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Experts from the University at Albany’s Center for Technology in Government (CTG) spent a week in Cairo, Egypt, working with Egypt’s National Management Institute (NMI) as part of Microsoft’s 4Afrika School of Government (SOG). CTG provided the NMI team and other Egyptian government officials with the knowledge and tools necessary to begin to directly provide executive development courses from CTG’s Leadership Academy.

Microsoft’s 4Afrika Initiative, overseen by Lutz Ziob, Dean of Microsoft’s 4Afrika SOG program, was launched in February 2013 to help accelerate Africa’s economic development and to improve its global competitiveness through innovation, affordable access to technology, and skills. One component of the 4Afrika program is the SOG program, which aims to build the innovation capacity of government leaders throughout the countries of Africa. CTG is the lead global content provider for the 4Afrika SOG.

“The 4Afrika SOG program provides a forum for government leaders in Africa to be exposed to the latest ideas in public sector technology innovation and innovation management. Through the SOG, the CTG Leadership Academy program exposes government leaders to a set of concepts, tools, and techniques critical to the unique role they, as government leaders, play in ensuring that their governments have the policy, management and technology capability necessary to fully realize the potential of innovations such as mobile technologies, cloud computing, sensors and big data,” said Dr. Theresa Pardo, Director of CTG. Dr. Pardo and Donna Canestraro, Leadership Institute Director at CTG, facilitated this session in Cairo working together with Eng. Sameh Dedair, CEO of NMI and Eng. Walid Al.Engbawy, Human Capacity Development General Manager at NMI.

The primary function of the April program was a ‘Train the Trainer’ workshop. The workshop was designed to transfer course content as well as the instructional resources for delivering a CTG Leadership Academy course to the NMI team. A unique aspect of the 4Afrika SOG program is a focus on knowledge transfer both in the form of direct executive development and through Train the Trainer programs. This dual focus makes it possible for Ministry Leaders and NMI staff to both gain the knowledge and skills from each course and transfer that knowledge to colleagues across the Egyptian government. “The Train the Trainer component of this program leverages investments in capability being made by all parties – Microsoft, CTG and of course, the governments themselves, and expands the impact by building local capability to directly deliver CTG’s technology innovation and management leadership programs on an ongoing basis,” said Ms. Canestraro.

CTG and Microsoft delivered the inaugural 4Afrika program in Nairobi, Kenya in January 2014, their second program in Cairo in January 2015, followed by this most recent program in April 2015. 

CTG is an award-winning applied research center of the University at Albany whose mission is to foster public sector innovation, enhance capability, generate public value, and support good governance. The CTG Leadership Institute, based on CTG’s award winning approach to information and communications technology innovation, includes the Leadership Academy, including the 4Afrika program, the Virtual Academy, the Institute by Design, and the Resource Center. For more information about CTG, visit ctg.albany.edu.