Ghana focused on digitising every aspect of economy – George Andah

Deputy Communications Minister, George Andah has emphasised government’s commitment to ensuring that all aspects of the economy are digitised.

This he said will minimise the tendency of officials to be ‘corrupt’ and increase drastically revenue in different sectors of the economy.

He noted that the digitisation of the various sectors of the economy and the use of modern technology is in line with the President’s vision of making Ghana the most business-friendly country on the continent.

George Andah believed that government’s digitisation agenda is in line with the ITU Telecom World 2017 theme in Busan, South Korea, “Smart digital transformation”

“In Ghana, we say its Digi-time. The President insists he wants Ghana to become the most business-friendly and the most people friendly economy on the continent and obviously everything like this is going to run on solid technology. So when you talk about the theme I think it’s in sync and in line with what Ghana believes in. All our services, you talking about the Health sector, Agriculture, Security, Housing, Transportation, Education, the backbone that all these services are going to run is technology” he stressed

The Deputy Communications Minister also mentioned some initiatives he was optimistic formed a good starting point for the country in its quest to digitalise the economy.

He pointed out that “we looking at the National id system, we looking at Housing address system, we looking at paperless offices and E-government services and it's interesting that at the ports just one-week after we introduced the paperless transactions, our revenue went up 56% year on year, so it's just cutting down waste and taking away the opportunity for people to be ‘corrupt’”

George Andoh observed that despite the effort by government to introduce these innovations, its implementation hasn’t been smooth.

He recounted that “there are a number of challenges that we envisaged. One will be people resisting change, people are used to doing things in a different way and now having to use technology and they feel like it's difficult to change their old habit. That is normal, we just have to keep engaging them” but he was quick to add that “the other thing is t ensure that we have the right policies and the right regulatory framework to make sure that we are ready for the take off that is happening. There is a bit of infrastructure that needs to be put on the grounds. One other thing is to ensure that we are building the right skills, the right capacity, the right competencies to take advantage of the whole digitisation process”

He declared that considering the benefits of transforming the economy and witnessing a smart city, “very soon Accra, should become a smart city. It is not negotiable and we are ready for that opportunity as well”

He hailed the organisers of the ITU Telecom World 2017 for providing such a platform for networking and giving countries like Ghana the opportunity to learn and show others what Ghana is capable of doing.