Rwanda. On his part, President Kagame praised South Korea for becoming a global IT power, observing that Rwanda hopes to follow South Korea’s example and turn itself into an IT and economic hub in Eastern Africa. During the summit, the two leaders discussed ways to further consolidate possibilities for cooperation in economy, trade, and infrastructure, along with development assistance. President Lee gave a high evaluation of the expanding bilateral friendship and cooperation since the Korea-Rwanda summit in May 2008. The Korean government has supported Rwanda through several collaborative projects including the construction of a new information and communication technology (ICT) school at the National University of Rwanda, which was inaugurated on May 16 this year. The state-of –the-art complex which has 11 laboratories with 400 computers, is said to be the best of its kind in Africa. South Korea’s ICT giants Korea Telecom (KT) opened shop in Kigali in 2008 to undertake the laying of the fibre-optic cable and setting up the National backbone. KT was also contracted to install a wireless broadband network known as the Kigali Metropolitan Area Network (Kigali MAN) The total projects implemented by KT are worth over US$70m in total. edmund.kagire@newtimes.rw