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The Lagos State Government has signed an agreement with Microsoft on e-Governance in Redmond, Washington in the United States. The agreement, signed by The Lagos State Governor, Babatunde Fahsola, is expected to foster e-Governance initiatives to better serve the people on the state. Members of his cabinet that travelled with him include Commissioner for Science and Technology, Mr. Biyi Mabadeje, the Permanent Secretary for Science and Technology, Mrs. Nike Animashaun and Director-General, Financial Management Bureau, Mr. Ahmed Mustapha. The Governor said, “The initiative is centered on four cardinal programmes, which includes; implementation of a citizen relationship management platform leveraging on the existing call center infrastructure, provision of IT infrastructure to support Lagos State health insurance initiative, Information and Technology skill development and affordable mobile devices availability, being a premier partner under the Microsoft4 Africa initiatives, which is centered on entrepreneur support.” “As part of the agreement, the state has secured the commitment of Microsoft to help train 100 Microsoft certified applications support personnel who will not only assist Lagos State government but other states in Nigeria to implement Microsoft application and the private sector for both Nigeria and the rest of Africa.” “The e-governance will focus on a platform of delivering services to the citizens of Lagos State using smart phones and mobile devices while enabling him to be able to monitor the performance of each Ministry, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) in the discharge of services and to monitor all ongoing projects especially those around the medium term budgetary objectives of PATH (Power, Agriculture, Transportation and Housing).” “It will also be used to answer queries from citizens regarding the state services, initiate transactions and eventually to completely offer government services via on-line; constitutes another mode of communication without traveling to the Secretariat. The expected go live date of this initiative is April, 2014”. “The health solutions will focus on delivering cloud based solutions that will assist pregnant mothers and patients at the 57 primary health care facilities, which are being upgraded under the health care initiative of the state.” “The Cloud Serve will also include a Private Cloud for Lagos State based on Microsoft Technology. This cloud technology will support Lagos State disaster recovery strategy, enhance the existing e-Health platform, integrate existing silos of databases that houses important information such as Health, Education and Budgetary data.” Responding, Microsoft’s General Manager, Worldwide, Jeff Frazier, who signed on behalf of Microsoft International, said, “The Company is ready to help finance the implementation of a health IT support infrastructure for the state existing community health insurance program which can then be leveraged to support the expected rollout of the state social health insurance programme.”