Richard MARIKI, Chairman of the Board of Directors and Rehema MAKUBURI, Head of Postal Affairs at the Tanzania Communica-tions Regulatory Authority, Justine BEYARAAZA, Africa regional expert and Suleman MSOFE, Head of the Operations and Techno-logy Directorate at the International Bureau.
Read MoreStiff international competition is forcing Africa’s postal service providers to reinvent themselves to remain relevant communication market players.
Speaking at a nine-day cost accounting seminar that started on Tuesday at the Grand Imperial Hotel in Kampala featuring several countries, the Minister of State for Information and Communication Technology, Mr John Alintuma Nsambu, called on the African postal industry to be dynamic to accommodate challenges of market liberalisation, globalisation and technological advancement.
He said the government supports the cost accounting techniques to promote efficiency within the industry.
The seminar is part of a training programme coming amid years of reform of Posta Uganda to turn it into a modern customer-orientated company.
Acting Managing Director Posta Uganda Emmanuel Mulooki said cost accounting seminar will help Posta Uganda to monitor and evaluate its expenditures.
Participants in the seminar have come from Uganda, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Botswana. Others have come from Ghana, Nigeria, Swaziland, Zambia and Ethiopia.
Read MoreAfrican postal administrations have been urged to embrace new strategies to make post offices autonomous and profitable.
Tanzania’s minister of Labour, Employment and Youth, John Chiligati, told delegates attending the ILO/UPU tripartite seminar on Social Dialogue in the Postal Sector from 27-29 November in Bagamoyo, Tanzania that postal administrations should adopt new technological changes to sustain jobs.
“Technological changes can sustain and offer new job opportunities if the workers are trained in information technology; otherwise technological advancements will become a serious threat to workers,” he said.
“The challenge now is to train traditional postal workers in modern electronic postal services. The survival of the postal industry in our region will depend on how the human resource is trained, motivated and participating in social dialogue,”
The minister said that social dialogue was an important feature of modern labour relations and called for the involvement of workers in structural and technological changes being implemented in the postal sector in the region.
And Universal Postal Union (UPU) representative Daniel le Goff urged African countries not live in a world of exclusion, but to seize the new business opportunities unfolding in the postal sector such as financial services, post bus and e-commerce.
He said the UPU, in conjunction with postal administrations in Africa, was implementation the Postal Development Plan for Africa (PDPA), an ongoing postal reform process that required stakeholder involvement.
Alternative means of communication are not a serious threat to postal mail services, participants at a one-day workshop on ‘quality of service continuous testing’, held in Dar es Salaam, concurred yesterday.
They said that, the other options of communication, such as mobile phones and e-mail services, which are cheaper and faster, have only affected personal mails while business mails have increased.
Tanzania Posts Corporation (TPC) Manager- Mails Business, Mr Protas Mwageni said that the increase of business mails was attributed to growth of businesses in general and big numbers of people using postal services.
In his opening remarks, the acting Postmaster General of TPC, Ms Bertha Mallogo, said that the need for quality grows under fair competition and that quality of services constitutes a driving force in postal services.
Mr Mwageni added that the quality of postal services in Tanzania were of high quality internationally, delivering mails four to five days a week while domestic mails are delivered within 48 hours due to overnight mails services offered by TPC.
“Any letter posted by 6pm will be delivered on the same day due to the service, mostly reaching destination the next day,” prided Mr Mwageni.
The workshop was organised by Universal Postal Union (UPU) aiming at training participants from Zambia, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Sudan, Seychelles, Ethiopia and the hosts Tanzania, on the use of continuous testing with the goal of improving postal services quality.
Read MoreTanzania Post Annual Report 2005
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