BASSETERRE, St. Kitts: The establishment of an Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Centre in St Kitts and Nevis will serve as an additional human resource development tool to prepare residents for the challenges and benefits to be enjoyed by a unified region and globalised world.

Senator Nigel Carty

“ICT is an enabler,” Minister of State with responsibility for ICT Nigel Carty said on Tuesday. “It enables persons in the tourism industry, persons in financial services, and persons in agriculture. Whatever sphere of activity you are in, ICT really provides a basis for you to make your services and products available to a wider cross section of people, and it offers a basis for making operations much more efficient.”

The building for the ICT centre is currently being refurbished and should be ready for use by early September at the latest.

It will feature state-of-the-art training facilities, teleconferencing facilities and equipment to manage and operate the St Kitts and Nevis country code top level domain name (dot) .kn.

The centre will house an E-government development and implementation unit. In this area, experts will analyse government systems and develop software systems to improve efficiency.

Arguably, Carty was most proud of the training and empowerment opportunities that will be featured at the facility.

“The real purpose is to have a training centre established for young people in the Federation,” he explained. “Apart from training people in basic and other high level skills within ICT, we also want to give opportunities to young entrepreneurs and so we are going to have a special unit there called the Small Enterprise Center where we are going to give young people the opportunity to establish their business.”

Under this initiative, the successful candidates will get support from the staff of the Ministry of Technology as well as the Ministry of Industry and Commerce. The government officials will assist with the proper development and implementation of business plans.

The building that will house the ICT centre is located at the C. A. Paul Southwell Industrial Site. Carty stressed that this selection was made strategically.

“We have put the centre there because we want not just young people, but young women in particular to be able to get the opportunity to benefit from the training and access to the facility,” he stressed. “We believe that young women in the society need to be developed in a special way. They are, in a large part, single parents with multiple children.”

Based on this, Carty said it was important that they be exposed to new economic opportunities which will trickle down to their children.

A strategy will also be developed to target other categories of society with ICT initiatives. This plan will incorporate the expertise of the Ministry of Social Development in shaping strategies to overcome the fear some harbour towards technology and make them more comfortable in a new learning environment.

“By the time the ICT centre is completed, we will have made significant progress in putting together a programme that will help to reach all of the (abovementioned) people,” he noted.

“If we are going to make a success of the regional integration movement, we have to become more efficient in the way we do business and our people have to become better skilled in ICT. So we have a responsibility to expose as many people as possible so they can have the hands-on experience and have the additional qualifications in order to compete with people in the region and anywhere in the world,” said the Minister of State. “I take my responsibility very seriously in trying to achieve the ICT objectives of the government.”