Africa leaders advised to champion digitalisation

The Minister of Communications and Digitalisation, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful has advised other leaders in the Africa continent to also champion the digitalisation agenda to enable their economic and future gains to be incredible.

She said digitisation has huge prospects in supporting rapid prototyping of ideas, seeding digital innovations, targeted business incubation and acceleration programmes in the digital industries, and also help to mitigate some of the challenges identified within the tech ecosystem.

Speaking at the High Level Seminar on Accelerating Digital Transformation: Realizing Dakar’s Call to Action in Western and Central Africa in Washington DC, Mrs Owusu-Ekuful said, Ghana’s digitalisation agenda has shaped a lot of sectors in the economy.

She urged other leaders on the Africa continent to emulate the same in ways to drive financial inclusion, closing information gaps, and changing the way of work despite challenges that may be encountered from the initial stage of its implementation.

Ghana, she indicated, has gained and seen tremendous progress in every sector of the economy since the aim to shift to the digitalisation side.

Digital technology

“Our digital transformation journey has been challenging yet very exciting. Challenging due to continuous demand for resources from all sectors to digitise and improve business processes but the excitement is from the modest gains achieved with relatively minimal investment.

“Since 2017, our government has taken deliberate steps to formalise our economy through digital technology. We have focused on foundational digital infrastructure to enhance connectivity, reskilling and upskilling our youth, and building interoperable platforms and a single national database on our national E ID which is linked to Ghana Revenue Authority and Tax identification Numbers (TIN) to enhance tax administration and compliance, E ID is also linked to Health Insurance, SIM registry, Pensions Authority, Companies Registry, DVLA, Passports and Digital address system,” she said.

She said Ghana was also focusing on strengthening the regulatory oversight on Electronic transactions by building the capacity of the National Information Technology Agency and other regulators in the sector including our Cybersecurity Authority.

“We have just launched the AfCFTA hub as a one stop shop for all e commerce, e logistics, courier companies, MNOs, payments systems operators, standards authority, FDA and the key regulators in the sector NCA, PCRSC, CSA, DPC, among others to promote trust and facilitate easy uptake of trade within Ghana and with Ghanaian companies,” she added.

She said, Ghana’s achievement over the period in the digitalisation agenda has been to successfully improve connectivity to all regions of the country, creating the enabling environment for the private sector to further invest and thrive.

Implementing a Rural Telephony and Digital Inclusion Project (GRT&DIP), building over 300 high school digital labs for students and teachers use, digitising Parliament and Cabinet - Public Procurement Systems she said was projected to save the country in excess of US$100 million per annum – digitalisation of the Judicial systems and Office of the Attorney General.