The Palestinian e-Government Academy (at Birzeit University) Celebrating the End of its Professional Training Program

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The Palestinian e-Government Academy (at Birzeit University) Celebrating the End of its Professional Training Program

The Palestinian e-Government Academy (initiated and hosted at Birzeit University) organized a graduation ceremony for the first two batches of the professional training program that was developed and implemented by the PalGov Project (funded by EU Tempus), on Thursday, September 27th 2012.

56 employees from the public and private sectors, and the three municipalities have been awarded with certificates from the Academy. This training program is directed towards building e-Government services, especially the Palestinian e-Government. The training program consists of 6 tutorials (about 300 highly advanced and specialized training hours) for each batch. The tutorials were developed by Palestinian specialists in collaboration with highly reputed European scientists, and were tailored to fit the needs of the Palestinian society. These training tutorials aim to enrich the public and private sectors in Palestine with the needed skills and knowledge to build the Palestinian e-Government.

Mr. Mousa Abu Zaid director of General Personnel Council in his speech highlighted the importance of the automation of government services, and raised the capacity building of the governmental staff in this area. The government is already putting great efforts to achieve these goals.

In his turn, Eng. Suleiman Zuhairi, the Deputy Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology, who is a partner in this project, considered that implementing e-Government services is a top priority in the ministry, Eng. Zuhairi also stressed that the complementary relationship between the Palestinian universities and the government sector, pointing that the great accomplishments of the training in raising the quality of the governmental staff will have a significant and strategic impact in the future of e-government in Palestine.

Dr.Nidal Jayyousi, the representative of TEMPUS program in the European Union, valued all the efforts that have been done to achieve this great success. He added that the importance of this training is not only to raise the efficiency of universities, but also to transfer the knowledge from Europe to Palestine, and from the universities to the industry and society. In addition, he thanked Birzeit University for successfully implementing the project and reaching this high impact. He also stated that Tempus chose this e-Government project as one of their success stories.

From his side, Dr. Mustafa Jarrar, the director of the Palestinian e-Government Project and the director of Sina Institute for Knowledge Engineering and Arabic technologies at Birzeit University, has praised the training considering that it is the first step in helping the government to deliver its services electronically. He added that establishing the Academy as an independent legal body consisting of several ministries and Birzeit university will serve not only Palestine but also the whole region, and will help the government not only in training but it will also bring specialized expertise for the benefit of Palestine.

While Mr. Amjad Harb, a representative of the training graduates, declared that this training was not like any other training program, as this training was deep, intense and long , with the rate of two days and a half per week for six months , and it focused on the real problems faced by ministries, pointing out that after this training, trainees are now able to implement e-government services without any foreign technical assistance.

Graduation Video: