The government has moved to collect ideas on various public services from its directorates and departments for developing mobile applications to reach service at hand, officials said.
The information and communication technology ministry has already received 20 ideas about women development issues including women’s personal safety service, healthcare tips and poultry farming generated by women working with the Department of Women Affairs at a function last week.
‘We are impressed getting new ideas from the 50 woman employees of the Women Affairs Directorate who generated 20 ideas about livelihood and safety of women,’ ICT secretary Nazrul Islam Khan told the news agency on Friday.
He said the ICT ministry would launch a series of workshop jointly with different directorates and depart
ments of the government to collect the ideas on various public services including education, health, banking and financial services from the officials for developing mobile apps.
Nazrul said after getting the ideas from different government offices the mobile apps would be developed involving the local apps developers and with the support of World Bank-funded ‘Leveraging ICT: Growth and Employment’ and ‘Learning and Earning’ project under the ICT ministry.
As part of its move the Bangladesh Computer Council will organise similar workshop with Social Welfare Directorate by this week to collect ideas from the officials on developing mobile apps, the ICT secretary said.
He said, ‘The numbers of smart phone users are increasing in the country and we want to develop mobile apps to reach public services at the hands of the people using these smartphones.’
According to the BTRC, the number of internet users in the country now stands at over 30 million and 30 per cent of over 100 million mobile phone users are smartphone users who used apps purchasing from the apps store.
The ICT secretary said the government had taken initiative to collect ideas on various public services to develop mobile apps for local market although there is an 8.1 billion or more global mobile apps market.
Bangladesh has so far failed to catch the market as there was no move to create an environment for flourishing mobile apps business as well as efforts to remove hurdles on way to enter into the global mobile apps market, Nazrul said.
He said before taking initiative to go mobile apps development the ICT ministry organised seminars to get recommendations from the IT experts of Google, Elance and the country’s mobile apps developer organisations about the barriers to start develop mobile apps.
Besides, a six-member committee headed by ICT ministry joint secretary Gazi Mizanur Rahman is working based on the recommendations of IT experts for developing mobile apps, he added.
‘We are giving importance on clients comfort and benefits of people during collections of ideas from officials of government directorates and departments for developing mobile apps on various public services,’ said BCC executive director Ashfaque Hossain.
-With New Age input
