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Government is concerned with the low levels of digital literacy and skills in Zambia as they have left the country exposed to cybercrime.
Zambia’s digital literacy and skills levels are currently at around 35 percent.
This leaves the country globally unprotected to cybercrime, says Technology and Science Minister, Felix Mutati at the BCX digital transformation summit in Lusaka on Thursday.
Mutati said this celled for urgent need to accelerate digital literacy and skills in the country to actualise Zambia’s smart programme agenda.
Read more: Zambia testing cryptocurrency technology, policy framework in the works —Minister Mutati
“We need do more and accelerate the digital literacy and skills in the country which includes cost and availability of devices. The biggest treasure we have is not food but cyber, if you do not protect your data you are a walking dead because data is gold.
“Government took a bold decision to eliminate taxes of digital devices including infrastructure to promote access and improve digital literacy and skills,” he said.
Mutati said citizens would be able to protect themselves from cybercrime if digital literacy and skills were improved.
He said with digital infrastructure and cloud computing, coupled with partnerships, the country would be able to deal with digital threats.
Mutati said this was important because everyone had to continuously be ahead of the scammers or hackers.
“This is because there is a huge mass of them investing in technology to attack,” he said.
Meanwhile, Mutati said government had concluded the digital strategy to be able to understand how it can align digital transformation agenda.
He said if there was no clarity and sanity the agenda might be difficult to attain.
Mutati said for the digital transformation to be achieved, there was also need to resolve the issues around trust and confidence.
He said this could be generated if the issues around devices in terms of keeping up-to-date with the issues of cyber were tackled.
“To build trust and confidence government is doing a number of things such as looking at the legal framework so that it is appropriate to enable us to secure our devices from cyber,” Mutati said.
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