IT, innovation collaboration bring Cape Town, Accra closer

Technology and SME incubation have been the catalyst for increased ties between Cape Town and Ghana after a high-level visit from the Deputy Minister of Communications from the West African country.

The Cape IT Initiative (CITI) hosted Deputy Minister Benjamin Aggrey Ntim on his visit to Cape Town, showcasing the UUNET Bandwidth Barn IT incubator.

The deputy minister spent two days in Cape Town exploring the incubation initiative and SME growth in the IT sector.

"Although IT incubation is still in an embryonic phase in Ghana, we have spent an instructive two days with CITI comparing notes. ICT innovation is imperative to the African continent if we are to grow our other industries. Nothing can happen without a solid infrastructure and IT forms a major part of this," said the deputy minister.

Ghana has already developed a number of IT activities at the Kofi Annan Centre of Excellence, working in tandem with the country`s tertiary educational facilities. This centre is particularly focusing on research within the ICT arena looking to equip graduates with practical skills for the workplace.

Ghana, like South Africa, has a good relationship with India and the minister commented that the collaboration between the two countries has led to significant growth in the IT industry.

Further similarities in ICT strategy between the two African countries were highlighted, including the need to look within Africa for solutions to the current lack of IT skills and delivery mechanisms.

"Collaboration between African nations is key to delivering IT infrastructure to a disparate and largely ill-educated populace," said Masedi Molosiwa, Executive Director of CITI. "It was immediately apparent on my first trip to Accra that the commonality between our two situations gave us an excellent opportunity to share information, experience and successes in order to deliver real solutions."

The deputy minister also made it very clear that his ministry has been tasked to aggressively pursue an open source strategy when it comes to e-government delivery.

"If we are to deliver connectivity and IT infrastructure to our entire nation we will have to embrace open source. No African country, with our limited resources, can afford to ignore this valuable opportunity and we are actively pursuing an open standards policy," said the deputy minister.

In addition to the closer ties between the two countries, the visit has resulted in three solid deliverables.

CITI will host an information sharing seminar in February where incubator companies from both countries will be able to learn from their common experiences. A peer exchange programme has also been instituted allowing Capetonians to travel to Ghana and vice versa to experience at first hand the technical innovations and programmes of the countries. CITI will also showcase Ghana as a possible marketplace for local technology at its IT conference next year.

"CITI is very excited by the growing ties between Ghana and South Africa in general, and Cape Town in particular. The Western Cape has some of the finest software designers in the world and with Accra only a six-hour flight away, who knows what joint development can come from this collaboration," Molosiwa concluded.