The Maua App at its heart, is to help grow the informal sector to be part of the formal sector. Its goal is to help facilitate greater market access and faster conclusion of sales through timely provision of information and geo-location of products, digital payment facilitation accessible by all and transportation service options to complete the ecosystem that promotes digital transformation for everyone especially our grassroots so they are not left behind by the push for Digital Transformation 

One of the initiatives that has taken off globally is the establishment of national and regional Schools of Internet Governance to build more knowledge and capacity about Internet Governance.

Glenn McKnight and Alfredo Calderon (both of ICANN-NARALO and ISOC chapters) have created a Virtual SIG to cater for countries or regions that do not have the capacity to create a SIG of their own – or want to find out more about doing so in the future.

Click for a slide of information about the VSIG that is being offered with the first option to Pacific participants.

There are only 100 spaces in this first cohort. Those interested must register in quickly before it is opened up globally in the next few days.

This would be a great introduction for those new to Internet Governance.

Read through the slides and contact Alfredo registration@virtualsig.org

Bi-Annual ICT Hackathon Challenge

PNG ICT Cluster is hosting its first Hackathon Innovation Challenge

Hack4Change

• Be the Change
• Be the Problem Solver
• Be the Hacker
• Be the Coder
• Be the Hustler

Date 24-27 July 2020

Venue: Gateway

Contact: Priscilla Kevin

Design Thinking Approach

Another milestone and huge success as ANEZ hosted its open day showcasing its first ANEZ Hackathon for Kids Event.

Led by Elma Polum and Emily Kula Lee, the endeavour equips kids in lifelong skills in this digital age.

The programme promotes early childhood learning and adjusting to the present COVID19 situation for ANEZ parents, also fundraising for the creative labs.

ANEZ is a childcare centre that provides an additional educational service for earlylearners, weekend coding classes at the ANEZ creative labs and after school classes for interested primary and high school students in Port Moresby.

Key guest was Crystal Kewe, a Technology Entrepreneur and Software Engineer who inspired the kids, preparing them for the Scrath Hackathon Challenge.

Crystal shared her experiences representing Papua New Guinea as 2018 APEC App Challennge First Prize Winner and 2018 APEC Digital(Google) Prosperity Awardee.

She encouraged the kids to have fun and enjoy the excitement of hacking a program which is part of the creative learning to sharpen DESIGN THINKING.

Crystal shared her story of learnign how to code at age 11 (self taught) and plans to pursue her software engineering scholarship in New Zealand in 2021.

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PRESS RELEASE : GOVCRATE

WHUPI (NZ) LTD is the parent company behind GOVCRATE LTD, a turnkey e-government platform that enables governments to transact with citizens and businesses digitally. The platform was created by Cook Islander Ano Tisam, who has a Master of Information Systems from the University of the South Pacific, Sam Taufao who has a Post Graduate Diploma in Innovation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Jonah Tisam who holds a PHD in Public Policy and Governance from the Auckland University of Technology.

“We’ve been working on the platform for the last 10 years. We were about to relocate the company to Singapore this year before COVID-19 hit. Singapore has a more favorable investment environment for tech startups and the support provided by the Singapore government to new tech startups is one of the best in the world”,  says CEO Jonah Tisam. However, with the recent announcement from the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Finance, Hon. Mark Brown on the Smart Economy initiative has us rethinking our options” says Tisam. In a bid to diversify the Cook Islands economy away from Tourism the government made an announcement to do so via an initiative called the Smart Economy.

Through this initiative there may be an opportunity for us to move the company to the Cook Islands. At this moment we are seriously reconsidering options around whether to move the company’s operations from New Zealand to Singapore or whether to move it to the Cook Islands and we will be having a board meeting this next week to look at options” says Tisam.

However Singapore still has a more favourable jurisdiction and investment environment. For the Cook Islands to compete with Singapore would require several changes to the current policy settings.

“To create an environment that is attractive to a technology company like ours to consider moving its operations to the Cook Islands, certain regulatory and policy changes would have to be made in the Cook Islands” says Tisam. According to Tisam, examples of changes that would create an attractive investment environment for technology startups would be:

• Tax incentives and / or lower corporate tax rates for technology companies
• Government funding and commitment to digital infrastructure projects
• Grant funding for technology startups
• Developing a highly skilled and digitally literate workforce
• Reduction in broadband costs

As it stands the Cook Islands has the potential to leapfrog other countries into the digital age due to its smaller size, COVID-19 free status and the ability to shift quickly. “The challenge for the government is whether they can make the right changes to their policy and regulatory frameworks to attract companies like ours to the Cook Islands to help stimulate and diversify the economy post Covid-19”, says Tisam.

Tisam says the company has the technological capability and the expertise to assist the government in three key areas. These are:

• To help diversify the economy into the tech sector through technical assistance
• To stimulate the economy through digital infrastructure projects in partnership with government
• and to improve existing government systems and operations through capacity building and the application of our digital platform to government operations.

“With the Cook Islands facing tough economic conditions we realize government has a huge part to play in ensuring the Cook Islands economy is more resilient. We’re willing to help in anyway we can and if the opportunity were to arise we’d be more than happy to have discussions with policy makers about how we could assist in driving the government’s Smart Economy initiative.” says Tisam.