DFID Governance Group Head visits PITB for enhanced collaboration

Lahore: Head of the Governance Group of Department for International Development (DFID) UK, Ms. Honor Flanagan visited Punjab IT Board (PITB) where she was briefed by its head Dr. Umar Saif on Tuesday.

She was accompanied by the Punjab head of DFID Mr. Ben French and Governance Advisor Omer Mukhtar Khan.  Ms. Flanagan highly applauded the innovative steps taken by the PITB in order to improve governance, transparency and accountability in the public sector.

She assured that the collaboration with the PITB would be enhanced in education, health and governance sector to improve peoples’ lives and standard of public service delivery. She also appreciated the dynamic leadership of Dr. Umar Saif on taking and looking after so many IT based projects in Punjab.

Earlier, the Chairman PITB giving an insight on the flagship projects of PITB said that main purpose of such IT based projects was to eradicate corruption from within the public departments, bring transparency and improve public service delivery.

He told that the smart monitoring system was bringing a lot of improvement in attendance and monitoring mechanism in schools and hospitals across the province.

Dr. Saif said “our Dengue Monitoring System was being used by public bodies to spot the Dengue larva that was helpful in minimizing the gravity of the epidemic since 2011.  The Police & Health Departments were running 25 and 20 projects respectively in collaboration with the PITB. E-Vaccs was the smart phone based application aimed at ensuring maximum vaccination to the children in Punjab. The real time school monitoring data of 5300 public schools of Punjab has been made open to strengthen the ongoing monitoring process for better results.”

Dr. Saif said that e-procurement program was recently launched to make the procurement under rules and easier for the government departments. A series of training workshops had also been started in that regard, he added.  He said that PITB’s Citizen Feedback Monitoring Program was a recommended global model for developing nations as the World Bank quotes at its website.

On a suggestion put from Mr. Ben French Dr Saif told that PITB was also working on Whatsapp to exploit its amazing communicative strengths in social media. At the end, Dr. Saif presented a beautiful souvenir of Arfa IT Tower to the distinguished guest to commemorate her auspicious visit.