DAILY GRAPHIC, Wednesday, July 11, 2012, Pg. 48 e-Government network to connect public schools



The Deputy Minister of Communications, Mr Attuquaye Armah



Story: Mary Ankrah

The Deputy Minister of Communications, Mr Attuquaye Armah, says the e-Government network infrastructure will soon be put in place to ride on the national communication fibre backbone to connect all public and educational institutions and district assembles.

The infrastructure, he said, would facilitate the provision of last mile solutions by the private sector to ensure a complete network infrastructure and provide adequate bandwidth capacity for e-services.

To that end, he said, the ministry had developed an information technology and information management (IT/IM) scheme of service to assist the public service in attracting and retaining highly skilled IT/IM personnel to support the transformation in the government sector through the development  and exploitation of information and Communication Technologies(ICTs).

The Minister noted that as a result of the above development, well trained IT professionals were needed in areas such as software engineering/programming/analysis, database administration, networking, e-commence, IT project management and internet application.

Mr Armah made this known at the third Ghana Telecom University College (GTUC) congregation last Saturday in Accra.

Out of the total of 253 students who graduated, 243 received either MSc or and MBA Degree in programmes including Supply Chain Management, Engineering and Management, Engineering Business Management, Finance, Management Information  System, Oil and Gas Engineering Project Management Logistics and IT while 10 students received MSc in Telecom Management.

Speaking at the third GTUC congregation, Mr Armah, however, indicated that unlike years back when students who came out of school had jobs easily, that had changed currently because the number of students who graduated yearly far exceeded the number of job vacancies available and that had made the job market very competitive.

It was for that change, he observed, that the Ministry had established the Ghana Multimedia Incubator Centre (GMIC) to promote innovation and entrepreneurship by providing a supportive and sharing environment to ICT business start-ups during initial stages of development to reduce the failure rate of such businesses.

Mr Armah also urged students and educational institutions to collaborate with government to collectively take advantage of the opportunities that ICTs offered. He added that “this way, the government, students and educational institutions could contribute towards the socioeconomic development of the country.”

In his keynote address, the Rector of Ghana Institute of Management and Public Administration (GIMPA), Prof. Yaw Agyeman Badu, noted that if the technological or digital divide was not tackled as a matter of urgency, institutions would continue to miseducate the current and future generation of students.

In that direction, he said, for Ghana to play a meaningful role in the global economy, it needed to place measures to integrate technology into the entire educational curriculum from primary to the tertiary level of education.

In addition, Prof. Badu emphasised the need for the country to move rapidly to bridge the technological gap so that the country would truly use ICT to leverage the country’ development process.



A cross section of the graduating students