The Norwegian government, International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the Government of Ghana have signed agreements to support the Digital Transformation Centres Initiative in Ghana.
The newly signed agreement is intended to develop and strengthen digital skills training for underprivileged communities in Ghana, in collaboration with international software giants Cisco and the Ghana Investment Fund for Electronic Communication (GIFEC).
The Initiative seeks to provide more than 14,000 people with job-ready digital skills, particularly women entrepreneurs, teachers, pupils and marginalized groups through 200 centres across the country.
The Digital Centres will also scale up the capacity of policymakers to formulate and implement policies related to digital skills programmes, conduct training-the-trainers’ workshop with the overarching objective of ensuring scalability and self-sustainability in Ghana’s digital transformation process.
“It is an honour and inspiration for us at Cisco to work with you all. Norway’s government presented a whitepaper recently: highlighting just how important digital technology is for the ability to achieve Sustainable Development Goals by 2030. We truly believe, at Cisco, just how incredibly important the skills are as part of this journey overall. I would also like to commend the government of Ghana for leaning to help equip its citizens with getting these digital skills and capabilities on board” says Wendy Mars, President of Cisco’s EMEAR region.
Ghana is not the only beneficiary of this initiative, nine DTCs across the world have been selected for the first phase, which is to run for 21 months: four (4) from Africa, two (2) from Latin America, and three (3) from the Asia-Pacific regions. The selected countries include Ghana, Rwanda, Brazil, Cote d’Ivoire, Zambia, Brazil, the Philippines, Indonesia and the Dominican Republic.
Speaking at the conference, Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful, the Minister of Communications, said 241 community information and communication Technology (ICT) centres across the country would be made available for the training of anyone interested in developing digitalization skills.
Furthermore, government was at various stages of expanding access to an additional 2,016 communities which make up about three million people, thereby proving 95 percent of the citizens with voice and data connectivity in the next 18 months, Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful said.
“We are building the capacity of persons both within the formal and informal sectors including teachers and students and for over the past four years, we have trained 502, 600 people in ICT programmes”- Mrs. Ursula Owusu-Ekuful.
“We have also trained 81, 500 artisans in ICT,” she pointed out.
Hitherto, the Ministry in collaboration with the United Nations Economic, Social Organization had introduced the ICT skills for entrepreneurial and women empowerment project to offer information technology skills to women and girls in the informal sector.
This partnership with Norway will help DTCs, particularly in Ghana, to speed-up building an inclusive digital society to ensure that lack of knowledge and skills is not a barrier to participation in the digital economy.
