Attach more importance to ICT studies - Students urged

Tamale, Jan. 22, GNA - Mr Chikpah Demuyakor, Northern Regional Director of Education on Saturday advised students and their tutors to attach more importance to the study and teaching of Information, Communication Technology (ICT) to help transform their societies.

He said ICT was an area, which could enrich societies whether they had natural resources or not and stressed its importance in national development.

Mr Demuyakor gave the advice when he addressed students from Junior and Senior Secondary schools in the Tamale Metropolitan Area at the National Youth

Information Society Campaign (NYISC) in Tamale on Saturday. The campaign is aimed at bringing young people together through ICT, as well as getting them developed, empowered and informed to deliberate on issues that could build a sustainable information society in Ghana.

The Northern Region programme is one of the regional outreach programmes throughout the country to herald the World Summit dubbed: "Phase 2 Africa Preparatory Conference in Ghana" to held in March this year.

Some 50 school children from 21 JSS and 19 SSS in the Tamale Metropolis attended the programme.

Mr Demuyakor said it was becoming increasingly competitive in the technological world and very difficult to gain employment in Africa without the knowledge of ICT and urged students throughout the country to pay more attention to its study.

He also called on the Ghanaian workers to always update their knowledge in ICT so that redundancy does not catch up with them in future.

The Director appealed to the ICT experts to focus their emphasis on educational institutions where the youth could easily be located in order for the country to make headway in ICT development.

Mr Leopold Armah, National Campaign Coordinator of (NYISC) regretted that the youth use their ample time accessing pornography on the Internet instead of using the facility as a study guide.

He expressed gratitude to students in the northern sector saying: "Northern students can make it in ICT because last year's national champion in ICT essay competition come from Navrongo in the Upper East".

He expressed the hope that students in the country would all be ICT literates in the next five years and advised them not regard ICT as a boring field.