Minister of Communications and Digitalization, Ursula Owusu-Ekuful has said that the upcoming regulation for the Data Centers and Cloud Services aspect of the ICT sector will easily create loads of jobs that will wait for young people who are yet to be trained to take those jobs.
She was speaking with journalists after opening a two-day workshop on Data Centre and Cloud Regulatory Framework Validation.
The workshop, jointly organized by the National Information Technology Agency (NITA) and Smart Africa Secretariat, is for industry stakeholders to look at the draft regulatory framework for the Data Center and Cloud Service sub-sector of the ICT sector in Ghana in the march towards rolling out the first sector regulation later this year.
The Minister said the regulation that will emerge, in the next few months, from the framework under consideration, will streamline the establishment of data centres and cloud services in the country, and also guide skills development for data management, storage, usage and transfer in a secure and safe manner.
The regulation will also ensure data sovereignty, where data generated in Ghana, stays in Ghana and is transferred and used in a manner that does not compromise the safety of individuals and the sovereignty of the state.
According to the Minister, currently, businesses in Africa are paying twice for data management and also for retrieval and use of data from hosting entities outside of Africa. So, once the regulation is in force and the data centres are built here, businesses in Ghana and other African countries will eliminate those costs, and make heavy savings on data hosting.
The additional benefit will be for more businesses to come and build their companies in Ghana and be confident of having the relevant data needed for their businesses.
Ursula Owusu-Ekuful noted that with Ghana’s relatively better connectivity than most countries on the continent, with the number of public and private data centers already in the country, the number of submarine cables landing in the country, Ghana is uniquely positioned to host international data center services.
She said digital skills development is also a critical part o the whole process, as the Smart Africa Academy in collaboration with the Kofi Annan ICT Centre of Excellence are training 20,000 young people in cloud services, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other cutting-edge digital skills which are currently in shortage.
“This means it is very likely they will walk into jobs waiting for them after their training,” she said. “This also assures businesses that when they relocate to Ghana they have not only the needed infrastructure but the necessary manpower they require to run their businesses,” she said.
It is also expected that the regulations to be established in Ghana will eventually serve as a template for other African countries to learn from.
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Chief Technical Officer at NITA, Solomon Kofi Richardson said the forthcoming Data Center and Cloud Services Regulation is just the first of several regulations to be launched this year, as NITA gets fully into its regulatory role.
He assured industry players that NITA will ensure that compliance with its regulations is very affordable, as it will work with other regulators to eliminate multiple regulatory fees and also ensure that fees are cut down to the barest minimum.
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On her part, the Director of Digital Infrastructure, Skills and Empowerment at Smart Africa, Thelma Efua Quaye said there are very concrete measures in place to ensure that all data centers in Africa are interoperable to ensure effective, safe and secure sharing of data in a way that assures everyone of reliability, so that no business in Africa will feel the need to use the services of entities outside of the continent.
She talked about the Smart Africa Trust Alliance, which Ghana has signed on to, and the Data Highway, which is yet to be built for safe and secure transfer of data across the continent.
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