The Western Cape government is to launch the Internet portal of its e-government initiative on Tuesday. It says it will be the first of its kind to offer content in English, Afrikaans and Xhosa.
"To the best of our knowledge, we`ve created the first isiXhosa Web portal in the world - this is an important milestone for the Western Cape," says Western Cape minister for finance and economic development Ebrahim Rasool.
This means there are now three ways for Western Cape citizens to access government information and services: through the Web portal, a call centre, or a walk-in centre.
Residents will now be able to hold the government accountable, by calling, surfing the Internet, or visiting the Cape Gateway offices. The call centre and walk-in centre were opened in June 2003 and deal with approximately 20 000 queries a month.
The Web portal is intended as a single point of access to easy-to-understand government information. The information on the portal is ordered into areas that make sense to the average person (such as birth, education, marriage), making the search for government information more user-friendly.
The provincial government will also publish provincial tenders on the site in direct response to the complaints about lack of access to these services received from rural businesses by the government during the Imbizo programmes.
"We recognise that most of our citizens don`t have access to the Internet," says Harold Wesso, chief director of Knowledge Economy and E-Government in the Provincial Administration. "What Cape Gateway seeks to do is to allow everyone to benefit from the access to information afforded by Internet and call centre technologies."
The government says the portal and call centre will be useful barometers of what the public needs to know - between calls coming in and questions e-mailed from the portal, the government will be able to gauge where the major gaps in its communications and policies lie.
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