Online Reporter
Farirai Machivenyika
Senior Reporter
GOVERNMENT has adopted digital transformation that focuses on the country’s citizens and improvement of service delivery, Deputy Minister of Public Service, Labour, and Social Welfare, Mercy Dinha, has said.
The Deputy Minister made this statement in her address to the 44th Session of the African Association for Public Administration and Management (AAPAM) held in the Kingdom of Eswatini last week.
“The Government of Zimbabwe, under the stewardship of President Mnangagwa since November 2017, has witnessed the adoption of digital transformation, which is citizen-centric,” she said.
“As part of the automation of decision-making processes, a whole-of-Government approach was adopted with the inception of an Electronic Executive Dashboard (EED) by the President, where he can monitor and evaluate progress on Government projects. As we gather here together in Eswatini, it’s time to interrogate existing workflow processes in our governments and validate whether they are citizen-centric.”
She added that the Government was currently re-engineering workflow processes following a successful job evaluation conducted in 2023, which recommended the digital transformation of all services being provided at all levels.
Zimbabwe has come up with Vision 2030, which envisages the automation of manual tasks, computerisation of Government departments such as schools and hospitals, automation of processes, and e-Government platforms for each sector, for example, public finance management (Public Finance Management System — online payments), human resources management (Human Resources Management Information System — e-recruitment), and civil registration (e-passport applications).
Deputy Minister Dinha added that all sectors of the Zimbabwean economy were witnessing digitalisation through the adoption of Artificial Intelligence.
“This group of technologies includes AI, which processes large amounts of data and uses human-programmed algorithms or more complex artificial intelligence to generate decisions and assessments,” she said.
The Deputy Minister also mentioned the integration of data systems that include networked cloud storage for vast amounts of public data to support automation and automated decision-making technologies, as well as providing public access to information about government activities and enabling more robust performance evaluation and management.
“Cameras and drones are being used in the agriculture sector, transport sector, and civil aviation for disaster management. The growing adoption of complex technologies has witnessed the restructuring of the public service to reshape the interactions between public servants and citizens.
