Basseterre, St. Kitts, March 08, 2018 (SKNIS): The American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN) in the Caribbean brought its message of managing internet resources to St. Kitts and Nevis on Thursday (March 08) as it seeks to advance the digital landscape across the Caribbean.
A large cross-section of stakeholders from a number of agencies including the Ministry of National Security, Government’s Information Technology Department, the University of the West Indies (UWI) Open Campus, Eastern Caribbean Central Bank, Ross University, and FLOW participated in the one-day meeting at the Ocean Terrace Inn. Several students from the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College also attended.
Bevil Wooding, ARIN’s Caribbean Outreach Liaison, said the session in St. Kitts and Nevis was important as members of his team have spent the last few months discussing the state of the local internet ecosystem.
“Many of you may not know this but the federation is actually pretty far advanced in terms of the building blocks for the modern digital economy and in my discussions with both the government and some private sector officials, one of the things that we recognize was missing from the current equation was a fundamental understanding of the underpinning or the foundation layer of building out the digital economy,” he said.
This prompted ARIN members to “tailor a specific programme for the federation” to help enhance knowledge about how the internet works and the means to build services and network capability to achieve the economic and social empowerment promise of the digital economy.
Government’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Policy Advisor, Pierre Bowrin, welcomed the training and said he was pleased to see the diverse background of the participants as “we all have a role to play” in advancing the economy.
Attorney General and Minister of Communications, Honourable Vincent Byron Jr., said that building resilience in digital network systems and the ICT platform was important particularly given government’s strategy to increase the use of ICT in all sectors of the economy.
The use of an EDUNET for enhanced learning and sharing between schools; implementation of a Hospital Management Information System (HMIS), which improves patient care, and a Labour Management Information System, which tracks employment, unemployment, and other related developments in the field are some examples of how the government is using ICT to transform St. Kitts and Nevis.
The major improvements in ICT earned the federation two awards at the 2016 World Telecommunication/ICT Indicators Symposium in Gabarone, Botswana.
