By DENISE MAYCOCK

Tribune Freeport Reporter

dmaycock@tribunemedia.net

Senior officials travelled to Estonia for a training exercise designed to further the introduction of e-government, and paperless, more efficient services, in Grand Bahama.

Kwasi Thompson, minister of state for Grand Bahama, and Elise Delancy, permanent secretary in the Office of the Prime Minister in Freeport, travelled the Baltic state where they participated in training for Caribbean policymakers and managers.

The trip, from October 15-19, was sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and equipped participants with the knowledge to develop and strengthen their nation's digital government capacity and promote information technology (IT) use in the public sector.

Estonia is regarded as a world leader in e-government. About 99 percent of government services in Estonia are online services available 24 hours per day, seven days a week. Citizens have access to e-services such as e-school, e-banking, e-police, e-health, e-tax, e-business, I-voting and e-Cabinet.

Mr Thompson said the training will strengthen the Government's institutional capacity, and identify best practices and knowledge to improve the quality of government services.

"We have embarked on making Grand Bahama a tech hub," said Mr Thompson. "If we truly want to see real results we must begin to make giant leaps to catch up with the rest of the world on how we provide government services for our people.

"We should begin to take steps to make government offices paperless and integrated, which means all of our offices and ministries are connected online and all can be accessed online."

Mr Thompson added that all ministries have made progress - to varying degrees - on digitising their services.

"We must begin to integrate those services online to make it easier for Bahamians," he said. If we move towards a system of integration, Bahamians would not have to bring a paper birth certificate or passport to every government office they do business with.

"If the service is online, they can access these services from their homes. It would forever change the way we do business and, finally, give our Family Island communities the same access to service.

"In Grand Bahama, it will be a necessary factor to attract international technology companies to invest in Grand Bahama and improve our economy."