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Ammon News -

Jordan's Economic and Social Council (ESC) recently reviewed the information and communications technology (ICT) conditions, within the State of the Country Report 2021, both in-person and remotely.

According to an ESC statement issued Saturday, the session was held, in the presence of the Minister of Digital Economy and Entrepreneurship, Ahmed Hanandeh, and a number of experts from the public and private sectors.

Speaking at the meeting, the ESC's head, Musa Shteiwi, said the ICT is interconnected with all sectors, stressing the importance of building on previous achievements to keep pace with global developments and maintain the sector's competitiveness in employing manpower, especially young people.

The ICT sector faces challenges related to inflexibility in tendering laws, investment-related difficulties, and export of information technology services to foreign markets due to instability in the legislative environment, Shteiwi pointed out.

For his part, Hanandeh said the ministry's infrastructure is "capable of smoothly" conducting digital transformation processes and implementing "the best" infrastructure practices, indicating the importance of providing digital services to citizens, through highly efficient expanded procedures.

The ministry faces challenges, primarily the complexity of institutional procedures, laws and legislation related to digital transformation, which it seeks to facilitate and make faster, in addition to the difficulty of updating sectoral data, Hanandeh added.

As an effort to push its future plans, he noted the ministry has completed a "large" number of legislations in the digital transformation field.

The participants recommended the need to revisit the ICT regulatory procedures and highlighted the importance of training the sector's workers on digital transformation, adding that Jordan needs to own national indicators to follow up on the development and achievements in the digital transformation field, the ESC statement said.

Engagement of the Ministry of Digital Economy and Leadership in outlining the next cybersecurity strategy, in its capacity as tasked to run the technical aspect, the participants recommended.

The study, which was presented within State of the Country Report 2021, said educational curricula and outcomes should keep pace with requirements of local and global markets, stressing the need to move towards digitization in developing textbooks for academic, professional and technical tracks.

In addition, the study highlighted the need to provide the "appropriate frequencies to operate of 5G cellular networks "as soon as possible."