The maiden National ICT Week has opened in Accra with a clear declaration by the Director-General of the National Information Technology Agency (NITA), Richard Okyere-Fosu that NITA will stop the wastage of resources by government institutions on ICT.
The week is designed as a platform to sensitize the public on NITA’s regulatory mandate and also for industry stakeholders to brainstorm on how to use digitalization to leapfrog national development within a properly regulated environment.
Speaking in an exclusive interview with Techfocus24 at the opening of the five-day event, Richard Okyere-Fosu noted that since NITA fully assumed its regulatory role in 2021, it has since gotten a private sector partner – Smart Infraco, to manage its world class data centre, which is the biggest in the West African sub-region to serve all state institutions, and yet some public institutions continue to waste resources on building their own data centres.
He said the irony is that, when NITA used to be a typical operator providing ICT services to all government institutions, those institutions were not even paying for NITA’s services, so NITA became known for problems because they didn’t have the funds to fix technical challenges like fibre cuts, data centre issues and others.
But now that NITA’s private sector partner, Smart Infraco has built a world class data centre to serve all state institutions, those very institutions have now found money to waste on building their own data centres instead of taking advantage of what NITA has provided.
“I don’t understand the wastage that is going on – we must consolidate the resources we have and use it effectively and that is exactly what NITA is pushing,” he stated.
He noted that for a long time, NITA was more of an operator than a regulator, so state institutions became used to doing their own thing without recourse to NITA. But all that is changing now because NITA is gearing up to dictate the pace.
The NITA Boss said, beyond assisting the communications and digitalization ministry with policies such as the Digital Economy Policy and Strategy, NITA is also coming up with the Common National Digital Architecture (CNDA), which will insist that any entity seeking to provide ICT or digital services to government must fit into a specific framework or “we are not interested.”
“We are going to dictate the pace and how government technology is utilized, and who qualifies to provide digital services to government,” he said.
Richard Okyere-Fosu also stated that the President also set up a committee to look at how to make all government institutions digitally interoperable, and that is also something that NITA is playing a big role in.
He noted that without interoperability, digitalization will be meaningless, and that is why it is important that state institutions work with NITA in their ICT and digital journey to ensure that all the standards are met to drive interoperability for effectiveness in government operations.
The NITA Boss believes that even though there is more work to be done, “whoever takes over NITA at the end of the 2024 elections will come and meet a NITA at a much better place than I found it.”
The five-day National ICT Week is under the theme “Driving Digital Transformation” and it is being held from Monday, August 26th to Friday, August 30th, 2024 at the Ghana-India Kofi Annan Centre for Excellence (AITI-KACE).
It expected to bring together key industry players, professionals, government representatives, the academia and the general public to explore the latest trends, innovations, and opportunities in the ICT sector.
The week will feature keynote speeches, panel discussions, workshops, conferences, exhibitions, and networking sessions aimed at promoting collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Some of the key topics to be discussed during the week are digital inclusion, digital trust through PKI (public key infrastructure), digital innovations, capacity building, and effective collaboration within the digital space across both public and private sectors.
