EU funds for the government's free tablet for children scheme and two other IT projects have been secured, EU funds Parliamentary Secretary Ian Borg said today.

Dr Borg told reporters this morning that nearly €12 million had been secured from the European Social Fund to finance the government’s electoral pledge of providing school-aged children with their own tablet.

Some 12,000 students will benefit from this scheme.

Dr Borg said the next two projects were related to planning and e-governance. One project, which will cost some €7 million, will see the development of a platform which, according to the Planning Authority, is aimed at "data consumption and data maintenance for policy making".

Dr Borg said around €5 million of the cost of this project had come from the European Regional Development Fund.

By far the most costly project will be around €57 million, with €28.5 million coming from the EU. Dr Borg said the ‘connected government project’, entitled CONvERGE, would see the development of a number of online applications and electronic services for the benefit of citizens and local businesses.

“The government will be creating a national repository for several registries, and will establish a new standard of data back-up which will be uniform. This will directly contribute to the achievement of Malta’s digital targets and the implementation of ‘one-government’ which hopes to ease the administrative burden on citizens,” he said.