e-commerce, would facilitate the adoption of a Certification Authority related to the issuance of qualified certificates vis-à-vis advanced electronic signatures required for access to e-Government services, since each certificate issued to a citizen for the purposes of effecting secure transactions with the e-government service must be associated with a specific e-address. A Common National Database would be required and each person could be automatically allocated an e-address. The e-addresses would be initially marked inactive, and would only become fully active upon completion of a free voluntary registration procedure. The registration procedure should include an opt-in option to additionally list all registered users in a publicly available web-based e-mail directory. The national e-mail system should be available either free of charge or at an low basic cost. The access path should be Internet based, preferably through the use of a web interface, ( although it is envisaged that other alternatives based on a simple dial-up or other mechanisms could be available). It is recommended that the e-address allocated to each person would be a permanent one. Users should be able to easily configure their address to redirect e-mail to any other email address of their choosing. This would allow every person to be contactable at a single address, even if the user were to opt for an alternative commercial Service Provider in the future. The creation of a Grenada National Internet Exchange The lack of a local Grenadian Internet backbone will result in routes to Grenadian sites having to pass over international connections. Expensive, over-subscribed and over-utilised bandwidth will result in poor performance of Grenadian Sites. Good performance is key to the rapid 46 A STRATEGY AND ACTION PLAN FOR GRENADA Anurag Sinha