The Ghanaian government believes that doubling the country`s cellular base to about four million subscribers would add 0.6% to its gross domestic product (GDP), says Aggrey Ntim, Ghanaian deputy minister of communications.
"We see the development of information and communications technology as a key driver to the development of Ghana in order to meet our millennium development goals," he says.
The minister was in SA at the invitation of the Cape IT Initiative, to examine local lessons and experiences of using business incubators to develop a technology entrepreneurial sector.
In an interview with ITWeb, Ntim said that while wireless technologies, such as mobile phones, did help to spur on development, "it is the land lines, meaning the installation of fibre optic cable, which is important".
Ghana`s millennium development goals include the raising of the country`s GDP from between $400 to $600 per capita, to $1 000 by the year 2015.
Ntim said his government is implementing a plan to lay fibre optic cable along the Ghanaian national electrical grid that will connect all corners of the country. It will serve as a conduit for the neighbouring states that need access to the SAT-3 undersea cable that connects Africa with Europe and the Americas.
"Currently our SAT-3 landing site is controlled by our national telecommunications company. However, we have plans to take control away from them so that anyone may have access to it along with our national fibre optic backbone."
The Ghanaian e-government programme is to connect all the government departments and ministries in the capital Accra to their regional offices and then to local councils through the fibre backbone.
"The backbone is the key to our telecommunications development."
Open source software will play a key role in bridging the digital divide and in education in Ghana, he noted.
"Proprietary systems will just be too expensive and we have to look at open source."
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