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Victor Kyalo, the ICT Principal Secretary. PHOTO | FILE
By OKUTTAH MARK
Posted Wednesday, August 17 2016 at 21:22
IN SUMMARY
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[li]Trainees are expected to come up with innovations meant to enhance public ICT offerings and improve service delivery during training. Victor Kyalo, the Principal Secretary ICT and Innovation at Ministry of ICT, said the programme will be key in addressing ICT gaps in both public and private sectors.[/li][/ul]
About 400 graduates of ICT-related courses have been picked under the second phase of the Presidential Digital Talent Programme (PDTP) to enhance their ICT human capacity. This is the second lot of ICT and engineering students to be recruited by the PDTP or Digitalent programme that started last year. The graduate trainees are expected to later this month start a year-long internship in various government institutions and private sector firms. The interns will undergo an initial one week induction, two months internship in the private sector and nine months internship in government institutions. The programme is a public–private sector partnership run by the ICT Authority and targets recent university IT graduates who have attained first or upper second class honours degrees and have been out of campus for less than two years. Trainees are expected to come up with innovations meant to enhance public ICT offerings and improve service delivery during training. Victor Kyalo, the Principal Secretary ICT and Innovation at Ministry of ICT, said the programme will be key in addressing ICT gaps in both public and private sectors.
“This programme is designed to build and entrench ICT capacity within the government to ensure ICT effectiveness and efficiency in public service delivery,” said Kyalo. “It is in line with Vision 2030 and the National ICT Master Plan Human Capital Pillar which seek to address ICT skills gap to improve public service delivery.”
Robert Mugo, the acting chief executive ICT Authority, said plans were underway to increase the number of graduates being taken up, with 800 interns set to be recruited in 2017. Last year, the programme recruited 100 students for the internships.
“We have proposed to do double the number of interns being recruited under the programme but this is still in its early stages,” said Mr Mugo.