Sebastian Burduja, the new Minister of Education and full Minister of Innovation and Digitization, speaks to Romanians from all over the country about one of the major problems facing Romania, the weight with which public services and state institutions are digitized in order to interact more effectively with citizens.
Sebastian Burduja talks below about digitization in the rural environment, where this process is taking place with difficulty and not so quickly, even if we are talking about large areas of the country in the rural environment that would benefit greatly from digitization, and for which projects must be supported In this regard.
"If it were physically possible, I would like to personally reach every Romanian in the country and ask him: how can we digitize Romania together? From this thought came the Digitization Caravan, which we announced publicly that we are starting on October 1. We kept our word. At the end of a very busy week, I went on the road yesterday afternoon to Oinacu commune, Giurgiu county. The caravan included: 4 colleagues from the Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, including Eduard Mititelu, undersecretary of state, 3 colleagues from ADR and 3 from the Romanian Post, including Valentin Ștefan, the Director General.
At Oinacu, the mayor, Fabian Țîrcă, the vice-president of the County Council, Elisabeta Mihalcea, the PNL deputy Alexandru Andrei and other colleagues from Romanian Post Giurgiu, the town hall and the County Council were waiting for us. It was a joy to find a well-run commune, a young mayor with many projects, including in the digital area, and total openness to everything we can add.
And the post office in Oinacu is a modern one, equipped with a computer and with employees who understand that their role in the community goes beyond the job description. We stayed for more than two hours and talked about ongoing and future projects in the area of digital transformation. The migration to giseul.ro is quite advanced, so the technical discussions with colleagues from ADR were extremely useful. In addition, we showed our full willingness to remain at your disposal in the future, just a phone call away.
Digital transformation is not done from an office, be it a minister's, and it is not done only in the urban environment. All Romanians deserve to benefit from this revolution. We returned to Bucharest with the conviction that we did the right thing. It's a small step, we have an entire country to digitize, but each experience helps us better understand what challenges we have, what needs there are and how we can help.
We're also back with a whole list of ideas to make this project as useful and complete as possible. And I have a feeling that it will be like that after every outing in the field. I would like to thank all my colleagues who gave up their free time on Friday evening to start this important endeavor together. It's a sign that we're on the right track. I also thank my friends from Giurgiu for the warm welcome. We are continuing and will keep you updated.”
