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Nothing Can Halt Ghana’s Advancement In The Digital System: Hon. Ursula
Nothing will prevent the Akufo-Addo administration from making Ghana the digital enabler and location of closing the digital gap for other African countries through the AfCFTA, according to Minister of Communications and Digitalization, Hon. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful.
In light of this, she was reported to have iterated as follows:
“For all these reasons and many more, we have decided in Ghana, as the host and one of the earliest proponents of the AfCFTA, that we will not allow the old excuses of inertia, lack of capacity, resources, and solidarity to continue hamstringing our forward march as a continent.
So long as Ghana continues to have influence in the affairs of this continent, we are committed to promoting, as aggressively as possible, the use of digital technology as an enabler, catalyst, resource gap bridger, coordinating mechanism, playing field leveler, and dots connector in making the AfCFTA experience completely different from anything that has preceded it in the decades-long quest for African economic and political unity.
“That is why, through this government’s Trancop policy, we wholeheartedly embraced the creation and rollout of the AfCFTA Hub platform to generate digital resources for all the key actors and stakeholders in Ghana involved in one way or another in making the AfCFTA a success.”
This was said in a speech delivered on Tuesday, January 18, 2023, in Accra, Ghana, at the University of Ghana’s 74th annual New Year School and Conference, with the theme “Digital Technology Development Preparedness for AfCFTA.”
The Ablekuma West lawmaker added that Africa must take advantage of the opportunities provided by the AfCFTA because it offers the simplest route to attracting billions of dollars in foreign investment to create a pan-African platform.
Moreover, she also expressed concern over the low level of digital prospects between African nations.
“The tremendous growth in digital technology around the world, and also in Africa, offers us a new opportunity to take another look at our capacity to deliver.
Take batteries for instance, whose prices have dropped by 97% since 1991, fuelling a massive Greentech revolution in many parts of the world, and between just 2017 and 2022, the cost of electronic data storage has dropped by more than 56%,” she added.
Moreover, she went on to emphasize that:
“We now have at our fingertips, provided we are willing to exercise our minds, all the computing and digital resources we need to overcome many of the coordination problems that have made the implementation of some of the grand plans for a single African market so elusive.
With a common digital platform, it is easier today to optimize maritime, aviation, and ground intermodal transport and logistics resources than it was in the past.
“With digital business models, it is much easier today to attract billions of dollars in international investment to build pan-African platforms than it was in the past.
With digital analytics infrastructure, it is also easier today to mobilize millions of micro traders to explore new sourcing opportunities in every corner of Africa than it was in the past” she concluded.
Conclusion
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