Digital is the new growth for Ghana - Bawumia

Vice President Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, has said that digitalisation is the way to improve the nation’s economy, urging the youth to take advantage of the trend.

“It’s digitime for Ghana and I think I can relate to that. It’s actually true and that we should look at this time as a digital time for Ghana because we want to transform this economy by making more time for critical areas and a lot of it has to do with information technology,” he said at the launch of as training programme organized by the National Communication Authority (NCA) for its National Service Personnel.

He further stated that a lack of tech-savvy citizens would drive the country backwards, considering the whole world is being driven by technology, hence, the need for NCA to intensify education on the use of technology.

The Vice President cited the Paperless Port system as one of the areas the country is benefitting on leveraging technology.

“The paperless system began with great impact. We just looked at data this morning and the first week of collection under the paperless system, compared to the first week of September 2016, collections have gone up 56 percent from around GH?130 million to around GH?213 million,” he said.

Dr. Bawumia added that, government is yet to implement the digital addressing system in order to ensure the smooth implementation of the National Identification cards.

“Another major initiative is Ghana is going digital in our address system, we are going to launch it in the next two months, we’ll start in October and have a formal launch in November.

What we have asked for is a GPS based system in conjunction with post code system, so Ghana postal service is going to be anchoring this whole thing and you’ll have digital addresses.

That’s very critical because we want to create a system where when you have your national ID, you’ll have your address as well, everything is going digital and everyone will have a unique identification number that will follow you from birth all the way to death,” he said.

The NCA introduced the two-month boot camp as part of their core mandate of continuous training of its human resource and as a means of enhancing the consumer outreach programme of the authority.

The programme is designed to orient and provide an insight into the various functions of the NCA. Some of the specific training programme outlined for the personnel include: IT essentials, Telecom and regulatory essentials, and legal framework for the establishment of the NCA.

On completion of the programme, personnel will be placed in various divisions of the authority and the authority’s offices across the nation.