Qualification offer in EGOV competencies in PALOP-TL João Marco C. Silva HASLab, INESC TEC University of Minho Portugal joaomarco@di.uminho.pt Luis Felipe M. Ramos University of Minho Portugal pg32447@alunos.uminho.pt Victor Fonte United Nations University (UNU- EGOV) & University of Minho Portugal vff@di.uminho.pt ABSTRACT 1 Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) have been successfully used in order to promote and pursue the goals of UN's 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Meeting these goals, however, require significant efforts on public policy development, adequate planning and implementation, as well as qualified human resources working at every level of government, public administration and institutions. This paper presents a first quantitative analysis originated from Electronic Government- related training sessions that took place on all five Portuguese Speaking African Countries, and in Timor-Leste along 2017. The results focus on (i) the availability of higher education institutions offering courses related to EGOV on each of those countries; (ii) the qualification of the professionals attending those sessions; and (iii) how availability of local higher education courses translates into qualifications of local professionals serving at public administration level. This paper also discusses some perceptions gathered from the field, both from participants and lecturer teams, framing additional challenges that EGOV-related courses must take into account in those particular settings. It concludes by pointing out some of the works already taking place, which provides a deeper understanding of the workforce competencies in EGOV for each of those countries. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → E-government KEYWORDS EGOV, education offering, PALOP-TL ACM Reference format: J. Silva, L. Ramos, V. Fonte. 2018. Qualification offer in EGOV competencies in PALOP-TL. In Proceedings of the 11 th International Conference on Theory and Practice of Electronic Governance, Galway, Ireland, April 2018 (ICEGOV’18), 4 pages. DOI: 10.1145/3209415.3209514 1 Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from Permissions@acm.org. 1 INTRODUCTION During a United Nations Summit held in September 2015, all member states have agreed with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [6], which introduces 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) to be achieved in the upcoming years in order to create conditions for sustainable, inclusive and sustained economic growth, shared prosperity and decent work for all people. A careful analysis of these goals reveals that some of them represent challenges for national governments, requiring enhancements in quality, efficiency and comprehensiveness of services provided to their citizens. An approach being widely adopted by many countries worldwide toward these goals consists in resorting to Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) for deep integration, interoperability and effective information sharing, under a broad concept of electronic government (EGOV). In fact, this has been a society demand, which leverage the power of technology for socio-economic development and other purposes [3]. Into the public administration domain, it might represent an increased efficiency in service delivery and improved synergies across government agencies. Moreover, research have demonstrated the developmental potential associated to ICTs on developing countries as a rationale for implementing different electronic government solutions [2]. Considering specifically the SDG scope, achieving some goals might be triggered by a well-designed EGOV approach, namely: (Goal 8) promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all; (Goal 9) build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation; (Goal 10) reduce inequality within and among countries; and (Goal 11) make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable. Although the implementation of EGOV solutions can provide many benefits, including improved public services, administration efficiency, reduced corruption and enhanced engagement with citizens [1], according to the United Nations, progress in developing electronic government has been unequal in different regions. This is more noticeable in African countries, in which 30% of the continent countries are at the bottom 10% of the world ranking [5]. Difficulties in enhancing socio-economic development through ICT are commonly related to the digital divide caused by ICEGOV '18, April 4–6, 2018, Galway, Ireland © 2018 Copyright is held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-5421-9/18/04…$15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3209415.3209514 308