Minister for Information Technology, Mrs. Anusha Rahman said that Pakistan has been marked as the leading investment destination of Telecom and IT sector in South Asia while talking to Minister for Education of Liberia, Mr. George Kronnisanyon. She arrived in Paris to attend Mobile Learning Conference under the auspices of UNESCO. The agenda of the conference is to work out the innovative ways of harnessing the potential of mobile learning for socio-economic development.
During the meeting, the Minster said that Pakistan’s free-lancers in the field of IT have been ranked No.4 in the world. She informed the Liberian Minister that Pakistan is aggressively pursuing an accelerated digitalization programme to spur socio-economic growth in the country.
She said that the recently launched ICT for Girls Programme is aimed at passing on the benefits of ICT to this less privileged section of society. Under this programme, girls from marginalised sections would be trained on coding and computing with the partnership of Microsoft to increase their employability potential.
Besides, under Universal Service Fund, the Pakistani government is spending billions of rupees to provide telecom and broadband facilities to un-served and under-served areas of the country. Alongside, in partnership with CISCO and Microsoft, a comprehensive IT education programme for ICT schools is under construction. The Minister informed that the recently approved telecom policy has been appreciated all across the industry and by other stake-holders as a land mark document.
Mr. George Kronnisanyon highly appreciated the endeavours of Government of Pakistan towards socio-economic development through effective utilisation of ICT. He sought the expertise of Pakistan in the field of ICT. In this regard, Ministry of ICT consented to provide all out support in the fields of ICT and education and pledged to work out the modalities to sign an MoU between the two countries.
Ambassador of Pakistan to France and permanent delegate to UNESCO, Mr. Ghalib Iqbal, and Member HR Ministry of IT, Mr. Tahir Mushtaq were also present during the meeting.
