– HPS
HEAD of the Presidential Secretariat and Cabinet Secretary Dr. Roger Luncheon said yesterday that Cabinet welcomed the signing of the contract between the Government of Guyana and Chinese electronics giant Haier for the supply of 27,000 laptops, and recognized it as further progress in the implementation of the National ICT strategy.
He was speaking at his weekly post-Cabinet press briefing held at the Office of the President.
The HPS said one of the building blocks for the ICT strategy was connectivity, and these will be based on affordable broadband and an open and competitive telecommunications sector. He said this would open access to the 90,000 laptop distribution and will also enable the schools computer programme where all of the secondary schools would be provided with computer labs.
The Government of Guyana, through the Office of the President and Chinese electronics giant Haier, on September 15, 2011, signed an agreement for the procurement of 27,000 laptops under the One Laptop Per Family Initiative. President Bharrat Jagdeo and Chinese Ambassador to Guyana, Yu Wenzhe, were on hand at the Office of the President to witness the historic signing. This would see the procurement of the first batch of laptops in October for distribution to the first set of recipients before the end of that month.

Signing on behalf of the government was Permanent Secretary in the Office of the President, Dr. Nanda Kishore Gopaul, and on behalf of Haier, General Manager – Overseas Project Division, Sun Yongle.

The total cost of the contract is US$7.56M. The cost per unit, inclusive of warranty and after sales service, is about US$280.
Dr. Luncheon explained that the verification exercise to identify the most vulnerable persons is ongoing.
“I am advised that considerably well-organized manual exercises are being conducted, with verification officers posted throughout the length and breadth of Guyana to verify the information received in the thousands of submissions that are in the possession of OLPF. These I am told will be personal verifications akin to the verification during registration, where each household is visited to ensure assertions in the submitted applications are indeed accurate,” Dr. Luncheon said.
He said that the conclusion of the verification exercise is not necessarily a requirement for the commencement of the distribution of laptops.
“Once verification has been done and we are clear in our mind as to whom the first wave of distribution is to be made, there should be no reason for them to wait until the entire verification is done,” the HPS said.
Further, the HPS said that some corrections are being applied regarding the laying of the Brazilian fibre-optic cable, which will enable low cost high bandwidth needed for the ICT strategy. He said that the cable has been laid out in ten kilometer-segments, which now have to be joined or spliced.
“After each reel, you have to splice it and hook it up to the subsequent reel. So from Lethem, across the bridge, where the first connection with the Brazilian cable took place, we have a series of junction boxes where the splicing has to take place to make the cable one continuous cable from Lethem to Castellani House,” he said.