India and Egypt today reviewed the progress of work of a regional university and super speciality hospital under the Pan African e-network project and explored opportunities for future cooperation.
Egyptian Minister of Communications and Information Technology Atef Helmy and Indian ambassador in Cairo Navdeep Suri conducted a visit today to the Faculties of Commerce and Medicine, Alexandria University see the progress made so far.
The project is part of the framework of the grant presented by the Indian Government to the African Union to use Information and Communication Technology in the provision of medical services and education for African countries for a period of 5 years.
The project will enable the creation of a site for distance education and distance medical services for all African countries.
Egypt had signed the agreement in 2007 along with 46 other countries.
There are 12 super speciality Indian Hospitals involved in the project providing consultations and free medical lectures in addition to 7 leading Indian universities offering degrees.
The first phase has witnessed a number of achievements that assumes relevance in the context of project targets.
The first step was to operationalise the site for distance education, where 25 students have so far been granted an MBA degree from the largest open University in the world, IGNOU, 48 students a Master's degree in IT from the University of Madras, 28 students a Diploma in Business Administration and 15 students a Diploma in IT from Amity University.
The site for telemedicine has also become operational, where medical lectures have been broadcast since November 2009.
This has achieved the highest percentage for attendees in the African countries in 2010. 873 lectures have been held and 19,130 Egyptian attendees have been participating according to the statistics until July 2013.
Moreover the University of Alexandria has been selected to be the regional University for Northern Africa and will provide scholarships to other participating African countries as well.
