National Post Office celebrates the Word Post Day with focus on emerging technology
By Elias Hakizimana.
Rwanda National Post Office is celebrating the World Post Day on October 9, 2019, applauding the role played by emerging technology in message transfer of different kinds apart from written documents that are sent electronically.
The purpose of World Post Day is to bring awareness to the Post’s role in the everyday lives of people and businesses as well as its contribution to the global social and economic development of countries.
The theme for this year 2019 is “Celebrating 145 years of delivering development and 50 years of the Postal Union Existence”
During a press conference along with the celebration of 50 Years of membership in Universal Postal Union (UPI), the Director-General of National Postal Office, Célestin Kayitare said that the Post as commerce exchange channel plays a pivotal role in helping the country reach its development.
He said that technology has become an important tool to advance this development through instant communication.
“e-commerce is a good example of how technology has fostered development, the Post still has a role to play and we will continue to foster our activities that include helping people to practice electronic commerce,” Kayitare said.
On November 15th, 2019, Rwanda will officially launch e-commerce platform to trade globally and sell physical objects. Kayitare said that the Post has a privilege place in easing goods and money transfer using advanced Technology.
25 years after the genocide perpetrated against the Tutsi in Rwanda, everything became damaged, slowing down even the Post’s activities as they lost people and properties. With the progress and rebuilding the country, the Post also made a tremendous journey and achieved a lot.
It did not lose anything since 2007 and it has been using its own money without government support according to Kayitare. The Post needs at least Rwf 80 million per month to advance its activities.
The only deficit it has met in 2011 was due to relocating to new places.
Reducing paper documents
However, though papers reduced in message transferring, Kayitare said that there is still a way to value what is written to avoid quarrels an foster authenticity.
The paper based-activities were reduced at 40 percent with the emerged technologies that use postal code and a big number of paper users were youth who used to share love messages. Today with Mobile phones and smart phones, these youths are no longer using papers.
World Post Day is being celebrated in over 192 countries including Rwanda. 145 years ago, the sector has been serving its essential needs of humanity to facilitate communication through a unique single postal service.
Its progress goes with fostering sustainable development goals (SDGs) through using ICT for development.
The sector made an increased turnover of 70 percent between 2014-2018 with the contribution of Express Mail Services (EMS) that increased from Rwf 280 Million to Rwf 420 Million, with an increase of 67% times.
“The Post will continue fostering development of the nation and digital economy. We are now positioned to transfer and order luggage apart from written messages. That is a way to facilitate commercial exchange that people need and it is an intermediary role we play in commerce exchange in all countries,” Kayitare noted.
He added that the Post will continue to deliver development and play its role in fast-tracking the prosperity of Made in Rwanda products.
1.5 billion people worldwide use services provided by Post Offices including financial services. This makes the Posts the second largest contributor to financial inclusion in the world according to Kayitare.
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