Ghana to get a Digital Strategy Policy soon

Ghana has started the process of developing a new Digital Strategy Policy, that's according to the Ministry of Communications. Currently, the Ministry has a 2012 Broadband Policy and an outdated Telecoms policy.

In a speech on behalf of the sector minister, Mr Kwasi Agyei Tabi, Director of Finance and Administration reiterated the Ministry’s commitment to work with the Alliance for Affordable Internet (A4AI), a broad coalition of prominent players from the private and public sector as well as civil society to make internet access more affordable for Ghanaians. He told a meeting of the A4AI Coalition that “the Government is keen to start a digital and smart economy which will improve the efficiency of doing government business using ICT as an enabler”.

The goal of the new policy is to harmonise existing ICT policies to take advantage of emerging digital opportunities from finance to education, and technology towards the creation of a knowledge-based economy. The ultimate aim is that all households, public and private business and services will benefit from affordable broadband.

Participants at the coalition meeting agreed there needs to be an increase in sharing of ICT Infrastructure such as towers and cables particularly between telecoms sector and utility companies like the Electricity Company of Ghana, the Ghana Grid Company (GRIDCO) and Ghana Railways to reduce the cost of expanding broadband coverage to rural areas. They also proposed that the new policy should include a rule to enforce a ‘One-Stop shop principle’. This will be a unified agency for the issuance of all permits required to roll out ICT infrastructure such as towers and fibre optic cables. This will remove bureaucracy in the vetting of permits and inevitably reduce the cost of providing services to consumers. The call was also made for the policy to seek to open up the digital space for more players, in addition to telecommunications companies, to encourage new technologies and ICT content developers/providers such as C- Square and Facebook.

The keynote speaker was Mr. Kofi Asante, the Administrator of the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communications (GIFEC) which collects 1% of revenues from Telcos to support ICT development in rural areas. His presentation illustrated the progress made and the importance for partnerships between government and the private sector in meeting the aim of affordable broadband access.

The Fund has developed projects and ICT training with private sector companies such as Huawei and MTN. Mr Asante indicated that the fund insisted on at least 60% of female participants for the training projects in order to encourage more women to use the Internet.

A4AI’s Global Head of Policy and Deputy Director, Mrs Eleanor Sarpong who hosted this dialogue reminded participants that “ the expansion of internet services have mainly been driven by mobile internet but over 50% of the world is still unconnected. We urgently need to look at new technologies and partnerships.” She encouraged participants present to be proactive in making inputs at the working group levels to guide government on its policies so everyone can be connected. Ms Onica Makwakwa who is in charge of A4AI operations in Africa praised Ghana for being an early adopter of the “1 for 2” Affordability target which has now been adopted globally by the UN Broadband Commission. She hopes Ghana will continue to lead the way in ensuring that no Ghanaian spends more than 2% of their average monthly income on 1 Gb of data

The A4AI Ghana coalition has 4 working groups focused on Taxation, Data collection and Research Infrastructure Sharing, and Consumer transparency and pricing.