FG Launches Multi-lingual Contact Centres

Dele Ogbodo in Abuja

The Minister of Communications, Mr. Adebayo Shittu, at the week end launched the federal government multi lingual Call Centres (GCC).

The platform, he said, is a technological enabled channel for citizens to access Ministries Departments and Agencies (MDAs) services from any location within and outside the country.

At the launch of the project in Abuja, Shitttu said the facility would be driven by Public Private Partnership (PPP), with Galaxy Backbone and Interra-Networks providing telephony, call routing, call recording through the use of cutting edge technology.

The minister said: “The core network and backend equipment is hosted within the government data centre which can be easily linked by all MDAs on the fibre network being deployed by Galaxy Backbone.”

According to him, agents are outsourced and located within the centre of the private sector collaborators located in Abuja, Lagos and Enugu, all connected to the central infrastructure.

There will be second level mini help desk facilities within the MDAs to respond to specific requests from citizens, the minister averred.

He said the platform presents citizens and stakeholders with the avenue to obtain information on or provide feedback to government. It also provides access to services via telephony (multi-lingual agents) in Hausa, Igbo, Yoruba, English and pidgin.

Shittu assured Nigerians that other local and foreign languages can also be incorporated subsequently with facilities such as email, chat and social media-Twitter and Facebook.

The minister acknowledged that the project would drive government agenda and implement policies to facilitate growth of the ICT sector while propelling Nigeria to becoming acknowledge-based country.

He said: “This programme was designed with the purpose to ensuring efficient use of government resources, designed to be robust, resilient and scalable such that various MDAs can benefit from them, without having to waste government funds replicating similar infrastructure,” he stated.

The adoption and proper implementation of the programmers, Shittu averred, would result in the creation of a level playing field to all citizens and stakeholders to engage government on their services and information.
The minister said: “The centralised nature of the deployment makes it available to serve various MDAs as a reliable medium for making their services and information available to interested stakeholders as well as receiving feedback without extra investment in Call Centre infrastructure.”