NITA-U develops e-licensing system for National Forestry Authority

This afternoon, the National Information Technology Authority Uganda (NITA-U) handed over an

e-licensing system to the National Forestry Authority (NFA).

The system which was designed by NITA-U provides an efficient, automated platform for registration, licensing, transfers, harvesting and enables NFA to disseminate information to tree farmers.

It enables online application for tree planting and allows farmers to access information about their application status, make online payments and access payment information among other features.

Speaking at the handover event, NITA-U executive director, Dr. Hatwib Mugasa said they were pleased when NFA approached them to provide technical support in digitising the institution.

"I would like to thank the Management and Staff of NFA for trusting us as your partners in this digitisation effort. You have set an example that all government entities must emulate. Let me take this opportunity to encourage all government institutions that have not yet fully embraced digitisation to join the digital revolution. As NITA-U, we are ready to journey with you,” he added.

The NFA executive director, Tom Okello Obong thanked NITA-U for a job well done.

"When we started this project, our goal was to facilitate tree farmers in accessing services from NFA online and provide real time information about farmers for better management.

I am glad to announce that as we speak, we are migrating existing farmers into the system and updating existing farmers. Farmers will now be able to apply from anywhere and at any time," Obong said.

The e-licensing system on top of facilitating online applications and access to information, will be able to manage back end approval processes, provide a dashboard for management and provide reports and enable payments.

The next phase of implementation will see the system extend licensing to other areas such as research, eco-tourism and occupation, telecommunication masts, nursery management and mining.

The system comes at time when government of Uganda through NITA-U has embarked on the process of integrating all government systems so that data can seamlessly in a rational, secure, efficient and sustainable manner in order to improve service delivery to citizens through e-services.

NITA-U has to date developed 24 applications for government.

The e-licensing system is an addition to the over 160 applications from over 90 government Entities that are currently hosted in the national cloud data centres.