Drawing up laws to improve electronic governance in the Commonwealth

Enhancing data protection and consumer rights through the legislation of electronic governance was what ten Commonwealth officials learned during a week-long workshop held in Sliema, Malta, which ran from 2 to 7 June 2008.

The participants from Botswana, Lesotho, South Africa, Tanzania, Trinidad and Tobago, and Zambia picked up the finer points on the drafting of legal frameworks to facilitate e-governance in an event organised by the Malta-Commonwealth Third Country Training Programme.

Anthony Ming, the Commonwealth Secretariat’s Adviser on Public Sector Informatics who gave a talk at the workshop, stressed the importance of developing legal frameworks to support e-governance in national strategies aimed at promoting information and communication technology (ICT).

“Creating laws to foster competition in the telecommunications sector will help to provide affordable and accessible network services to consumers,” said Mr Ming. “At the same time, consumer rights must also be protected through laws such as on data protection and cyber crime. In the liberalisation of the ICT sector, there must be safeguards in place for the management of scarce radio spectrum in order to offer consumers a range of information sources. Hence, there is a need to look at laws that will enable the ICT sector to develop and to grow in a positive as well as a commercially viable way.”

Mr Ming pointed out that a recent World Bank study of 40 countries revealed that more than 85 per cent of them had included legislation and regulation as a key aspect of national ICT policy.

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