Second phase of e-government project begin

Huawei Ghana said it has successfully completed the US$30 million phase one of the e-government project and has begun work on the US$150 million phase two.

The company gave the announced this at the recent launch of the phase two of the e-government project in Accra.

Funding for the whole project comprise a US$150 million loan from the Chinese EXIM Bank, with a US$30million concessionary bit; a US$40million loan from the World Bank and recently, some €37million concessionary loan from the Danish government.

The entire project was designed to computerize the entire government system, by extending the national ICT backbone infrastructure to all districts in the country and providing a national data centre to manage its operations remotely from a central point.

The project would also see the establishment of a secondary data centre specifically for disaster recovery capability.

The portion being built by Huawei is configured to reach up to 1,050 sites around the country; 550 locations via wireless last mile access networks and an additional 500 locations via any other means.

The infrastructure would ultimately connect all public institutions to a single shared communications and computing infrastructure to facilitate effective delivery of government services to citizens, businesses and others.

It would also connect schools, hospital, police stations, agric extension offices and several other relevant institutions within its coverage area.

The project would for instance manifest in what has become popularly known as e-Parliament, e-Executive, e-Health, e-Justice, and e-Services such as e-Immigration, e-Policing, e-Education, and many more.

Huawei is working together with the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) to execute the project on a turnkey basis.

Under phase one, Huawei provided a wide area network (WAN) covering all ten regional capitals as well as Tarkwa, Obuasi, Tema, Nkawkaw and Winneba.

The company also provided a LAN infrastructure carrying 6300 ports for government offices, last mile for all ministries in Accra linked by fibre, and other offices were covered by WiMax, LANSwitch and Wifi, a construction of a data centre housing DNS, antivirus load balance, security system, storage system, management system and the provision of VOIP for 100 offices, 2 video conferencing sites and 31Km fibre among other things.

Phase two, which would cost US$150million, has just begun, and would include an upgrade of the WiMax Network to LTE Network; upgrade the existing 30 WiMAX base stations to LTE e-NodeB, provision of 30 new LTE e-Node B Base Stations, extension of the Metro Area Network to include more MDAs and increase network resilience.

Huawei would also add 8,000-port Local Area Network (LAN) infrastructure throughout the country, build a Secondary Data Center and integrate with the existing Primary Data Center, setup 25 additional Telepresence facilities to connect various state departments, build a call center and two one-stop service centers.

Also under phase two, the ICT solutions giant would create two communication and information centers, set-up an office automation system, build web portals for MDAs, set-up a Correspondent Management System (CMS), pilot e-Heath solution for three hospitals, including the KorleBu Teaching Hospital, and set-up a Tele-Medicine solution.

To ensure the delivery of quality services for these solutions, Huawei will subsequently conduct periodic training activities for the handlers of these equipment and solutions.

Meanwhile, there is a third phase of the project that would involve development and deployment of the appropriate of applications that would allow individuals and corporate citizens to access the benefits from the project.

NITA has said some aspects of the third phase of the project are up for bidding, while others have already started seen some level of implementation on pilot basis.