China's Huawei set to help build e-government for Algeria

ALGIERS - Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is set to help Algeria build e-government by digitizing a large volume of official documents of various ministries, a senior manager from Huawei told Xinhua in a recent interview.

"Algeria has launched a performance improvement program of its administration, and Huawei hopes to participate in this project with local partners," said Gao Jie, the general manager of Huawei Telecoms Algeria.

The use of information and communications technology by government, commonly known as e-government, aims at making public services more accessible to customers and improving their internal operations.

Many Algerian ministries, such as the defense ministry, the interior ministry and foreign ministry, are working to these ends and some of them have made remarkable advances.

For Huawei Algeria, it is also interested in the ambitious projects of e-commerce and e-banking in the North African country.

"Such projects require the existence of a very high-speed internet hitting 20 megabits per second instead of the current 1 or 2 megabits that most Internet users in Algeria have," Gao noted.

"Once all platforms required for online commerce are deployed, Algerians will be able to do business transactions with a single click on their personal computers or smartphones," he added.

According to Gao, only some large state-run companies, such as Air Algeria, Algeria Telecom and Sonelgaz, are offering this service to their customers.

Another project on which Huawei Algeria is working is deployment of infrastructure networks in the country, he said.

Huawei Algeria, which employs 100 Chinese and 400 Algerians, entered the country in 2008, and has since been in close cooperation with local phone operators.

In addition to solutions and services, Huawei Algeria also provides high-level training programs to Algerian engineers and university teachers.

HuaWei trained more than 2,000 young Algerians in 2017 alone, Gao said, adding that his company also selects 10 local engineers every year for further training in China.

Citing multiple projects underway or under consideration, Gao revealed that Huawei is now studying the possibility of establishing a smartphone assembly plant in the North African country.