Bawumia inspects work on Digital Youth Hub at UG

The Vice-President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia, has inspected the progress of work on a Digital Youth Hub (DYH) being constructed at the University of Ghana (UG), Accra. 

It is the first of technology hubs being established under the Ghana COVID-19 Alleviation and Revitalisation of Enterprises Support (Ghana CARES) programme.

The hub, which will serve as an innovative space for young tech entrepreneurs in the country to interact, collaborate, start up and build sustainable technology-based businesses, is a collaboration between the UG and the Ministries of Finance (MoF) and Communications and Digitalisation.

Preparations for the project started in November 2022, with actual construction beginning in January this year.

Architects for the project, Messrs Arc-AURA, and contractors, Messrs Mustek Engineering Limited, told Dr Bawumia at the site last Tuesday that the project, which sits on a five-acre land allocated by UG, was 55 per cent done. The UG has also expressed its readiness to add five acres to facilitate the construction of hostel facilities.

They gave an assurance that the first phase would be ready by December this year.

The Ministers of Finance,  and Communications and Digitalisation, Dr Mohammed Amin Adam and Ursula Owusu-Ekuful   and  their respective teams, accompanied the Vice-President.

Also present was the Vice-Chancellor of the university, the consultants and other stakeholders. 

Commendation

Dr Bawumia commended the partners for the project and said it was part of a greater agenda for the country to build a digital state, as well as accelerate digitalisation.

He said empirical evidence showed a positive correlation between digitalisation and economic growth.

The Vice-President said countries that would take advantage of the Fourth Industrial Revolution would create more job opportunities, adding that “you need to make sure that the youth in our country have the skills to be participants in this revolution”.

Dr Bawumia expressed the hope that when fully operational, the facility would be benchmarked against the best in the world to attract global players to the country.

He urged the Finance Minister to also provide resources for the hubs to be built at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), the University of Cape Coast (UCC) and the University for Development Studies (UDS).

“These three should be added, while we add others as we go, because we will need to train more people. We want to train a million youth in digital skills, a million youth. It's not a task that cannot be done,” Vice-President Bawumia said.

Second phase

The Minister of Finance said the second phase would commence soon after the first was inaugurated in the first week of December this year.

It would entail the building of hostel facilities for students coming from other parts of the country and Europe.

He said until the hub was replicated in the other universities, people enlisted for training would have to use the UG facility.

The minister added that the project would be built on the UCC, KNUST and UDS campuses to spread the infrastructure to provide skills for more people.

He further said that the hub would have a 2,000 capacity conference room that could make it the centre for conferencing.

The minister said the hub was being built to mimic the Silicon Valley in the US, which started in Stanford University with a similar hub, attracting industry and the business community to build high-tech firms.

Dr Adam said the government had established a $5 million endowment fund to support the management and the planning of the hub when completed.

“So everything that is required to make it a complete hub, a complete village for the provision of skills to the youth of Ghana, is available,” he said.