By Our correspondent
THE Minister for Communication, Science and Technology, Prof. Makame Mbarawa, has urged mobile phone service companies to consider providing communication services to rural areas as most of them are underserved.He made the call yesterday in Dar es Salaam when opening the ministry’s workers’ council meeting which is to discuss, among other things, what the ministry has accomplished during the financial year 2013/2014 and map the way forward for the coming fiscal year.
Prof. Mbarawa said the government has established the Universal Communications Access Fund (UCSAF) with the aim to promote universal access to information and technology services, but regretted that most mobile companies were not ready to rise up to the challenge.
“We have tried to convince some of the companies and, to some extent, we have succeeded in signing a contract with them under which they will be given subsidy to provide services in rural areas” he said
He stressed that next week the government will sign another contract with some of the mobile companies to provide communication service to 86 underserved wards in the country which have 511 villages in which 455,099 will be served with the services.
UCSAF signed another contract in February with Tanzania Telecommunications Company Limited (TTCL) to provide a subsidy of 6.10 million US dollars (about 9.8bn/-) to build a network to provide communication services in rural areas.
Expounding further he said that in the current changes going on in the world community members are challenged to understand the meaning and importance of using modern technology to bring development.
“It is true that our country has set example in various issues on technology including national Information Communication Technology (ICT) broadband backbone still education is needed for community members to understand the importance of such technologies,” said Prof. Mbarawa.
He both commended the good performance of his Ministry during the financial year 2013/2014 and has appealed to workers to continue with the same spirit in the next financial year.
Prof. Mbarawa said that in 2013/2014 has seen the ministry accomplishing most of set goals and that is a true testimony that there is no gap between the management and workers’ representative.
He urged the workers to continue with the same spirit of working hard towards achieving certain goals and assured them of high co-operation from the management.