Egypt's Ministry of communication and Information Technology will carry out the initial stage of the program "Tablet for A Student" next month by distributing a number of tablets to the Ministry of Higher Education. Engineer Hany Mahmoud, Minister of Communications and Information Technology, said the ministry's plan to offer the first stage of "Tablet for A Student" initiative relies on distributing the tablets to the schools that have access to the internet; referring that the ministry will cooperate with the Ministry of Education to distribute the tablets to the students in the upcoming semester. A joint committee between the ministries of communications and education, led by Dr Hoda Baraka- assistant minister- has started to set a plan to select the schools as well the ways of distributing the tablets to them. The plan is expected to be set within days; the minister said, referring to the price of the tablet is EGP 900 afforded by the ministry. The ministry will implement the program of distributing the tablets, which are based on the cloud computing, to students of the preparatory stage. The student can commute the tablet when he/she reaches the secondary school. The two tablets' costs don't exceed $ 200. Mahmoud has referred to the Benha Electronics Company, which won the tender offered by the government to manufacture thousands of tablets to students. On his part, Yasser El Kady, CEO of the Information Technology Industry Development Agency (ITIDA), the tender's total cost is EGP 10 million ($ 1.64 million), afforded by the ministry of communication jointly with finance ministry.
