A Ten Point Program for e-Brasil Candidates

ICTs are powerful tools for reducing socioeconomic inequality and improving competitiveness. It is hoped that candidates for positions in the federal, state and municipal governments will commit themselves to a government porogram that takes will transform this belief into a reality. The profile of these candidates should be that of a visionary leader, a mobilizer who creates consensus, sells ideas and obtains a strong mandate that will allow him or her to realize synergies between the work of all ministries or secretariats and reap economies of scale to achieve previously announced goals.

What we call an e-Brasil candidate – whether for President of the Republic, State Governor or Mayor – knows that with his or her leadership it will be possible to implement public policies, programs and projects that will not only achieve the goals, but win recognition from the population and votes in the future. What are the elements that should be in the e-Brasil candidate's program? They are different for candidates for President, Governors, and Mayors. For Governors and Mayors these characteristics will vary with the characteristics of the state or município. But they will all have ten common elements.

1. Digital inclusion and e-development. Without strong public digital inclusion policies it is impossible to achieve the other elements of the e-Brasil Program.  What is crucial is to accelerate the access of all the population to broadband Internet, using for the less-favored population alternative models of sustainability that exempt them from paying access fees, with remuneration of the supplier through advertising, public budgets and/or resources from the Fund for Universalization of Telecommunications Services (Fust). Priority should go to schools, telecenters and other collective access points. It is also very important to encourage competition between providers and broadband technologies (fiber optic cable, satellite, coaxial cable, Wi-Fi, Wi-MAX, PLC), hardware and software (including open code software) to lower costs. A national program of digital cities will bring the benefits of e-development to the cizens in municípios today unserved.

2. e-Education and training, lifelong.  Education and training are the highest sectoral priority: they are means for democratizing access to knowledge to improve opportunities for employment, income distribution, and also Brazil's competitiveness in an ever more knowledge-based world economy. Governments should accelerate the computerization of public schools, give them broadband Internet connections, using all the available alternatives, including government networks, increase the number of computers per school and per student, and encourage the creation of world-class electronic content for teaching. The candidate for President will commit himself to supporting these efforts in the states and municípios with the resources of the federal government. All the candidates can promote partnerships with the S System (Senai, Senac, Sebrae, etc.), private corporate universities, and public and private univerisites for permanent education of the labor force. Brasil has to give strategic priority to the question of education to position itself as a successful competitor in the global economy.

3. e-Public safety. Security is a fundamental right and a necessity to achieve the other objectives. Among the priority actions are the interlinking of the databases of all the public safety agencies: the prison system, the Federal Police, State Civil and Military Polices,the information system of the Ministry of Justice, and civil guards at the municipal level.  In addition it is recommended that the operations centers of the civil and military police and the fire departments of the states be integrated in a single instalation in the capital and in large cities in the interior, with facilities to share and coordinate databases and radio communication systems.

4. e-Health. Public health is in large part education and can be improved using ICTs. It is also possible to improve the management of both the preventive and curative health systems. Here a priority is the development of a health portal with sub-portals for doctors, nurses, pharmicists, and the general population to facilitate education in the areas of health and diagnosis. A health network with broadband connections should be created, interlinking all the health units (federal, state and municipal), creating an environment conducive to training, medical consultations, making appointments on line, obtaining second opinions, practicing telemedice, etc. It is also fundamental to reserve part of the available development resources (Sectoral Funds, Innovation Law, Informatics Law, Fust, Funtel, etc.) for using ICTs for health, with the objective of  reducing the bottlenect generated by the lack of specialized health personnel.

5. e-Public services and management. It is possible to greatly improve the delivery of public services to citizens as well as the managment of governments. A prioirity is to develop electronic government, optimizing and interlinking government networks at the federal, state and municipal levels, promoting the integration and digitalization of all municípios and providing incentives for the participation of municipal governmens in public-private sector partnerships (PPPs). Such partnerships can be used for the construction and operation of integrated service centers (one-stop shops) for the population, like the Poupatempo program in São Paulo, the SAC in Bahia, the Vapt  Vupt in Goiás, the Super Fácil in Amapá and the Tudo Fácil in Rio Grande do Sul. It should be a goal to expand the supply, through electronic means, of all public services delivered by the federal, state, and municipal governments, with the revision and simplification of processes, offering, at least, complete and up-to-date information and the electronic making or acquiring of  apointments or access to services. Other prioriities are to promote the integrated management of informaiton in the use of public services, obeying the principle of never asking citizens for informjation that the state already has.

6. Government e-procurement of goods and services.  A priority is to implement or prefect Internet portals for procurement and computerized systems of support for the management of bidding and contracts, spreading to all the states the advances already achieved in some: electronic bidding and publishing bidding documents and on the Internet, simplification of the suppliers registry, electronic catalogs of materials and services,  registry of prices paid and broad publication of contracts on the Internet. A great achievement of these measures has been the drastic reduction in opportunities for corruption and price cuts on the order of 20 percent for goods and services purchased using e-procurement.    To increase social control of governments, the transparency of public administration should be increased by putting budgets, revenues, expenditures and government accounts on the Internet, in addition to information on the execution of works, projects and services.

7. e-Justice. There seems to be relative consensus on the technical measures that should be adopted, notably those that promote the simplification of procedures for judges and court personnel which result in speedng up the handling of cases. In this context the use of ICTs is fundamental, because they can reduce the delays and increase transparency in the handling of cases. It is a prioity to approve a legal framework for  electronic judicial processes, greatly reducing the margin for questioning the validity of using electronic documents to support judicial procedures.  

8. e-Commerce. It is possible to reduce transaction costs in the economy, providing gains for consumers and reducing so-called "Brazil Cost" which so reduces the competitiveness of the country. It is necessary to provide incentives for the use of digital certificates in commerce and in relations with the governments, mobilizing the notary publics so thay can participate supplying such certificates and computerizing ports and airports, thereby greatly reducing costs of and obstacles to international transactions.

9. Encouraging development of the ICT sector. The software and services subsector in Brazil can grow rapidly with some short- and long-term measures. First, policies for public purchases favoring software provided by Brazilian small and medium size companies. Second, wide-ranging human resource programs for the education, training and re-training of professionals in partnership with the private sector. Third, a revision of the array of taxes to make taxation compatible with the special characteristics of software and informatics service providers. This adaptation would seek to equalize the conditions for competition of Brazilian firms with those of their principal foreign competitors. All this should be included in a general law for the sector, on which Congress has been working for some years.  

10. Strategy, coordination, and leadership. Electronic government policy should enter the priority agenda of the federal, state and municipal governments and be aligned with other e-development policies. Leadership is fundamental, and should begin at the highest level of the executive branch, the President of the Republic for the federal government, the governors for the states, and the mayors for the municípios. Under the chief executives's leadership it is necessary to strengthen a coordinating unit in his or her office, headed by a person who has his confidence and a combination of political and technoligical skills sufficient to develop and implement strategic programs which cut across the ministries or secretariats and agencies.  These are programs that demand coordinated action of diverse public sector agencies and partnerships between these and the private sector, univerisities, research institutes, and civil society organizations, and also  relations with the media. The public ICT firms and administrative units dealing with ICTs in the agencies and entities of public administration should act aligned with the e-government and e-development policies and restructured for updating their technologies and ways of doing business.