Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Chamber of Telecommunications, Ing. Dr. Kenneth Ashigbey has called on tech industry regulators to relax their usual entrenched positions and approach industry discussions from a collaborative stance for the advancement of the industry and its contribution to Africa’s development.
Speaking at the Mobile Technology for Development (MT4D) forum during the just-ended 3i Africa Summit, he stated strongly “our regulators should stop wearing the hat that I am regulator – let’s bring gray matter into the room so that when we sit to discuss we do so from the point of knowledge and not just because you are regulator or a policymaker.”
He noted that collaboration between policymakers/regulators, industry players, academia and even customers is very crucial in designing appropriate digital public infrastructure (DPI) and even products to bring about the digital inclusion needed to accelerate development on the back of digital innovation.
According to him, even in dealing with the power supply challenge facing the country, it is time to walk away from the populist approach of seeking to supply power from one source at Akosombo all the way to the northern part of the country, instead of having mini grids in various communities to do the job and cut losses.
He explained that engineers are fully aware that in transmitting power all the way from Akosombo to the north, a lot of the power will be lost in transit and so that is not the best way to go about it.
Dr. Ken Ashigbey also note that another impediment to the efforts at reaching digital inclusion through DPI accessibility is the problem of fibre cuts, which is costing the industry up to $6 million year just to fix.
“How can you make DPI accessible to rural communities when you are spending $6 million just to fix fibre cuts. This is money that could have been used to expand connectivity to Tseame my village but it is being used to fix fibre cuts,” he said.
He noted that due to lack of proper collaboration, road contractors, for instance, cut telecom fibre indiscriminately any time they are building roads and it becomes a problem getting them to fix the damages.
Dr. Ken Ashigbey therefore urged participants at the forum to focus on specific areas of collaboration and just attempt to do so on one item each so that by the next MT4D in 2025, “we can have some positive reports of progress we have made.”
