Today the Central Information Technology Office held a sensitization and validation workshop for their new Information and Communications Technology Policy. The document, which seeks to develop the relationship between the Belizean people and technology, has been in the works since 2013. The ICT policy was originally completed in 2015, so now stakeholder criticism and advice is being taken to update its content. We spoke to CITO's acting director, Francisco Gonzalez, about the new policy...

Francisco Gonzalez - Acting Director, CITO
"The policy seeks to establish a sustainable environment and ecosystem whereby the impoverished can have access to technology, any kind of technology. And it also tries to establish an environment where our education system can produce individuals who are suited for the current jobs that exist today, and that will be needed for tomorrow in technology. For example, I was just discussing with you off camera about the example about Hot Mama’s and Marie Sharp. Whenever something goes wrong with their bottling equipment they need to go out of the country to find a specialist for it. Why can’t that be done in Belize, why do we have to go outside of the country to find that expertise. We can do that here in Belize and that is what this document seeks to do, it seeks to guide us in a way to find our own way to do these things but first of all this is just a high level document. After this validation workshop would come the implementation plan and the strategy. From there we would have actual specific projects that would lead to the development of this kind of environment that we’re talking about."

The ICT policy also addresses cyber security, an area that affects every Belizean with an internet connection.