By: Sintayehu Tamirat
Dire Dawa University says it is digitizing the functioning of some region and federal institutions.
University's officials told EBC World that the university has been engaged in various community programs since its establishment. And over the past four years, in a bid to back Ethiopia's national strategy - Digital Ethiopia 2025 - Dire Dawa University gas been delivering techs to several institutions at Dire Dawa City Administration as well as federal ones, according to Ubah Adem (PhD), university's president.
Digital Ethiopia 2025 Srategy, which is government's comprehensive plan is aimed at transforming Ethiopia into an inclusive, prosperous society by leveraging digital technologies across various sectors, including agriculture, manufacturing, IT-enabled services, and tourism, to drive economic growth and improve public services. Key goals include expanding digital literacy, increasing digital payments, and fostering greater interaction between government, private sector, and citizens.
The University stressed that it contributed a lot in modernizing the functioning of some regional and federal institutions to meet the national goal.
"Over the past four years our university, particularly in relation to modernizing and digitizing institutional functioning, has accomplished a lot. In this regard, we have been contributing to Dire Dawa City Administration and other regions as well as federal institutions. We have full confidence in that our university has contributed greatly. We even secured patent rights for some of techs we developed," Ubah said.
Mentioning that the university itself took the initiative, it identified the basic challenges of institutions, set priorities and provided digital solutions particularly in the hospitality, education, and security sectors among others, according to Eshetu Mekonen (PhD), Director of University Industry Linkage and Technology Transfer.
"Why we're working on this five technologies is because the institutions told us they experienced difficulties in managing firearms, guests coming to Dire Dawa and also, traffic control during night time as well as traffic accident and other issues. Dire Guest is one of the best technology we contributed to our city administration, " Eshetu said.
Eshetu added thatthe university's intervention has brought great impacts on the institutions' efficiency and in changing the conventional way of doing business.
While the university has been undertaking the various services to the communities near the university, particularly in Dire Dawa city and Somali region and modernizing and digitizing the aforementioned institutions, it has encountered some challenges, budget constraint being the major one, the officials said.
University's Community Service Director, Wondifraw Dejene (PhD), explained "The university's budget remained constant for the last four years in stark contrast to inflation and growing demands of technology, staff number, community outreach, university growth, and more."
Eshetu indicated that the Dual Approach Model the university has employed has eased the budget issue. Recommending the model for other higher learning institutions as facing the same challenge, Eshetu said "it brings a win-win approach for the university and its clients. With this model, universities can receive quite a fair amount of fee" for some of the services they deliver to communities and institutions.
Both, the university's President and its community service Director said they are collaboratively working with federal government, other universities, global institutions to address the budget challenge.
