District information officers build capacity

A training programme aimed at building the capacity of district information officers and community information centre (CIC) managers on digital content development has ended in Accra.

The three-day event was to empower the participants to acquire web development skills expected to enhance their knowledge in digital local content management.

Organised by the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC), the programme was attended by participants from 20 districts in  the country.

Forty people benefited from a similar training programme in 2012.

Addressing the participants, the Administrator/Chief Executive Officer of GIFEC, Mr Kofi Attor, said the concept of the CICs had gone beyond just teaching people basic computer skills.

“The CICs need to be relevant to the needs of a community. They should be a one-stop information centre for the community,” he said.

In that regard, he urged the participants to develop innovative ways to pass on information concerning pricing to farmers in their communities to prevent the farmers from being ripped off by middlemen.

While pledging the commitment of GIFEC to ensure that the centres were well resourced to handle the needs of the communities, he urged the participants to ensure a good maintenance culture and make themselves relevant to the needs of the communities.

The CICs are a hybrid for-profit tele-centre and non-profit community resource centres and their vision is to ensure universal access to Information and Communications Technology (ICT) applications for accelerated growth and development.

Currently, there are 137 CICs across the country, with 97 fully functioning.  Twenty more are on the drawing board for the year.

The GIFEC Director of CICs, Ms Victoria Dei-Kuma, said an assessment of the programme indicated that past beneficiaries were making a lot of impact in their communities.

She said the fund would continue to monitor the progress of the participants to ensure that the knowledge they acquired was used for the benefit of their districts.

Some of the participants told the Daily Graphic that the programme would go a long way to help create an information base for the people in their districts.

They urged GIFEC to organise more of such programmes to help participants develop the needed skills that their work needed.

The CEO of the Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES) Secretariat, Mr Alhassan Umar, observed that it was not everybody who could get government jobs. 

He, therefore, urged the youth to take advantage of the opportunities offered by ICT.

“It is not enough just to know how to surf the Internet; you can create jobs for yourselves and others,” he added.

Story: Seth J. Bokpe