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Ghana's Technological Transformation




When it comes to information technology in Africa, this continent has an amazing ability to leapfrog.
Forget old-school landlines and desktop computers. Many in sub-Saharan Africa have skipped directly to mobile devices. And while Africa, like other emerging markets, has been slow to embrace cloud computing, it is starting to take off here, with tech experts touting the cloud’s big and perhaps unseen potential.
As per Len Weincier, founder of CloudAfrica, one of the biggest hurdles in widespread usage of cloud computing is a lack of knowledge about its benefits. But we must understand that Cloud computing is in fact most ideal for Africa, where there is little traditional internet infrastructure, unreliable electricity grids in many areas — making on-site storage impractical — and an ongoing boom in business and development.
Taking back our memories to 2002, Ghana was having only 240,000 landlines and 300,000 cell phone users with a 20 million population. An author then wrote in MIT technology review that Ghana’s telecom mess limits the utility of the Internet, raises the costs of information services-and suggests that the country was mired in the Stone Age, technologically. The same author, who was then the foreign correspondent for Wall Street Journal wrote that “He has seen information technologies changing the landscape in unexpected ways. The people I’ve met are more adept at using these technologies, and are hungrier for them, than most experts believe. “He visited a third-floor office in a high-rise known as the Pyramid in Accra, where hundreds of men and women type at computer keyboards, reading American health insurance claims on their computer screens, popularly known as data entry. But the requirement for technological integration in Ghana was not only for Data entry jobs. At that time Prof. Quaynor stressed on the need for multinational technology corporations to do more for African countries, including creating high-tech product development jobs for local workers. (Full review available on https://www.technologyreview.com/s/401607/ghanas-digital-dilemma/).

It’s important to understand this history to showcase the achievement of ICT development in Ghana after that. Today global technological giants are having their presence in Ghana and competing with each other to get a share of the digital projects launched by Government of Ghana.
Some of the initiatives taken and supported by NITA (National Information Technology Agency), a premier Government agency for formulating and implementing ICT policy in Ghana,  in recent times.
  • eGovernance
  • eHealth
  • ICT Skills Development
  • Taarifa among others.
It is to be known that according to the UN’s e-Government survey in 2012, Ghana ranked 28th in the world in the survey’s “e-participation” index, which measures the quality of information and services provided by the government to citizens though e-government programmes.
To keep pace with the recent technological advancement, NITA commissioned one of the largest Data centres in Africa with an investment of USD 300 Million. The state-of-art three Centre infrastructures was built by Government to facilitate efficient delivery of government services and use by private sector with the key objective of speeding up the uptake of ICT, and promoting local content in highly secured, available and resilient environment.
This Data centre is a live example of usage of Cloud Computing in governance in Ghana.
I still feel that a lot needs to be done for making us self-reliance in technology and bridging the digital-divide which exists within the continent and within Ghana’s region too.


Image Source : http://techtalkafrica.com
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Location: Accra, Ghana

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