The Technical Committee for Digital Gabon and eGabon-SIS projects held its first meeting in Libreville on Friday 24th May, with several items on the agenda.
The general objective of this first technical committee (COTECH) was to lay the foundations for operational governance to ensure an organised and rigorous management of the Digital Gabon project in the official launch phase and eGabon-SIS project in the deployment phase.
The Digital Gabon project will focus on modernising legal identification systems by setting up a digital population register, digitising the civil registration system, including birth registration, and considering the digital transformation of public administration and certain services.
The Cotech chairman, Mr Alberto Wenceslas MOUNGUENGUI MOUDOKI, General Manager of the National Agency for Digital infrastructures and Frequencies (ANINF), recalled the importance of change management in the context of health information system currently being rolled out, so that healthcare professionals can take ownership of tools that will be made available to them, and so that the public can be reassured of the use that will be made of their data.
In this capacity, Mr Samuel Moussouna Ikamou, Vice-President of the Authority for the Protection of Personal Data and Privacy, called participants’ attention on the existence of the law on the protection of personal data and privacy. He therefore asked that, as part of the implementation of projects, health professionals who handle citizens’ data should be informed of what they can and cannot do with these data, and ANINF, which hosts the data, should pull out the security conditions applied to protect it.
He went on to say that in order to comply with the law, it is necessary to ensure that service providers are subject to the same conditions of responsibility when handling personal data, in particular by declaring it to the competent authority.
In his closing remarks, the COTECH chairman urged everyone to take a patriotic leap forward to make these projects a reality for population benefit. “Digital sovereignty is a tool, but the beneficiary is the citizen,” he declared.
The work was concluded with the validation of the timetable for COTECH meetings and the proposal to hold the first COTECH meeting on July 12th 2024.