The ICT ministry permanent secretary Prof Aminah Zawedde is one of the seven PSs whose contracts the president renewed and extended last week. They will be serving for another three years up to August 2027.
The others are Ramathan Goobi, Adolf Mwesige of parliament, Lucy Nakyobe, state house comptroller Jane Barekye, generals David Kasura and Musanyufu Joseph of agriculture and internal affairs respectively. The president didn’t reappoint Ketty Lamaro who has been working as PS Ministry of education under Janet.
Lamaro proved too weak to handle such a big sector, something which made Janet and donors very uncomfortable continuing with her. She was fired and forced to hand over last Friday. The new PS now is Jane Okou Egau, who has worked at the MoES for more than 30 years. She had been Undersecretary working under Lamaro.
In the case of Prof Aminah Zawedde, she was reluctant to continue serving for another three years but powerful people in the country persuaded her to apply for a new contract to consolidate the achievements of her first three years.
The president’s blue-eyed girl from Makerere, where she used to lecture ICTs, was sick and tired of intrigue and infighting by people who weren’t happy to see her become PS in August 2021.
Such haters tried to make the atmosphere very toxic for her but Zawedde walked on and managed to deliver some achievements.
They kept forging stories to portray her as corrupt and unfit to be PS at ICT only to be ignored by the president who appointed her back for another three years. The president has confidence in the IT-savvy Prof Aminah Zawedde because of what she has done in just three years and her record of high performance.
Even when this is the case, Prof Zawedde, who many see as one of the few senior civil servants from the Muslim faith and also from the academia, might bow out after expiry of this new contract even when age will still be on her side and has an impressive resume.
HER ACHIEVEMENTS:
In the last three years, she has supported young innovators a lot to produce local ICT solutions and systems which have created hundreds of thousands of jobs and saved the govt a lot of money. She funded the development of the PDM beneficiaries’ registration and cash disbursement system called PDMIS.
Ugx855bn has been paid through PDMIS and more than 22.8m beneficiaries have been registered from 8m households. 33,624 jobs have been created through this PDM system.
The other locally developed ICT systems which have created large number of jobs and made money for government include IHMIS which has automated health services, EMIS which has facilitated electronic registration of millions of learners and teachers, egp which has digitized government procurement processes and reduced corruption tendencies.
There is also EDRIMS which has digitized and automated staff files at government MDAs and OBRS which has automated registration of businesses by URSB and has generated Ugx90bn for the government apart from creating 233,188 jobs for Ugandans countrywide who are working as URSB agents in supporting those wanting to register businesses online which is now the only way to register a business.
URSB no longer uses paper processes and all this is courtesy of Zawedde’s leadership as PS. Zawedde also did well being chair for the media and publicity committee for the NAM & G77 summits in Kampala last January.
The large media teams she coordinated delivered a lot of positive online visibility for Uganda via social media. And Uganda was trending for positive reasons during that period as Kampala was hosting the two summits.
She has also streamlined the operations of government communications officers and got them training opportunities, to be certified by public service commission apart from strengthening collaborative relations between Uganda and International Telecommunications Union ITU and ICT development partners like JICA from Japan.
She has also played a role in the revamp of UTL and onboarding of an investor from UAE who is coming to inject recapitalization money into the newly formed Uganda Telecommunication Corporation Ltd-UTCL.
She also set up the BPO and Innovations council whose members worked out the BPO policy documents and also made input into the thinking process leading to the launching National Digital Transformation Road which is a five-year blue print of how Uganda will expand universal access to high quality affordable internet.
The government adopted this and used it to enrich its national development plan IV which defines ICTs as enablers of the country’s social economic transformation. Zawedde will be using her new contract period to consolidate on all these gains made during her first contract of three years and there is hope that a lot of transformation will be achieved by Uganda as a country using ICTs.
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